CHAPTER 2: The Silver Alpha's Command

POV: Aiden

The howls are still ringing in my teeth when I grab her.

Not gentle. Not rough either. Just fast. The thoroughfare's a wreck, bodies everywhere, and Raven's people are already getting their feet under them. I pull the girl through the crowd. She trips over an apple from the overturned cart. I catch her elbow and keep going. Through the service corridor. Through the iron doors. I throw the locking bar and the sound it makes is too loud, too final, like something I can't take back.

Outside, Raven's voice. Not shouting but something more aggressive.

"Aiden. Release her. She's a thief, a spy, a…"

"Be silent."

"You don't get to…"

"I said be silent."

I press my palm to the iron and push. Frost bleeds into the runes. They light up pale blue and then the lock catches and the temperature in the corridor drops enough that I see her shiver. I notice. I don't know why I notice.

Raven's still talking, magically amplified, calm in that way she gets when she's already decided how something ends.

"Alpha Aiden. You harbor an unregistered rogue. A thief. A spy who breached a sealed Council session. I am invoking the Seventh Compact. You have until moonrise to surrender her, or I bring the Elder quorum to your doorstep."

A pause. She's not done.

"She's not your mate, Aiden. She's a weapon someone aimed at you. Don't be the fool who catches the blade bare-handed."

I don't answer. My thumb moves across her knuckles. I don't realize I'm doing it until I've already done it.

I turn. Look at her properly. She's bleeding from both palms. There's a gash on her forearm, ugly and shallow. Bruising along her ribs that's already starting to darken. She looks like she's been running her whole life. She probably has.

"Hold still."

"It's nothing. I've had worse from…"

"I didn't ask. I said hold still."

I crouch. Take her hand and turn it over. The cuts aren't deep but they're dirty. When I press my frost to the bruise on her ribs she sucks in a breath.

"Too cold?"

She shakes her head. "No. It's… it pulls. Like it's reaching for something."

I look closer. Under the bruise, under the skin, something's glowing. Faint. Warm. A pulse that isn't her heartbeat. The seal. Lunissa. And it's answering me.

I should pull my hand back. I don't.

"What's happening to me," she whispers.

"I don't know."

"You're the Alpha. You're supposed to know."

I almost laugh… "I was wrong."

She digs crumpled papers out of her jacket. I take them, smooth them flat. Execution orders. Forty-three names. Wolves, bears, mountain lions who don't fit the single-mate law. Signed by the Elder quorum. And underneath the list, a map. Hand-drawn on old vellum. Ink that still shimmers. It leads to the Altar of Aix. Someone's written SOON across the bottom.

"Forty-three," I say.

"They're killing them. Anyone who can't bond the way the Council wants. They call it cleansing."

"And this map."

"I don't know what it means. I just knew it was important. I could feel it."

The Altar of Aix hasn't been used in two hundred years. Not since the Lunissa line was wiped out. That's what the records say, anyway.

Not wiped out. Hidden.

I drop to one knee and put both hands on the floor. Push my aura down into the foundations. The frost spreads through the walls, the floor, the bones of the Keep. Every crack. Every seam. It takes everything I've got. My vision goes gray at the edges. Something warm drips from my nose.

"You're bleeding," she says.

"I'll manage."

"Your nose is bleeding, Aiden."

"The wards will hold until dawn." I wipe it with the back of my hand. My shoulder aches. I've been awake for two days. "After that, I'll need my loyalists. Rafe. Storm. Asher. They'll answer."

"And if they don't."

I meet her eyes. "Then I hold the door."

She sits on the cold floor. I sit across from her. Not touching. But I could reach her if I needed to. My knees hurt from kneeling. I'm hungry. I can't remember the last time I ate.

"Why?," she asks.

"Why what?”

"You could've let Blaze take me. You should've. I'm nobody."

The pause stretches.

"You are not nobody," I say. "You haven't been nobody for a long time. You just didn't know." I should stop there. I don't. "And I don't abandon what's mine."

The word lands. She presses her hand to her chest and the seal pulses, once, bright enough to see through her shirt.

Later I open the door to my quarters. Sparse. A wide bed. Furs. I toss her a clean linen from the shelf.

"You sleep here. The wards are thickest in this room. I'll take the outer corridor."

"You'll freeze."

"I'm frost-born."

"You'll bleed."

Something in me eases. Just a little. "Then I'll bleed."

"That's not better."

"Sleep, Luna. I'll gather Rafe and Storm before the moon turns. No one gets through these halls. You're safe tonight."

Her voice goes small. "You keep saying tonight."

"Because I don't know what tomorrow looks like."

She presses her face into the furs. Her breathing slows. I step into the corridor and lean against the wall and press my ear to the cold stone. Voices. Low. Furious.

"The Silver Alpha harbors an unregistered creature in his own chambers. The Seventh Compact is clear."

"Raven speaks reason. The girl is a destabilizing force. Four howls. Four. The prophecies of Luxlyric warned of this."

"If the bond is true, we are already too late. If it is false… if it is Lunissa glamour… then we sever it before dawn."

"And if Aiden refuses to surrender her?"

A long silence.

"Then the Alpha seat is no longer his to hold."

My hand curls against the wall. Frost cracks the stone under my fingers. I have until dawn.

I check on her. She's asleep. Or trying. Her brow is furrowed, her hand pressed flat to her chest. The bond is pulling. But not toward me. South. Toward Jathorne. Her lips move.

"Stop... I don't... I don't know you..."

"Luna. Wake up."

Her eyes snap open. "Someone's coming. Not from outside. From below. From the old passages. I can feel them. They're…" She stops. Both hands over her heart. "They're angry."

The brazier gutters. The frost on the walls cracks. Not from my power. From below. A vibration. Footsteps. Heavy. Coming up through stone that's been sealed for a decade.

I pull her behind me. My frost flares. The door shudders.

The floor glows. Not blue. Gold. Molten. A hand punches up through solid rock, claws digging into stone. The scent that comes through the gap is smoke and burnt wood and rage so thick I can taste it.

I raise my blade.

The hand grips the broken edge. And a voice, rough and wrecked and furious, rasps up from the dark:

"I felt her. And I will NOT be locked out of what's mine."