Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Faye's POV

I had three days.

Three days since the elders started saying my name in hushed, almost reverent tones. Three days since father looked at me like he didn't quite recognise the daughter he'd spent years ignoring.

Three days, and it still hadn't fully settled in my chest.

I sat at the edge of my bed in the early hours of the morning, long before the pack stirred, with the black parchment spread open across my knees. The wax seal had already been broken the night father received it, but I kept reading it over and over like the words would change if I stared long enough.

They didn't.

"The WhiteMoon Pack has until the next full moon to surrender its lands or face destruction. No negotiation. No mercy." — Alpha Asher of the Red Claws Pack.

Seven days. We had seven days.

I set the parchment down on the bed and walked to the window. Outside, the pack was still sleeping. Smoke drifted lazily from the kitchen chimneys, and the training grounds were empty. 

They didn't have a clue what was coming for them.

I pressed my forehead to the cool glass and closed my eyes. Father had tried everything. He'd sent envoys and they came back with their pride in pieces. He'd asked the elders for ideas and they offered prayers. 

But I hadn't.

I thought about what I knew of Alpha Asher, because everyone knew something. You couldn't grow up in any pack and not hear his name whispered the way people whisper about storms before they arrive. The Red Beast, they called him.

I pushed off the window and crouched beside the loose floorboard near my wardrobe. Underneath, wrapped in old cloth, were the things I'd been quietly gathering over the past two days. A dark travelling cloak. Dried meat and a small water pouch. A map of the eastern forest that one of the older hunters had drawn years ago, back when the borders were different.

And my bow.

I ran my thumb along the curve of it. My hands didn't shake. They never did when I held it, which was funny because they shook at everything else. They shook when Scarlet raised her voice. They shook at the dinner table when father looked past me like I was furniture. They even shook the night of the wedding when I sat alone on that cold floor and cried into my gown.

But not now.

I packed everything into a satchel, pulled my hair back into a tight braid, and sat on the floor to wait for the right moment.

I left just before dawn.

The guard change happened at the northern gate every morning at the same time. I'd noticed it during my weeks of training in the dark. Four minutes where both guards had their backs turned and the torches at the gate entrance flickered from the draft, and that four minutes was more than enough.

I slipped out without a sound.

The eastern forest swallowed me quickly. It was thick and old, the kind of place where the trees grew so close together that even midday looked like dusk. I'd been through it before on short hunts, but never this deep. Never past the second creek.

I kept moving.

By the time the sun had fully risen, I was well beyond WhiteMoon territory. The forest changed gradually, the trees wider, the ground softer, the air carrying the faint metallic smell of a large camp somewhere ahead. 

I slowed down and moved with more care.

The Red Claws camp was not what I expected. I had imagined something brutal looking, all sharp edges and blood-soaked banners. But what I found nestled between two ridges was almost... structured.  Guard rotations every fifteen minutes, Archers in the trees spaced far enough apart that a gap existed between each pair.

I found the gap and I waited.

It took two hours of crouching behind the same fallen oak before the right moment came. A distraction near the southern end of the camp, raised voices and the sound of something heavy being dropped. Every head turned and that was my perfect chance.

I moved.

Getting inside was the easy part but what came after was harder because the camp was larger than it looked from the outside. Soldiers everywhere, talking, eating, sharpening weapons. None of them looked twice at the cloaked figure moving quietly along the tree line.

I kept my head down and my eyes open.

I found him by accident.

I had been looking for the command tent, the largest one, which was obvious once I found it because of the red banner hanging outside with the snarling wolf emblem. But before I reached it, I heard a voice that cut clean through the noise of the area.

"Tell Nero the eastern flank moves at nightfall. No fires after sundown. Anyone who breaks formation answers to me personally."

I pressed myself behind a supply cart and looked around the edge of it.

He was standing with his back half-turned to me, talking to two men who nodded like their lives depended on getting it right. And maybe they did. He was taller than I'd pictured, broad through the shoulders, wearing a dark tunic with no armour. Confident enough not to need it inside his own camp, apparently.

Alpha Asher.

The Red Beast himself.

My heart did something strange. Not fear exactly. Something more complicated that I didn't have the time to examine.

I pulled out my bow slowly, careful not to make a sound, and nocked an arrow. My breathing steadied on its own. This was the part where my body always calmed down, like it understood what it was built for even when my mind was still catching up.

I aimed for his shoulder. Not to kill. Just to wound him badly enough that his forces would have to pull back. A weakened Alpha meant a scattered army, and a scattered army was one that couldn't march on WhiteMoon in seven days.

That was the plan, and a good one at that.

I let the arrow fly.

For half a second the world went completely still. Then Asher staggered forward with a sharp sound that was more surprise than pain, and the entire camp exploded.

I was already running.

I didn't look back. I didn't have to. I could hear them, boots hitting the ground behind me, shouts ricocheting off the trees. I threw the cloak off as I hit the forest because it would only slow me down, and I ran the way I used to run as a kid when Stephen chased me through the packhouse hallways.

Except this time I wasn't scared.

I was flying.

I vaulted over a root, ducked under a low branch, and cut left toward the second creek where the ground would be harder to track. Behind me the shouts were growing more distant. They didn't know this forest the way I did. They were larger, heavier, trained for open combat, not threading through trees in the dark.

I kept running until the sound of them faded completely. Until the only thing I could hear was my own breath and the creek rushing somewhere below me and the quiet, ordinary sound of birds starting up their morning calls like nothing had happened at all.

I stopped at the base of a wide oak and pressed my back against it, chest heaving.

My hands were still steady.

I looked down at them for a moment, almost surprised. Then I pushed off the tree and started the long walk back toward WhiteMoon. 

I had shot the most feared Alpha in the region and gotten out alive.

I just didn't know yet what it was going to cost me.