POV: Thorne
The fog shattered like glass.
One second it was there thick, sweet-smelling, wrapped around his mind like wool and the next it was gone, blasted apart by the gold light pouring from their joined hands, and the world rushed back in so fast and so sharp it was like surfacing from cold water. Colors were brighter. Sounds were louder. The ballroom snapped into focus around him with the brutal clarity of a man waking from a fever.
And with the clarity came everything he had missed.
Two days of smiling at nothing. His wolf going silent. The floral tea he hadn't asked for, delivered every morning by hands he now understood were two hundred years old. The notebook. The signing. The way his thoughts had kept sliding away from the name Winterhart like water off stone. He hadn't forgotten it. He had been made to forget it, over and over, every time it surfaced, pushed back under by something external and deliberate and patient.
He had been poisoned.
