MasukShe's mine.I heard it again on the walk back to the cell. I heard it in the corridor, in the silence between my footsteps, in the space where I was trying very hard not to think.She doesn't belong here. She's mine.I pushed the cell door open harder than necessary and sat down on the edge of the cot with my hands pressed flat against my knees. Wren looked at me. I looked at the wall. She had the good sense not to speak first.Who did he think he was.That was the thing I kept circling back to, the question with teeth in it. Who did he think he was, standing there in that doorway with that expression on his face — controlled, certain, like he was collecting something that had always been his — saying those words in that voice. She's mine. As if the last thing he had said to me wasn't the opposite of that. As if he hadn't looked at me in front of everyone and made his position perfectly clear. Wolfless. Beneath consideration. Not enough.And now he was here. In foreign territory, in s
"Let's go home, Elara."My voice came out steadier than anything I felt in that moment. I had stepped out of the shadow of the alcove — no point in hiding now that she'd seen me — and I was looking at her directly, the way you look at something you've decided about.Ronan was on his feet before I finished the sentence."She's going nowhere."He had positioned himself without seeming to move. The particular stillness I had felt it when we fought, that quality he had of being already ready before you'd decided anything."She's in my territory," he added."I noticed." I looked around the room with the specific kind of patience that tends to irritate people. "Nice territory. Very contained.""You want to talk about containment?" His voice dropped half a register. "You're the one who crawled through my boundary line in stolen clothes”."So?" I said. "You scared I'll touch up your ribs a little more?"Something shifted in his expression. Not anger — something colder and more considered than
Lobos was supposed to be gone for another hour.I had timed it. I knew his habits the way I knew most things about the people close to me — not because I asked, but because I paid attention. He would be at the eastern post until midday, and midday gave me enough of a window to be gone before he had anyone to argue with.I was three steps from the door when it opened.He looked at my pack. Then at me. Then at my pack again."You were going to leave without me.""I was going to leave," I said. "The without you part was a courtesy."He put his back against the door. Lobos has many qualities. Subtlety is not among them. "I'm coming.""The Elders said —""The Elders said you had to go alone. They didn't say anything to me." He picked up his own jacket from the hook beside the door with the particular calm of a man who has already decided and is simply waiting for you to catch up. "So. Are we going?"I looked at him for a long moment. Then I walked past him out the door.He followed. I didn
Wren was sitting cross-legged on the cot when I got back, watching me with that particular patience of hers — the kind that means she's already decided to wait you out.She waited until the guard's footsteps disappeared down the corridor."Well?"I sat across from her and looked at my hands. Turned them over. They looked exactly the same as they always had. Ordinary. I didn't know what I expected — some mark, some sign of the thing I still didn't have a name for. There was nothing."Something happened," I said.So I told her. Plain, no interpretation — just what it was. Ronan's questions. The heat that moved through me when he grabbed my arm. His wrist, smooth where the wound had been. His shoulder settling back into place like it had never been broken.Wren was quiet for exactly three seconds.Then she reached over and dragged her palm across the iron gate."Wren —""I need to know." She held her hand up. A clean split across her palm, already bleeding. "So do you."She wasn't wrong.
I had been sitting in the room they'd given us for what felt like hours when the guard came.Not a request. A summons has a different quality to it — the way the door opens, the way the man in the doorway doesn't quite meet your eyes. Wren reached for my hand when I stood and I squeezed her fingers once before I followed him out.They took me to Ronan.He was in a chair that probably felt like a throne under normal circumstances. Tonight it looked like the only thing holding him upright. The healer had clearly done what she could — bandaging wrapped his forearm, a dressing across his brow, linen around his ribs visible at the open collar of his shirt. But the wounds were extensive enough that barely covered was the most generous description. His jaw was set in that particular way of a man managing pain and refusing to let it show, and not entirely succeeding.He looked at me when I entered. Those amber eyes, sharp even now, even like this."Sit," he said.I sat."Who are you to Kael B
I have run this forest since I was seven years old. I know the eastern boundary the way I know my own hands — every landmark, every shift in the ground, every place where the territory changes character and starts belonging to something older than pack law. I have run it in every season, in every state of mind. I have never felt lost in it.Today it felt different.Not the forest. The forest was exactly what it had always been — pine and soil and the particular cold that lives under canopy even in warm months. What was different was me. The shift came slower than it should have. My wolf was there but muted, like a voice heard through a closed door, and when I ran the ground didn't pass beneath me the way it usually does. I felt the effort. I felt my own weight. These are not things I am accustomed to feeling.I was looking for one thing — Elara’s smell.Someone had been here recently — multiple tracks, disturbed undergrowth, the faint smell of char from something attempted and abandon







