Chapter Four: What Answered the Call

Dessa

I couldn’t sleep. I hadn’t slept properly in three nights, not since the yard, not since the stranger at the tree line had looked at me like I was something worth remembering.

Every time I closed my eyes I was back in the Great Hall with Kieran’s voice looping on some broken track I couldn’t switch off. Fatass. Weak. A joke. Then the gate, then the command that hadn’t touched me, all of it layered on top of each other until I couldn’t tell which memory I was standing inside anymore.

I gave up around midnight. Pulled on my boots, shrugged into the first coat I found by the door, and let myself out into the cold before I could think better of it. Silas would have told me to stay. That was exactly why I didn’t wake him to ask.

The trees swallowed the last of the porch light within a hundred yards. I told myself I only wanted air. I didn’t tell myself where my feet were really taking me until I heard it. Snarling, dozens of throats deep, the wet, ugly sound of bodies colliding in the dark.

I found the clearing before I found him.

Rogues. More than I could count in the time it took my brain to understand what I was looking at. Twenty, thirty of them, matted and starved-looking, the kind of wolves who’d lost their packs and their names and everything that used to make them careful. And in the middle of them, moving through them like smoke, was Ronan.

He wasn’t fighting them so much as taking them apart. I watched him put down three in the time it took me to draw one breath, no wasted motion, black eyes flat and almost bored even with blood striping down one forearm. But there were too many. Even a Lycan could be worn down by enough teeth, enough numbers, enough time.

I don’t remember deciding to step into the clearing. I remember the moment three rogues broke off from the pack and turned toward me instead, scenting something new, something that hadn’t been marked as his.

They lunged.

Something cracked open behind my sternum, the same gold heat that had answered Kieran’s command in the yard, except this time it didn’t just hold a door shut. It surged.

I felt it pour down through my arms and hands, my nails lengthening into something not quite human and not quite wolf. The first rogue reached me and I moved before I understood I was moving, caught it out of the air by the throat, and put it down before its teeth ever found skin.

The second came in low, for my legs. I broke its jaw with the heel of my palm and felt no fear at all, only that same certainty that had carried me through the failed command, like my body had been waiting its whole life to be allowed to do this.

No rogue that came near me got the chance to touch me. Not one.

I felt Ronan notice. I felt the exact half-second his attention split between the horde in front of him and the impossible thing happening behind him, and that half-second nearly cost him everything. A fourth rogue broke from the tree line aimed straight at my unguarded side, jaws already open, and I didn’t see it in time.

Ronan did.

He crossed the distance faster than my eyes could follow and threw his own arm into the rogue’s path instead of letting it reach me. Teeth closed around his forearm with a sound I felt in my back teeth, deep and final, and he didn’t make a noise. He just held the rogue there, locked, giving me the half-second I needed.

I turned into it without thinking. My claws found the rogue’s chest and I tore it away from him with strength that shouldn’t have been mine three days ago. I watched it fall and not get back up, and I stood there breathing hard over the body with gold burning so bright behind my eyes that the whole clearing looked washed in it.

I smelled them before I heard them, two scents cutting through the blood and the pine, familiar in a way that hit low and fast. Kieran. And Silas right behind him, both of them crashing through the tree line at a dead run like something had physically dragged them there.

The remaining rogues didn’t wait to find out what the three of us together would mean for them. They scattered into the dark in every direction, and the clearing went quiet except for breathing and the drip of blood into frost-hardened dirt.

I shifted back to skin without meaning to, the change rolling through me easy and painless for the first time in my life. No grinding bone, no white-hot tearing, just a smooth exhale from one shape into another. My eyes were still glowing when I turned and found Ronan on his knees in the churned-up snow, cradling the arm the rogue had torn into.

I was in front of him before I’d decided to move.

“Let me see.”

He didn’t argue. That alone told me how bad the wound was. A Lycan who didn’t argue about anything. I took his forearm in both hands, torn muscle and blood slick under my fingers, and I didn’t think. I just wanted it closed. I wanted him whole. The wanting came from somewhere deeper than words, urgent and absolute.

Heat spilled out of my palms and into the wound.

