The Howl

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POV: Luther

The whiskey burned, but it didn’t reach the hollow.

I stood on the stone balcony above the yard, glass in hand, watching Red Moon breathe in the dark. Torches guttered, throwing ragged light across training posts and wet flagstones. A few late warriors finished drills because I had said to finish drills, and obedience is easier than sleep when the Alpha is restless.

They bowed when they saw me. Too fast. Too shallow. Fear has a scent, and it rises quickest at night.

Wind slid cold along the ridge and lifted the hair at my nape. Beyond the border, the forest swayed, a black ocean in the moonless dark. I tipped the glass and found it empty.

Silence thickened.

Then the night split.

At first, not even a howl—just a child’s voice, carried where no child’s voice should ever reach.

“Mama—it hurts!”

The words tore through the night, small and breaking. Pain, not power. A pup’s cry, raw and unhidden.

A second voice joined, thin and strained—two little throats overlapping in fear.

“Mama—”

The sound cracked mid-breath, shredded, and reformed into something the world had no right to hear.

The howl came.

Not the iron cry of seasoned wolves. Not the broken wail of rogues at the border.

This was raw. New.

Two voices rose together—bright, fierce, untrained—and the sound went through the pack like a blade. The glass slipped from my hand and shattered at my feet.

Below me, the yard froze. Swords clanged on stone. A warrior dropped to his knees, palms slapping flagstones in a prayer he didn’t know he remembered.

The voices climbed higher, not asking permission to be heard. Commanding.

The sound rolled over roofs and through halls and down into bone. I felt it in my teeth. In the old scars across my ribs. In the empty council chair draped in velvet, as if the wood itself remembered what it had been carved to hold.

A stable boy staggered into the yard, eyes wide, hay still on his sleeves. He fell to his knees anyway, forehead to stone. At the gate, two guards collapsed together with a muffled curse. In the kitchens, a gasp and a body hitting tile.

Every wolf not Alpha-born bowed beneath that sound.

Only the Betas stayed standing, barely, legs shaking like saplings. The elders stumbled out, silk dragging in mud, faces pale. Elder Mira clutched a column and whispered, “Alpha-born.”

She swallowed. “Twice.”

The murmurs rose sharply. “Twins.” “Goddess have mercy.”

The second howl peaked—so sudden, so pure my vision blurred—and for a heartbeat I thought I heard words inside it.

Hurts. Mama. Breathe.

A woman’s voice threaded faintly through the storm, steady where the pups were breaking. Don’t fight it. Just breathe.

The sound of her reached me across a distance too wide for sense, and still it rang true.

I gripped the balcony rail hard enough to bend iron.

“Impossible,” I rasped. “Pups this young don’t shift. Not at that age—”

Explain it, Recce snapped, claws up my spine. His voice filled my skull, hot and bright, no longer a ragged snarl but a war horn. Explain why our pack kneels. Why the ridge answers. Why the night belongs to them.

Another wave hit—power, not sound—and the torches bowed in their brackets. I had heard Alpha-born howls before. They carried weight. But this was more. Not just weight. Recognition.

The land itself turned its head.

I looked up, desperate for reason. For silver. For the disc every wolf waits for.

Nothing.

No moon. No mercy. Just storm.

“Pups don’t shift without the full moon,” I rasped. But there was no moon tonight. Only clouds tearing themselves apart to make room for voices the sky had no business carrying.

“This can’t be—” I started, but the math clawed through anyway.

Six years since the coronation.

Six years since a girl pressed her mouth to mine in a door no one used and gave me a night I had no right to keep.

Six years since I’d stood before my pack and called her weak with a voice that shook.

Five years is too young.

Not too young for ours, Recce said, certainly a whip. Not for the sons of an Alpha forged in shame and iron. You know what we are. What we make. You did this and threw them away.

The elders pressed closer. “Where?” Rowan croaked. “Which house?”

Mira’s eyes flicked to the empty chair on the dais. “Alpha,” she said, voice trembling between awe and calculation, “if the Goddess has blessed the line—”

“Blessed?” The word scraped my teeth. I could still hear the sob inside the howl, a voice swallowed by pain and remade into power. “You call this blessed?”

Listen, Recce snarled.

The howls braided tighter until they were one. My lungs seized on the shape of it. Heat tore through my chest like a brand reopening an old scar.

Father.

I staggered. My hand missed the rail and I caught the stone with bloody fingers just to stay upright.

“No,” I whispered, prayer lost to the storm. “No—no—”

Ours, Recce exulted. Heirs.

“They’re too young,” I tried, clawing at air. “Twins don’t—”

Twins do when the Goddess makes a point. His laugh hurt. You bedded our mate and stood before the banners and called her nothing. You wanted whispers. She shouts.

The last of the warriors bowed his head. Even Garron, my Beta, braced on his thighs, breathing like a man who’d outrun death and found it waiting anyway. His eyes met mine—no challenge, no advice. Just a question he didn’t dare ask aloud.

I thought of the door no one used. Of a girl’s laugh breaking into a gasp. Of her fingers clutching my lapel like she could keep me upright by needing me. Tomorrow, she’d breathe. They’ll see I’m yours.

I had taken her tomorrow and turned her into ash.

The howls ebbed, quieter now, as if the voices had spent themselves. Only the echo remained, a thread pulled through bone and tied at the back.

A whisper rose among the kneeling wolves. “Alpha-born.” “Twins.” “The line holds.”

Rowan straightened, dignity clawing back. “If Red Moon has heirs, we will find them. We will bring them home—”

I moved before I thought. One step met stone, the second carried me to the rail, the third would have been off the balcony if not for the iron under my hands. Every eye snapped to me like hunting dogs to a thrown knife.

“You will not bring them anywhere,” I said, voice low enough to be a promise. “Anyone who hunts that sound without my command will not come back.”

Mira’s mouth pinched. “Alpha, this is bigger than—”

“Bigger than what?” I asked. I didn’t raise my voice. The storm carried it. “Bigger than the last order your Alpha gave? Bigger than the bond you told me to break?”

Her throat worked. “We need to know whose blood—”

“We know whose blood,” I said. The words tasted like iron. “All of us do.”

No one spoke. The only sound was the wind easing and the last thin thread of the howls dying into the dark—like two small voices falling asleep in a house that smelled of bread and rain.

Recce pressed his weight into me until my back hit the balcony door. Say it.

I shut my eyes.

I saw a kitchen corridor. A girl’s stubborn chin. Her mouth formed my name like she didn’t know if saying it would save us or destroy us. I saw her in silk that didn’t fit, tears she hadn’t deserved, and the hall where my own voice had become a weapon I couldn’t forgive.

I opened my eyes to the pack on its knees and the elders stealing glances like thieves.

“They’re alive,” I said, and if there was mercy in the world, my voice didn’t break. “My pups.”

No one moved. The words hung in the air and did not fall.

Recce’s growl rolled through me, vow and threat alike. Too late for denial. They howl for us now. They howl for their father.

He paused, and when he spoke again it was softer, almost reverent.

They howl for their father.