[POV: Atlas]
I left Evan in Ava's hands and stood, the battlefield still roaring around me, and felt it: a pull in my blood that had nothing to do with the war.
It was deep and old, a thread I'd carried my entire life without understanding what it was. The twin bond. Dominic's presence, dark and deliberate, tugging at something in the marrow of my bones.
He was close, inside the packhouse and waiting.
"He's calling you," Hyde growled, the ancestral power in his voice making the warning vibrate through my ribs. "Through the blood and the bond. He wants you to come."
"I know."
"It's a trap, Atlas."
"I know that too."
I turned from the battlefield and walked toward the packhouse. Kobe shouted my name and a warning behind me, but I didn't stop.
The pull was magnetic, undeniable.
Dominic had always been the shadow at the edge of my life, and tonight we would finish what our parents had started the day they decided one twin was worth saving and the other was worth sharpening into a weapon.
The packhouse corridors were deserted, smelling of smoke and iron. Emergency torches guttered in their sconces, and the silver light from my crescent mark painted the walls in shifting patterns as I passed.
The pull led me upward. Third floor, eastern wing. Draven's private quarters.
I pushed the door open and found my brother.
Dominic stood at the center of the bedroom, inside a circle of runes carved into the hardwood floor. The symbols glowed violet, pulsing with dark energy that made the shadows writhe.
The shadow-forged blade rested in his right hand: black steel that swallowed light. He was calm. Almost serene, his expression carrying the quiet certainty of a man who'd been rehearsing this moment for months.
"There you are," he said softly, as though I'd arrived late for dinner. "I was beginning to think you'd make me wait all night."
"What is this, Dominic?" I gestured at the runes, the blade, the ritual circle that pulsed between us. "Another scheme? Another trap designed to take something that doesn't belong to you?"
"Everything in this room belongs to me, brother. It always has."
He turned the blade slowly in his hand, letting the violet light catch its edge.
"The power running through your veins right now—the ancestral gift, the silver wolf legacy—it was never meant for you alone. Our parents just didn't understand what they were looking at."
"Enlighten me, then. Since you seem to have all the answers our family never bothered sharing."
Something shifted in his expression. He lowered the blade to his side and met my eyes with an intensity that made the twin bond pulse between us.
"The prophecy," he said. "Two brothers born under the moon's shadow. That's the version they told you, but it's not the full text."
"Tell me!"
"Two brothers born under the moon's shadow, one to hold the light, one to hold the dark. Together, balanced, they sustain the cycle. Divided, they destroy it."
His voice dropped, the edges fraying.
"It was never about one twin being the hero and the other being the monster, Atlas. It was about balance. Light and dark, held in equilibrium by two halves of the same blood. We were supposed to complement each other, sustain each other."
The words landed in my chest like stones in still water, sending ripples through everything I thought I'd understood about our family, our history, the prophecy that had shaped both our lives.
"But our parents chose wrong," Dominic continued, and now the mask was slipping further, the polished surface cracking to reveal something raw and aching underneath.
"They looked at us, and instead of nurturing the balance, they broke it. They poured all their fear into me and all their hope into you. They beat the softness out of me and the strength out of you. They created exactly what they were afraid of—a monster on one side and a victim on the other."
"Dominic—"
"Do you know what it's like to be six years old and realize your own mother flinches when you walk into a room?"
His voice cracked, and the sound cut through me deeper than any blade could have.
"I wasn't born a monster, Atlas. They built me. Piece by piece, year by year, until the role they'd assigned me became the only thing I knew how to be."
My throat was tight. My eyes burned because beneath the villain—beneath the shadow magic and the murdered parents and the armies and the blood pacts—I could hear it.
The wounded child. The boy who'd grown up in the same house I had, breathing the same poisoned air, shaped by the same cruelty, just aimed in a different direction.
"I hear you," I said quietly. "Dominic, I hear what you're saying, and I believe you. Our parents destroyed both of us in different ways. But this—"
I pointed at the ritual circle, the blade. "This isn't a balance. This is theft. Whatever they did to us doesn't justify what you've done to everyone else."
The crack sealed shut. The mask slid back into place, smooth and cold and impenetrable, and Dominic's eyes hardened with a finality that made the twin bond go rigid between us.
"You're right," he said. "Balance was never an option after what they did. So I'll settle for completion."
He plunged the blade into the central rune.
The ritual circle detonated. Violet light erupted from every carved symbol, shooting upward in pillars of dark energy that spread across the walls like veins of living shadow.
The room shook, the floorboards cracked, and I felt it: a massive, violent pull on the ancestral power inside me, as though something had wrapped its fist around the silver wolf legacy and was tearing it free.
The transfer had begun. The runes were trying to siphon my power through our twin blood, channeling it from my body into his through the conduit of the blade and the shared resonance of our DNA.
"Fight back!" Hyde roared, and the ancestors' power surged in response. "NOW, Atlas! If he completes the transfer, everything we are dies!"
Silver light exploded from my body.
The ancestral energy met the violet pull of the ritual and the collision sent a shockwave through the room that blew the windows outward in a spray of glass.
I planted my feet and pushed—every ounce of silver wolf power flooding outward from my core, shadows and frost erupting around me in a spiraling maelstrom that slammed against Dominic's dark magic with the force of two tectonic plates grinding together.
Dominic bared his teeth, the blade shaking in his grip, shadow magic pouring from his body to feed the ritual.
His eyes blazed violet. Mine blazed silver. The room between us became a war—light against dark, twin against twin, the prophecy's broken halves finally colliding with everything they had.
"You can't win this, Atlas!" Dominic shouted over the roar of competing magic. "The ritual is designed for twin blood, your power recognizes mine! It wants to be whole!"
"Then let me show you what the whole thing looks like!" I shouted back, and the silver fire inside me surged higher, brighter, the ancestors' voices rising in my blood like a battle hymn three centuries old.
The room blazed white and violet, and the twin battle consumed everything within its walls.