I watched it like it was someone else’s hands doing it. Torn muscle knitting shut, skin sealing smooth and unscarred, the blood stopping like a tap had been turned off. Ronan’s breath left him in a ragged pull, and when I looked up his eyes had gone from flat obsidian to a deep, burning red, fixed on me like I’d rearranged something in him just by touching his skin.

“Mate,” he said. Just that. Wrecked and certain, like the word had been waiting behind his teeth for three nights.

Kieran reached the clearing four seconds later, chest heaving, and stopped dead at the sight of Ronan kneeling in front of me with my hands still on his healed arm and his eyes burning that deep, claiming red.

Nobody spoke for a moment. The silence was thick enough to choke on.

“Get your hands off her,” Kieran said, low, and I watched everything left of the boy who’d mocked me in the Great Hall burn away into something feral and possessive.

“She put her hands on me,” Ronan said, not moving, not blinking, still on his knees like he had no intention of giving up the position. “I didn’t ask her to. I’m not going to apologize for it either.”

Silas stepped up on my other side, close enough that his shoulder brushed mine, and the look he gave both of them was worse than a growl. Flat, cold, certain. “She’s not a line the two of you get to draw around. Either of you.”

Three Alphas. Three pairs of eyes locked on each other over my head, none of them backing down, all that raw possessiveness crackling in the air like the seconds before lightning hits the ground. A week ago that kind of attention would have made me smaller. It would have sent me looking for a wall to put my back against.

I didn’t feel small standing in the middle of it. I felt like the only steady thing in a clearing full of men who’d apparently decided that losing their minds over me was worth doing in front of witnesses.

“I’m going to say this once,” I said, and something in my voice made all three of them stop and look at me instead of each other. “I’m not a prize sitting in the middle of your standoff. I fought tonight. I healed him tonight. I didn’t do either of those things so the three of you could posture over what’s left of me.”

Kieran’s jaw tightened. Ronan’s mouth curved, slow, like he was watching something he already knew he’d end up worshipping. Silas just nodded once, like I’d confirmed something he’d already decided was true.

None of them looked away from each other for a long time after that. The glare between the three of them was hot enough to start a second fire in that clearing, and every wolf still watching from the tree line understood exactly what they were seeing. Three Alphas, each one certain he wasn’t leaving, none of them willing to be the one who shared.

“How did you know we were out here?” I asked later, once Maren had finished checking all three of us over and the fire in the healer’s hall had burned down to embers, Kieran pacing by the door because no one had let him leave and no one had let him stand too close either.

“We woke up at the same moment, all three of us,” Silas said. “Like something pulled us out of sleep and pointed us at the trees.”

I didn’t have an answer that made sense out loud. But I felt the truth of it settle into my chest anyway, quiet and enormous.

Whatever the gold behind my eyes actually was, it hadn’t just protected me tonight. It had reached out into the dark and called every one of them home. And judging by the way none of the three could stop watching me across that room, I understood I was never going to be looked at like I was nothing again.

Wren

I watched the whole thing from the ridge above the clearing, close enough to see the gold pouring out of her hands and far enough that none of them thought to look up.

Dessa Whitlock. Healing a Lycan Alpha’s arm like it was nothing. Summoning two more Alphas out of a dead sleep just by bleeding into the dark.

I’d known her since we were seven years old. I’d sat beside her at a hundred pack dinners, braided her hair before her first shift, and laughed. God help me, I’d laughed, right there in the Great Hall with everyone else, because it had been easier to laugh with the crowd than to be the one girl standing next to the joke. I told myself that night it didn’t matter. That she’d get over it. That we’d still be exactly what we’d always been once the humiliation faded.

I hadn’t planned on this. Three Alphas losing their minds over a body I used to watch her cry about in private, back when we were girls and she still let herself cry in front of me.

Something twisted tight and ugly behind my ribs, watching her stand in that clearing glowing like something out of the old stories, and I knew with total clarity that whatever came next, I wasn’t going to be able to laugh my way out of it this time.

She thought the worst thing that ever happened to her was standing in that hall while Kieran tore her apart in front of everyone she knew.

She had no idea I was about to become so much worse than he ever was.