Chapter 17

Chapter 17 – Whispers in the Dark

Aria woke to the sound of howling.

Not the long, hollow call from the ridge that threaded through nights like a distant prayer. This howl was jagged and close, a raw piece of sound that hacked into sleep and left her breathless. It clawed through the last of her dreams and dragged her awake, heart pounding as if it wanted out of her chest.

She sat up on the narrow bed Kael had insisted she use, every muscle tight with the thin-wire exhaustion that had become her companion. Moonlight pooled silver across the floorboards; the small fire in the hearth had dwindled to embers that breathed little tongues of blue. Shadows licked and stretched across the logs and rafters, fingering the walls like long, patient talons.

Something felt wrong.

The packhouse had never been truly silent—never since she had first stumbled into it, terrified and raw. There were always the small, human sounds: a pot scraped, water poured, the shuffle of boots and the soft clack of claws on stone. Even at midnight, the lodge hummed with life. But tonight the hush was wrong, deliberate, as if the entire house had pressed its palms to its lips.

She slid from the bed without the creak her shoes used to make, because she’d learned not to announce herself. Her bare feet found the cold stone; she crossed to the window and pressed her forehead to the glass. Outside, the torches around the clearing stuttered in the wind, their light more candle than spear. The yard was empty, a black bowl rimmed with flickers. No silhouettes prowled the parapets, no guards circled the outer path—only the slow breathing of the dark.

A shiver threaded down her spine. Sometimes fear arrived as logic: the rogues were at the border; tensions had frayed the pack; Lucien’s whispers had poisoned many heads. Other times fear was less rational, a sensation that tasted like metal on the tongue. This was both. She felt watched. Not the casual, curious watching of the pack when a new face arrived, but the concentrated, cold kind that zeroed in and did not blink.

Her fingers tightened on the windowsill until the wood creaked. You’re imagining it, she told herself. Nerves. Exhaustion. Lucien’s shadow in your head. She breathed in slow, measured counts—four in, hold, four out—just like Kael had shown her after the rogue attack when panic still hit like a storm.

But when she closed her eyes, Lucien’s face flared behind her lids, unmistakable and furious: those red coals of eyes, hands that had grazed her arm, the soft, venomous way he’d said little secret. His voice threaded through her mind—Ask him what your blood is worth—and her stomach turned hard.

She forced her jaw to unclench and turned away from the window to the room. The fire in the hearth had guttered low; the shadows pooled like ink in the corners. The bed across from hers was empty where Kael sometimes slept, the blanket folded with the absent, practical care of someone used to taking the first watch. He had been with the elders tonight—she’d heard—mending alliances, smoothing bruises the pack could not show the world. She should have been able to sleep. He would protect the lodge.

A whisper slid through the hush, so faint she could have convinced herself it was part of her own breath.

“Aria…”

The name, carried not by wind or wood, but as if someone had cupped their hand to her ear. It was the wrong timbre—soft, raspy, threaded with amusement and something colder—and the way it landed in her chest made her entire body lock.

She froze. Breath thinned to a thin, brittle string.

Silence swallowed the word. No footsteps followed. No second voice answered. Only the refrigerator hush of the night and the distant murmur of sleeping wolves.

Her mind supplied reasons—young pups on sentry, someone drunk from stew, Rowan’s watchers misinterpreting a sound. But the hairs along her arms prickled with a truth that sounded far older than those explanations: You are not alone.

She moved without thinking, a careful, practiced animal glide. The floorboards did not betray her. She took the narrow corridor that led from the private rooms toward the communal hearth, every sense strained. Doors breathed quietly closed. A tray clinked in the kitchen where Mira, the healer, kept night vigils sometimes. The smell of boiled herbs drifted and then vanished.

