Bound To The Wolf I Was Sent To Kill

The first thing you learn about war is that it never smells like blood.

It smells like wet earth churned to mud, like fear-sweat and pine sap and the sharp copper tang that comes after. Blood is only the last note.

I stood in the middle of it all with my claws dripping, and I breathed it in like it was air.

Three Blackmere wolves circled me. Gray, brown, and a scarred black one with a torn ear. They thought they had me. They always think that, right up until they see the fur.

"Blade," the gray one whispered, and the word shook. "That's the Blade."

"Yes," I said, through my teeth, through my jaw, through the low grumble of a body that was built to do exactly this. "It is."

I moved.

The gray one died first, because he hesitated. I took his throat and let his weight drag me down, then rolled with it, using his body as a shield when the brown one lunged. Teeth met fur. Not my fur. I felt the impact through the corpse, and then I was up again, spinning, my claws opening the brown wolf from shoulder to hip.

The black one ran.

Good. Run.

I let him go, because the Frostmaw teach you that discipline is what separates us from them. We do not chase. We do not linger. We finish the mission and we bring our dead home.

Behind me, the battle roared on. Horns from the ridge, the wet slap of bodies hitting bodies, a Frostmaw warrior screaming out orders I had memorized years ago. The Blackmere line was breaking on the eastern slope, and we were pushing them back toward the river the way Alpha Dorian had planned.

We were winning.

I told myself that, and I kept moving.

My fur was the color of fresh snow, or had been at dawn. Now it was streaked red down my flanks and across my chest, and every wolf on this field knew it. The Blackmere called me something in their own tongue. My own people called me the Blade of the Alpha. I had earned the title at nineteen and I'd worn it for six years since.

A Blackmere warrior came at me from the left, huge, too large for his own reflexes. I ducked under his swing and drove my shoulder into his ribs. Bone gave way. He folded, coughing, and I ended it fast and clean, because even the enemy deserved that much.

They're monsters, Dorian had told me a hundred times, in the war room, with a hand on my shoulder. They burned the northern villages. They butchered the children. You know what they are, Astrid.

I knew what they were.

So why did my paws keep slowing?

I shoved the thought down, the way I always did, and pressed on toward the center of the field, where the fighting was thickest. Somewhere ahead was the Blackmere command position. If I could break it, the line would collapse.

A wolf stepped in front of me and died before he finished his growl.

Another. Another.

The mud sucked at my paws. My breath came in white plumes. Sweat and blood ran into my eyes, and I shook my head hard and kept going, faster, cutting through the chaos like I was made of it.

And then the crowd of bodies parted, the way water parts around a stone.

He was standing on a rise of broken ground, maybe forty paces away.

I have seen a great many alphas in my life. I have seen them in council, in war, in triumph and in death. I know what power looks like when it walks into a room.

But I had never seen anything like this.

He was enormous, even by the standards of his kind. Black fur, thick and rough as storm clouds, and shoulders built like a battering ram. Blood on his muzzle, though I could tell it wasn't his. His eyes were the color of a winter sky just before it breaks.

Luca Knox. The alpha king of the Blackmere.

Every Frostmaw child grows up on stories about him. The butcher of the northern border. The wolf who ate his enemies' hearts. The man Dorian said would burn our world down if we ever let him near the gates.

He was looking at me.

Not at the Blade. Not at the white wolf who had cut a bloody path through his warriors. At me.

My paws stopped.

I don't remember deciding to stop. My body simply refused to take another step, like something inside me had pulled a wire tight. The noise of the battle dropped away, as if someone had cupped their hands over my ears. The mud, the horns, the screaming, all of it went faint and far.

There was only him.

A jolt tore through me.

It started in my chest and shot outward, down every limb, into my teeth, into the roots of my fur. I felt my heart stutter. I felt my wolf, the fierce, loyal, ruthless creature I had trusted my whole life, lift her head inside me and sing.

He froze too. I saw it. His massive body went rigid on the rise, and his eyes widened, and for one impossible second the alpha king of the Blackmere looked as shaken as I felt.

I knew what this was. Every wolf knows, even those of us who don't believe the stories.

No, I thought. No. Not him. Not now.

And then I heard his voice.

Not with my ears. Inside my head, low and rough, like a hand running down my spine.

Mate.

I couldn't breathe.

My mate.

A wolf slammed into me from the side. I barely felt it. I hit the mud and rolled, and my claws went out on instinct, and the warrior who'd tackled me was dead before I understood what I'd done. I was back on my feet without knowing how.

Luca had not moved.

He was still watching me, across forty paces of blood and chaos, and his voice came again, quieter now, and so urgent it made my knees weak.

They're lying to you.