THE MARK ON THE THROAT

Nyra does not come to breakfast the next morning.

I notice it right away. She always sits across from me, always steals a piece of my bread even though she has her own, always finds some small thing to say about the weather or the guards or the way Ysolde yells at the newest Omega for breaking a plate. Her chair sits empty, and the empty space feels louder than any noise she has ever made.

"Where is Nyra," I ask Mira, who is picking at her porridge like it insulted her.

Mira shrugs, but her eyes do not meet mine. "Healing rooms. I heard she was called there before dawn."

"Called for what?"

"They found another body." Mira lowers her voice, glancing around the kitchen like the walls might repeat her words to someone dangerous. "Near the forest. Same as the last one."

My spoon stops halfway to my mouth. "Another one."

"Low-rank. A boy, this time. Barely seventeen." Mira shivers, and it is not from the cold. "They say he was found white as chalk. Not a drop of blood left in him."

I set my spoon down slowly, because my hands have started to shake and I do not want her to see it.

I find an excuse within the hour — Kael's boots need mending, and the cobbler works two doors down from the healing rooms, close enough that nobody questions why I walk past. Close enough that I can see through the half-open door.

Nyra stands over a table. A sheet covers most of what lies on it, but not the throat. Not the two dark punctures sitting side by side just under the jaw, the skin around them gone gray and sunken, like something drank the life straight out of the boy from that one small place.

My stomach turns over.

I know this wound.

I healed one exactly like it once, years ago, in a different body, in a different life.

A wolf brought to my healing room half-dead, drained the same way, marks in the same place. I remember asking my old mentor what could do such a thing to a wolf twice its size.

I remember her face going gray and her mouth going shut, the way a mouth goes shut around something it has decided is safer left unsaid.

"That is not a rogue attack," I say, before I can stop myself.

Nyra's head snaps up. She sees me in the doorway and does not look surprised, only tired, the kind of tired that sits behind the eyes and does not leave with sleep.

"Come in," she says. "Quickly. Before someone sees you."

I slip inside and shut the door.

"You should not be here," she says, but she does not sound like she means it.

"Neither should this." I nod at the throat. "I have seen a wound like that before."

"Where?"

I catch myself just in time. "I do not remember," I say. "A dream, maybe."

Nyra studies me. She has stopped pretending she believes my dreams are only dreams. "This is the second one in ten days," she says.

"Both low-rank. Both found near the Moonless Forest. Both drained through the throat and left with no other mark on the body at all.

No claw wounds. No bite. Just this." She touches the air above the punctures without touching the skin itself, like even her hand is afraid of it.

"A rogue does not feed like that," I say. "A rogue tears. A rogue is not careful."

"No," Nyra agrees, quiet. "This was careful."

The word sits between us, heavy and cold.

"Nyra." I keep my voice low. "Who else knows what these wounds look like?"

"The Elders, maybe. Old wolves who remember old things." She hesitates, chewing the inside of her cheek. "Riven has been asking about it too.

He came by yesterday, before you did. Wanted to know if I had ever seen anything like this before."

My pulse jumps. "What did you tell him?"

"The truth. That I had not. Until this morning."

I look down at the boy on the table. Seventeen. Someone's son. Someone's little brother, maybe, who woke up yesterday morning thinking he had a whole life ahead of him.

"Seraphine mentioned an anniversary," I say slowly. "At court. She said history has a way of repeating itself."

Nyra's face goes very still. "You think this is connected to her."

"I think five years ago, someone drained a healer's reputation instead of her blood, and called it poison instead of murder, and nobody asked too many careful questions then either." My voice comes out harder than I mean it to. "I think Seraphine knows exactly what did this. I think she has known the whole time."

"That is a dangerous thing to say about a Blackthorn."

"It is a more dangerous thing to be found dead with your throat open like a spigot," I say, and Nyra flinches, and I am sorry, but I do not take it back.

The door opens behind us.

I spin around, heart slamming, already halfway into an excuse about the cobbler, the boots, anything — and stop, because it is Riven filling the doorway, green eyes moving from me to the table and back again with a speed that makes it clear he has already put together more than I would like.

"Well," he says. "Look who is not mending boots after all."

"Riven—"

"Save it." He steps inside, shuts the door behind him with a quiet click that sounds louder than it should. "I want to know how an Omega who arrived three weeks ago knew to come looking at a body before anyone told her there was one."

"I did not know—"

"You are a terrible liar," he says, echoing his own words from weeks ago, and something about hearing them again makes my throat go tight. "Mira mentioned the body at breakfast. I checked.

You were three tables away, and you were out this door in under a minute. That is not curiosity. That is recognition."

I say nothing. There is nothing safe to say.

Riven looks at Nyra. "Does she know something."

"I do not—" Nyra starts.

"Do not lie for her, Nyra. Not about this. Two boys are dead."

"I am not lying," Nyra says, and her voice shakes but does not break. "I do not know everything she knows. I only know she is not what she says she is.

And I think—" She looks at me, and there is something fierce in her face now, something protective that surprises me coming from someone so gentle. "I think she is trying to help, not hurt."

Riven's jaw works. He looks at me for a long moment, weighing something behind those sharp green eyes.

"There were footprints," he says finally, "near where they found the boy this morning. Wolf prints, but wrong. Too narrow. Too deep at the toe, like whatever made them was standing on its hind legs longer than a wolf should."

He watches my face while he says it. "You know what that sounds like, Rue?"

My blood runs cold, because I do know. I knew it the moment Nyra said the word carefully.

"No," I say, and it comes out as barely a whisper.

"I think you do." He steps closer. "I think you know exactly what walks on two legs too long and drinks a wolf dry through the throat and leaves nothing else behind.

And I think that is the same thing that killed someone five years ago and got away with calling it someone else's crime."

The room tilts. I grip the edge of the table to keep myself upright.

"Say it," Riven says, quiet now, almost gentle, the way you would coax an animal out of a trap. "Whatever it is you are carrying around inside you, Rue. Say it before it kills someone else."

I open my mouth.

And that is when the door slams open behind him, and a guard's voice cuts through the room, breathless, urgent, wrong in every way a voice can be wrong.

"The Alpha," he gasps. "Something has attacked the Alpha. He is bleeding — he needs the healer — now."

Nyra is already moving, grabbing her bag, but I cannot move at all. My whole body has gone to ice, because Kael was in the training yard not twenty minutes ago, alive, whole, and now he is not whole, and the last thing I said to Riven is not, and the last thing I want to say — the only thing that matters right now — is a name I am forbidden to speak, rising up my throat so fast I nearly choke on holding it back.

"Where," I manage.

"East courtyard. Near the fountain."

The fountain he never walks past. The one he takes the long way to avoid.

Someone made him go there.

I am running before I decide to run at all, Nyra's voice calling my name somewhere behind me, and all I can think, over and over, faster than my own footsteps, is: not again, not again, I will not lose him again.