Kael did not ask what the price would cost him.

He already knew.

A wolf’s heart. Not the muscle beating in his chest. The part of him that had chosen her across every version of the story where he still had a choice. The stubborn, stupid, living core that had followed her into the first night, into the multi-life battlefield, into a war that had already predicted his death in fourteen different sequences. The fifth memory needed that core as its final ink.

He met the gold-eyed boy’s gaze through the cracking white-glass barrier and nodded once.

Then he turned his hand into a blade and opened his own chest....