The wind howled through what was left of the desolate mountain fortress Iron Claw once called home.
Its towers had loomed over the mountain pass like jagged fangs. Now, they were nothing but blackened teeth jutting from the snow, their shadows long and broken against the white blanketing everything in sight. Smoke hadn’t touched the stone in years, but the scent of ash clung to it stubbornly, baked into the mortar.
Kade stood silently in the ruins, snow crusted on his cloak with icy frost feathering the ends of his dark hair. Fifteen years separated the boy who watched Lyra be taken away from Midnight Crest and the man who stood alone in the center of where her new life had been shattered. Scars banded his forearms, old and new crossing like roads on a map. The short sword he’d forged as
