When they arrive at the dungeon, the air smells like the end of the world.

Darien stands at the threshold of the cell, his lungs burning with the scent of incinerated bone reeking in the confined space. There is no body to bury. Tobias Bellamy—the man who has loomed over Darien’s entire life like an immovable mountain—is reduced to a pile of scorched flesh and bone, leaving nothing but a jagged violet stain on the stone floor.

Beside him, Amias shakes with a bone-deep terror that completely replaces any grief. "He did it," Amias whispers, his voice cracking like dry glass. "He really did it."

Darien can’t speak. His mind is a fractured mirror, reflecting images of the brother he thought he knew against the monster who left these scorch marks. He doesn’t feel like an Alpha or a warrior; he feels like a child lost in a dark, suffocating forest.

Morgan... what have you become?

"Find him," Darien rasps, the command tearing from his throat. "Search every inch of this estate. If he’s still here, we end this now."

The search that follows is a blur of slamming doors and fierce, panicked shouting. Darien leads a squad through the armory, his heart battering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He is terrified of what he will find, and even more terrified of what he won’t.

Then, a scream pierces the chaos. It isn’t a guard. It is Heidi.

WHAT?!

"She sounds like she’s in danger!" Kairos’s hackles raise in Darien’s mind, the wolf’s instincts screaming for blood.

Darien doesn’t think; he shifts halfway, his muscles bulging and claws extending as he tears through the hallways toward Rayne’s chambers. He bursts through the doors just in time to see a nightmare rendered in flesh.

Morgan is there. But he isn’t the brother Darien shares a home with. His clothes are soaked in blood that isn’t his own, and his eyes glow with a manic light that makes the very air vibrate. He is mid-lunge, his fingers curled like talons as he tears into Heidi.

Heidi, in her shimmering God-Wolf form, is snarling, her white fur bristling, but she is hesitant—her heart is slowing her down. Even as Morgan’s claws rake across her shoulder, drawing golden ichor, she cannot bring herself to kill him.

"Morgan, NO!" Darien roars, throwing his entire weight into his brother.

The collision feels like hitting a wall of solid iron. Amias and Daphne burst in a second later, and the room explodes into a mess of snarls and broken furniture. It takes all four of them to finally pin him. Heidi bleeds from a deep gash on her flank, her chest heaving as she shifts back to human form, tears streaming down her face.

Morgan fights like a caged animal until a violent, racking cough seizes him. He slumps against the floor, spitting a thick, dark gore that hisses against the carpet.

"Let me... finish..." Morgan wheezes, his head lolling back as the guards finally shackle his wrists in heavy silver. He looks up at Heidi and a broken, jagged laugh escapes his lips. "Are you really... so stupid, Heidi? You’re going to stop me... before the plan is complete?"

Heidi collapses to her knees in front of him, her hands hovering over his blood-stained chest. "Why?" she sobs, the sound breaking Darien’s heart into a thousand pieces. "How can you be such an animal? You followed me into exile! You loved me! How could you kill Grayson? Your own twin? Your father? And now... you try to kill me?"

Rayne stands in the corner, her face frozen in horror while Daphne weeps openly, clutching Amias’s arm.

Morgan’s laughter turns into a wet, rhythmic hacking. "Twin?" he mocks, his eyes fixing on Rayne with a hatred so cold it seems to drop the temperature of the room. "I’m not in the mood for jokes, little wolf. But since you want to know how a monster is made... let’s tell a story."

He turns his gaze to Rayne, who flinches as if he has struck her. "It started with her," Morgan hisses, pointing a trembling, shackled finger at the woman who raised them. "With the ’loving’ Luna and the ’noble’ King who decided that my mother wasn’t enough or fit to be a Queen!"

"Morgan, shut up!" Darien shouts, his stomach churning. "She’s your mother!"

"Is she?" Morgan sneers.

The room goes deathly silent.

Morgan’s voice drops to a lethal, crystalline whisper as he lays out the truth like a row of corpses. He speaks of Rayne’s twin sister—the woman who was actually his mother. He speaks of a birth on the same day, a blood-soaked pact, and a murder.

Rayne and Tobias slaughtered her own sister—her own flesh and blood—so that Rayne could secure her place beside the King.

Rayne lets out a strangled, bird-like cry and collapses onto the floor, her silk skirts blooming around her like a dying flower.

Darien feels the world stop. The air leaves his lungs, leaving him hollow. He looks at Rayne—the woman who was the only ray of light in this dark home of theirs, the woman who, despite the toxic rivalry from the two other Lunas, never retaliated—and he sees a murderer.

He looks at Morgan and Grayson. They aren’t two halves of a soul. They are cousins, forced into a biological lie that was forged in the blood of an innocent woman.

"They didn’t just give us a life, Darien," Morgan whispers, his eyes finally softening for a fraction of a second into a look of pure, agonizing grief. "They gave us a prison built on a grave. I didn’t turn feral following Heidi to banishment. I turned feral the moment I realized my entire existence was a trophy for a woman who killed her own twin to be a Queen."

Darien sinks to his knees. The reality of the betrayal—of the fact that no matter what his father did, he always believed there was some good within the man and that there were certain boundaries he’d never cross, boundaries like kinship—makes his face pale.

He looks at Heidi, who is staring at Rayne with a look of utter repulsion.

The Bellamy legacy wasn’t built on honor. It was built on a massive sacrifice, one of which has finally come back to claim them all.

"Then why did you kill Grayson? Why not punish the offenders? Why take the life of an innocent man who loved you more than his own life?" Darien whispers, the realization tasting like ash in his mouth.

"I killed him," Morgan rasps, "because I couldn’t look at his face and not see the lie."