Chapter 4

I knew the moment everything began to change.

It was morning, the sun cutting weak light through the cabin windows, and the girls were supposed to be playing with their wooden blocks near the hearth. I had my back turned, hands deep in a basin of water, scrubbing the soot from their clothes. Then it happened.

A sharp sound. A thud. Arinya’s laugh bright and fierce, too fierce for a child her age.

I turned. And for one breath, my heart stopped.

Her eyes flashed. Not brown. Not the warm honey I had looked into since she was born. Gold. Bright as fire.

I dropped the cloth in my hands. My fingers trembled. “Arinya…”

She blinked, confused, the gold fading back to her usual gaze. She tilted her head like she didn’t understand. “Mama? Did I do something wrong?”

“No,” I whispered too fast, too sharp. I forced a smile, but I could feel my pulse racing under my skin. “No, love. Just… be gentle. With your sister.”

She frowned but nodded, going back to her game.

But my knees shook. My mouth went dry. It was here. The thing I had prayed would never happen. The truth was finding its way out through my daughter’s body. Her wolf was waking.

And if her wolf was waking, the world would notice.

By midday, I could already feel the stares.

Heavenbrook was small, too small. A town where secrets rotted faster than fruit left on the windowsill. I took the girls to market, basket on my hip, head bowed. But I could hear them.

“She’s odd, that woman. Never goes to the town feasts.”

“And those children… always quiet, always staring.”

“I saw the older one push a boy twice her size. Sent him crying.”

I gripped the basket tighter, my smile fixed when I greeted the baker. But his wife didn’t smile back. Her eyes lingered too long on Arinya. On Lyssara’s pale face and wandering gaze.

It spread like smoke. The sense that we didn’t belong. That maybe we weren’t safe to have here.

And they weren’t wrong.

That night, when the girls were asleep, I sat by the fire with their tiny shoes drying near the flame. My chest felt too heavy to hold the truth inside anymore. My thoughts dragged me back to the moment everything began the moment I knew I carried them.

I had been alone then, far from Ironclaw, far from the packs. My body sore, my heart still raw from the night that never left me. I remember pressing my hand to my stomach, the sick roll of fear when I realized what it meant.

Two lives. Not one. Two.

I cried until my throat was raw. Not because I didn’t want them, but because I knew the world wouldn’t want them. Half blood. Half shadow. Children born of a night that wasn’t supposed to happen.

I thought of going back, begging for mercy. But mercy had never been given to me, not once. Not when I failed to shift. Not when I tried to belong. And I knew what they would do to me, and to the children inside me.

So I ran. I ran until my lungs burned and my feet bled. I chose the only road left: hide them. Hide myself. Let the world believe I had vanished, because in a way, I had.

But now… their bloodline was revealing itself. And Heavenbrook was too small to keep it hidden.

The next day, I found Lyssara sitting outside with a piece of charcoal, scratching on old scraps of paper. She didn’t draw flowers or trees like other children. She drew circles within circles, lines that bent and twisted like something alive. Symbols. Marks I had seen once before.

“Where did you learn this?” I asked her.

She looked up, eyes heavy, like she was older than she should be. “I don’t know. They come in my head. When I sleep.”

I swallowed hard. The firelight of the past burned in my mind sneaking into the Ironclaw library when I was a girl, my fingers brushing forbidden scrolls. I remembered a prophecy, words half-crumbled, half-whispered:

A child of shadow and light will tear the chains. Blood moon will call, and the packs will break.

I hadn’t understood it then. I don't want to understand it now.

But when I looked at Lyssara’s drawings, and thought of Arinya’s golden eyes… I knew the prophecy was walking in my house.

I didn’t hear them. Not yet. But if I closed my eyes, I could almost feel them. Three presences, heavy as storms, circling closer through the forest.

Kaelor would want to talk, to reason, to ask me why. His voice had always been calm, a scar cutting across the words but never dulling them.

Rhydan would not want to talk at all. He would want to break the door down, demand answers, claim what he thought was his. His temper was fire, and fire didn’t ask before burning.

And Draven… he would already be calculating. Watching the town, watching me, planning every step. He was always the shadow in the corner of the firelight, the one I could never quite read until it was too late.

They were different men, but bound by the same thing. Bound to me. Bound to the children they didn’t even know existed.

And now they are here. I felt it in my bones, in the tight pull of the air at night.

It was late when I came home from the diner again, the girls trailing sleepily beside me. The path was darker than usual, the trees whispering with wind.

When I reached the cabin, my chest turned to ice.

The door.

Long, deep claw marks carved into the wood. Not shallow scratches from wild beasts. No, these were deliberate. Three lines, slashed with strength, as if to say: We know. We are coming.

Arinya gasped, clutching my skirt. Lyssara only stared, her fingers twitching like she wanted to draw the marks herself.

My hands shook as I pushed them inside, bolting the door, pulling the girls into the safety of the firelight. But there was no safety left. Not really.

I sat with them in my arms, the cabin walls pressing in. My heart hammered as the night deepened, as the howl rose from the pines. Low, long, haunting.

I whispered into their hair, voice breaking. “He’s here.”

No. Not him.

They.