Halfway down the hall, Aria stopped. There—by the low stair that led to the servants’ quarters—someone had left a lantern, its glass still warm from recent use. The wick had been snuffed with a thumbprint that left an oily smear across the rim. The kind of fingerprint that did not belong to anyone who would turn a lamp off casually. It was deliberate. Small, but deliberate.

Her pulse thudded loud enough to count. She crouched, close enough to see the scuff at the base of the stair: a smear of mud and something he needed her to see—sap, amber-dark, like from a tree recently clawed. The rogues had liked to mark trees with resin to savor the scent, to leave signatures only they could read. She had seen such marks in her nightmares. She had felt Lucien’s nails drag the bark in the archive. Her stomach knotted so tight she thought she might vomit.

She should run. She should wake Kael. She should throw open every door and shout his name until every warrior answered. She should call for Rowan’s watchers and let the pack’s fury swallow the rogues whole.

She had not told Kael everything. She had not told him the way Lucien had smiled at her, the way the archive had swallowed his shadow. She had chosen silence because she feared his eyes would change if she spoke the truth. She had chosen to protect him from the thing that might tear them apart.

And that choice bloomed now into a blade.

A soft sound from the end of the hall—just beyond the kitchen, where the old back door sat—made her head whip around. Something small clattered: a spoon, a dropped pan, a cautious footfall. The sound was followed by a breath, gentle and measured, as if someone had learned how to breathe without making a breeze.

Aria’s throat felt dry as paper. She did the thing she had promised she would never do: she listened. The breath came again, steadier now, and someone whispered, “Shh.”

Then another voice, low and familiar—the reason the word familiar shoved her chest into an icebox. It was too soft to be certain, but it bore the cadence she had heard in the archives, in her nightmares. A slow, amused purr.

“Do not wake him yet.”

Her blood thrashed, as if her heart itself wanted to climb out and run. She had imagined Lucien. Her exhaustion had laced. But in the next beat, a shadow moved at the edge of the doorway—a body that did not belong to the sleeping servants, a silhouette stranger and sinuous. The corridor’s scant light caught the glint of something metallic at the figure’s hip: a blade, dull and ribboned with dried sap.

Aria drew in a breath as if it were the first time she’d ever tried to breathe. She had no weapon. Her hands had only pulse and bone and the thin linen of her shift. She could see, just past the intruder, the narrow stair that led toward her room, its banister scratched, familiar—just one more short step to safety.

The figure’s head turned toward her like a slow, practiced predator. The cloak fell back enough that moonlight struck—brief and terrible—on a flash of crimson in the hood.

For an instant, the world narrowed to the smear of red and the shape of a mouth that curved into a smile she had already learned to hate.

“Aria,” the voice cooed—Lucien’s voice, unmistakable and intimate, as if the moon itself had been cut to match his tone. “Sleep well, little secret.”

Something cold spread beneath her skin, the kind of cold that shuts the throat and steels the knees. She took one step back, and then another. Every instinct screamed for flight.

Behind the intruder, a low sound rose in the dark—hundreds of silent things shifting into place; the soft padding of rogues taking their stations like a tide swallowing shore.

Aria’s fingers brushed the banister. It felt impossibly far. Her mouth opened; no sound came out that mattered. The intruder’s eyes—crimson coals—fixed on her with the friendliness of a knife.

Outside, the distant ridge answered with a single, lonely howl that meant nothing and everything.

And then the door at the end of the hall banged open, and a voice she had trusted—Kael’s voice, sharp with command—split the air.

“What—” he began.

Everything held; the lodge inhaled, waiting.

The figure smiled again, slow and satisfied, and the blade at his hip caught the moonlight in a thin, terrible arc.

“—do you see?” Lucien’s voice said, close enough that she could feel the breath on her face. “I told you I’d return you to him.”

The world tilted. The hall blurred around the edges. Aria’s knees gave the slightest fraction, as if the house itself had decided whether to protect or betray.

Then the scene snapped to black—like sudden, absolute night—and a single, bone-deep sound ripped the quiet into pieces.