“Let’s cut to the chase and not waste the Queen’s time. She needs er rest,” Jack says, sparing her a quick nce before turning to Fury. “About your unfortunate encounter with my uncle–you must have realized by now that he feeds on darkness. The darkest kind. That’s how he’s be strong enough to defeat a warrior like you, and why he remains so untraceable, no matter how hard I try to find him.”

    Fury’s eyes glint with memory. “He’s using the Queen’s real ne. It doesn’t burn him it fuels him. That’s how he beat me. He wasn’t just strong–he was fast, relentless. He crushed my legs with a spell before I could even fight back. And he said it himself: he’s wielding a form of dark magic this world has never sen.” His voice drops, rough. “Even if the princess reassured me you’ll face him and make him pay, I need you to understand what I saw in him defies words.”

    The Queen finally speaks. “Just as I feared. He’s feeding on my ne- on my power, my strength.” Her gaze flickers briefly toward me, unreadable, before returning to Jack. “You wonder how he can hold it without burning alive? He traded his soul and body for it.”

    Jack’s nostrils re. “What do you mean?”

    My mother’s eyes darken, the weight of her words pressing down on us. “The magic he bound himself to is called Veydris. It is forbidden–older than wolves, older than kingdoms, older than memory itself. Veydris does not grant power. It consumes. It strips away the soul, devours the body, and leaves nothing but a vessel of rot and hunger. He may seem unstoppable now, but his life is burning away like a candle thrown into fire. A year, perhaps wo–and when that me dies, there will be nothing left of him but ash.”

    Her voice sharpens, cracking through the silence like a whip. “And until that dayes, every moment he breathes, he will drag as many souls as he can into the abyss with him. He does not simply want to kill us. He wants to damn us. To pull this entire kingdom into hell at his side.”

    A year or two. That’s all he has left. But long enough to tear our world apart. Long enough to destroy everything. Jack’s uncle has always been cruel–but now he is desperate. And desperation is far more dangerous than cruelty.

    Jack’s chest heaves, his jaw locked like stone. “Then I’ll fight him I’ll find him and end this. I don’t care what it takes. I will keep searching, keep hunting—” His eyes burn with the kind of stubborn rage I’ve seen before–the kind that refuses to bend, no matter how impossible the odds.

    The Queen’s gaze snaps to him. “No. I told you- not even an Alpha King’s wolf can take him down.”

    The words slice through the roomb, /bcold and final. Jack defiance falters for the briefest second before he bares his teeth. “Then who? Who else can take him down if not me? I defeated him when was only sixteen. I can do it again—ten times, a thousand times! I will beat that bastard no matter how strong he-”

    “You cannot destroy him that way!” she cuts in, her voice thundering with a power that makes the walls seem to tremble. For the first time, I see her fa?ade slip, her pain surfacing in the glimmer of her tired eyes. “You think brute strength will defeat Veydris? No. You’ll only throw yourself into the fire he has be And I will not bury another soul because of his madness.”

    Jack’s fists shake at his sides, Fury looks stricken, and I… I can’t stop staring at my mother. At the quiet cracks in her armor.

    Then she exhales slowly, almost as if forcing herself to steady, Hegaze sweeps over us, hard. “There is only one way to end

    this.”

    My breath catches. “What way?”

    Her lips curve into something that’s not quite a smile, not quite a mace–just the look of someone who’s already chosen a path far darker than she wants to admit.

    “I have a n,” she says softly, “But my husband your king canever know. This will end, once and for all.”

    My heart pounds like a drum of warning in my chest. Because the way she said it… it didn’t sound like a promise.

    It sounded like a sacrifice.