Chapter 3: What Nobody Explains

Maren put me to work before I’d fully woken up the next morning, which I understood later was its own kind of kindness … nobody at Thorneheart seemed to believe idle hands helped anyone heal.

“Training grounds are through there,” she said, nodding toward a cleared yard behind the hall where a dozen wolves were already sparring in the cold morning light. “You don’t have to join today. Or ever, if it’s not for you. But breakfast’s in twenty minutes either way, so you might as well watch.”

I sat on the fence rail with a mug of something bitter and warm and watched people hit each other with what looked, to my untrained eye, like genuine enthusiasm. Nobody glanced my way. Nobody adjusted their sparring to perform for an audience, the way I remembered Ironwood’s warriors doing whenever pack elders watched.

A girl about my age broke from the group and jogged over, wiping sweat from her jaw with the back of her wrist. “You’re the one Kian brought in last night,” she said, not unkindly. “I’m Petra. You want a real mug of that? What you’ve got looks like it’s been sitting since dawn.”

“I didn’t know there was a fake version.”

“There’s a fresh pot and a pot that’s been fighting for its life since sunrise. You got the second one.” She grinned and took my mug without asking, jogged off toward the hall, and came back a few minutes later with a replacement that was, in fact, considerably better.

“You keep flinching every time someone lands a hit,” a voice said beside me. Kian, holding his own mug, watching the yard instead of me. “You don’t have to. Nobody’s going to ask you to fight today.”

“I’m not flinching because I’m scared of the fighting.”

“I know.” He didn’t push further, which I was grateful for.

Maren called a break an hour later and crossed the yard toward us, sweat-damp and unbothered by it. “You want to try something small? Not sparring. Just footwork, see how you carry weight when you move.”

“I don’t have training.”

“Didn’t ask if you had training. Asked if you wanted to try.”

I said yes before I’d fully decided to, mostly because saying no felt like agreeing with every voice in my head that had ever told me this wasn’t a thing my body was for.

The footwork drill was simple … shifting weight side to side, low stance, nothing that should have been difficult. I overcorrected twice, stumbled once, and Kian caught my arm before I hit the fence post … not the wood, this time. His hand.

The moment his fingers closed around my wrist, something jolted up my arm, sharp and hot, entirely unlike an ordinary touch. I gasped before I could stop myself. Kian went rigid beside me, his own breath catching audibly, his grip tightening for one unguarded second before he forced himself to loosen it.

“You felt that,” I said. It wasn’t really a question.

“I felt that.” His voice had gone rough. He was staring at his own hand, still hovering near my wrist, like it belonged to someone else. “That’s not … that’s not a thing that happens. Not from an ordinary touch.”

Right over the place where the bond-mark sat, I realized. Right where his palm had landed.

Neither of us moved for a long moment, the training yard’s noise fading into something distant and unimportant around us. His eyes found mine, and whatever he saw there made his jaw tighten.

“Kian…

“I know.” His voice was barely above a whisper. “I don’t have an explanation. I’m not going to pretend I do.”

Maren’s voice cut through the moment before either of us could say anything else. “Do that again,” she called from a few yards off, oblivious to what had just happened, already crouching by the fence post I’d nearly hit. “Grab the post. Like you just did.”

I forced myself to move, self-conscious, my pulse still loud in my ears. The wood groaned under my palm.

Maren examined the grain. “That’s old oak. Reinforced. My own second couldn’t leave a mark on that without shifting first.”

“I didn’t shift.”

“I know.” She stood, and there was something new in how she looked at me now … recalculating a number she’d been given wrong the first time. “How long have you been doing that? Leaving marks on things you didn’t mean to?”

“I don’t know. I always thought I was just clumsy. My mother used to say I didn’t know my own strength, but she meant it as a criticism.”

“It’s not a criticism,” Maren said. “It’s a data point.”

Across the yard, Dorian had stopped sparring entirely, watching us with an expression I couldn’t place. “Maren,” he said, low. “A word.”

They stepped a few paces off, close enough that I caught fragments … old signs, if she’s what I think she is … and far enough that I couldn’t ask what any of it meant.

Kian hadn’t moved from beside me. When I glanced at him, he was still watching his own hand, flexing his fingers slowly.

“Whatever that was,” he said quietly, only for me, “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it happened the same week Dorian’s gone quiet twice over what you might be.”

“You think it’s connected. Whatever’s in me and whatever just happened between us.”

“I think,” he said, choosing the words with obvious care, “that I’ve never in my life felt anything like that from touching another person. And I think I’m not ready to say out loud what I suspect it means, because if I’m wrong, I don’t want to have handed you a hope you didn’t ask for. But I don’t think I’m wrong.”

Petra fell into step beside me on the way to breakfast, oblivious to everything that had just passed between us. “Dorian doesn’t stop training for nothing,” she said. “Whatever he thinks he just saw, he’s seen something like it before, and it wasn’t good news the first time either.”

“Do you know what he’s talking about?”

“No. But I know Dorian doesn’t use the word want like that. Packs don’t want to know things unless whatever it is changes who holds power.”

I barely heard her. My wrist was still warm where Kian had touched it, and some reckless, unguarded part of me was already wondering what would happen if he touched it again.

I ate breakfast at a long table full of strangers who asked my name and moved on to ordinary conversation, like I’d told them something ordinary too. Kian sat across from me instead of beside me, which I understood, without either of us saying it, as a kind of careful distance … neither of us fully trusting what our hands might do if they ended up close enough to test the theory twice.

Maren came back partway through the meal, her expression carefully smoothed into something neutral that didn’t fool me at all. She didn’t say what she and Dorian had discussed. Neither did he, though he watched me for the rest of breakfast with an expression that had shifted, overnight, from caution to something closer to reverence, which frightened me more than the caution had.

“You’re staring,” Kian said, low, when he caught me watching Dorian watch me back.

“So are you. At your own hand, mostly, since the training yard.”

That got the ghost of a smile out of him, brief and startled, like I’d caught him at something. “Guilty.” He turned his palm over on the table between us, not quite an invitation, not quite anything else either … just an offering, there if I wanted it. “I keep thinking about it. Wondering if it’ll happen again if I try.”

I looked at his hand for a long moment, my own pulse loud enough that I was certain he could hear it in the quiet space between us.

I didn’t reach for it. Not yet. But I wanted to, badly enough that the wanting itself felt like its own kind of answer … one neither of us was ready to say out loud, not with Dorian’s careful, reverent eyes still tracking every move I made from across the room.