Chapter 2

She was trembling now, hard enough that he could feel it travel up through her hand into his own chest, and something inside him pulled painfully tight, like a fist closing around his heart. He had never once seen his sister like this, not once, in all their years; she was the pillar. She was the one who didn't break.

He pulled her into his arms and held on.

"Shh, Ela, listen to me; it was only a dream.” He said it into her hair, low and steady, in the same voice their father used to use the voice that made things true simply by saying them. “You are not a wolf. You are the same girl who looked back at you in that mirror just now. Nothing is coming for you; I am not leaving. I will stay right here until you fall asleep."

She nodded against his shoulder, more felt than seen.

“Emis,” she breathed. “I am so scared.”

“I know.” His arms tightened around her.  “But you are safe; close your eyes and sleep.”

It took a long while; eventually her grip loosened, her breathing slowed and evened, and sleep finally took her under.

Eremis didn't move, unwilling to risk waking her.

She looked so small like this, curled into herself, still faintly trembling even in sleep, and that, more than the scream, more than the dream itself, was what frightened him. Marcela had held their household together after their father died. She had never once let anyone see her afraid. Seeing it now felt like watching a wall crack.

He stayed a long moment simply watching her breathe.

Then, gently, he closed his eyes and reached along the old, familiar thread that connected him to his pack and sent word out into the dark.

He was the son of the last Alpha king of his clan, and when his father died in that so-called accident, the burden of rebuilding had fallen to him alone. He had spent years hunting down every wolf who had once sworn loyalty to his father, the scattered, the frightened, the ones who had stopped answering to anyone at all. He had trained them himself, rebuilt them from nothing, and promised every one of them their kingdom back.

Tonight, for the first time, a cold thought settled into him and refused to leave.

What if the thing hunting my sister in her sleep has already found her?

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The phone crackled faintly in the silence.

“Madam, everything is ready. We will move as soon as we get your signal.”

The voice was clipped, businesslike, the voice of a man who had learned long ago not to ask questions of the woman he served. On the other end of the line, she said nothing for a moment and only listened, savouring the words the way one savours the last mouthful of something long denied.

“Finally,” The word came out first as barely more than a breath, and then again, louder, cracking open with something close to triumph. “Finally!! The time has come.”

She was already moving as she spoke, her pace hurried, almost hungry, her masked face catching slivers of moonlight as she crossed the corridor. It had been years of patience, of waiting in shadows while lesser people shinning in the light. And now, at last, the waiting was over.

“My waiting is over,” she said again, more to herself now than to the man on the phone, as if she needed to hear the words in her own voice to believe them. “I will get what I have always wanted. And no one can stop me this time.”

Her hand found the door and shoved it open. It groaned on old hinges, a low, rusted creak that seemed to echo far longer than it should have in the empty hallway beyond.

“No one,” she repeated, and this time the word came out as something closer to a vow than a boast.

“Wait for me. I will be there within the hour.”

She ended the call without waiting for a reply and slipped the phone away, and for a moment she simply stood at the threshold, letting the room settle around.

It was small, neglected. The kind of room that had been sealed away and forgotten on purpose, and she could tell that much from the stillness of the air, the particular hush of a place no one had dared to disturb in a long time. Her eyes swept over it slowly, deliberately, on every shadow, until they came to rest on the desk.

A family portrait sat there, half-buried under a fine grey shroud of dust, its frame tarnished with age and neglect. She crossed to it without hurry, as there was no need to hurry here, not in this room, not with this, and let her gloved fingers hover just above the glass.

Besides the portrait, brittle newspaper clippings lay fanned out like something once arranged with care. One held the photograph of a girl, her face so finely composed it seemed almost sculpted, noble-born, the pride of her people, the kind of face that belonged on banners rather than faded newsprint. Another clipping showed a couple, caught mid-laugh in some long-ago moment, wrapped so completely around each other that the photographer must have simply stepped back and let them exist.

The woman's masked face gave away nothing. But her eyes, visible even through the narrow slits of the mask, softened into something unexpectedly tender as she looked at them, not warmth, exactly, but something older and more complicated than warmth, longing, perhaps, or grief that had been hidden over many years, into something sharper and far more dangerous.

She reached out and traced the outline of the portrait, her fingertips lingering over the glass as though she could still, after everything, feel the people beneath it.

“Well.” Her voice, when it came, was quiet, gentle, almost sad, and utterly without mercy. “Looks like I will finally be able to make it and you won’t be able to stop me.”

She let her hand fall away.

Then she turned, and whatever softness had crept into her a moment before vanished entirely, into the mask, into the certainty of her walked as she walked back out into the dark. Her steps firm against the floor, elegant and unhurried, and the walk of a woman who had already decided the outcome and was simply arriving to collect it.

No one was going to stop her. Not this time.