Chapter 5

Point of view: Wren

“Wrong sister,” a voice hissed against my ear, cold and amused, right before something sharp bit into my shoulder. “Did you really think no one would notice?”

I had gone out walking alone, against every warning Briar’s absence and common sense should have given me, simply because the walls of the Ashborn keep had started to feel like a cage built specifically around my lie. The training grounds near the eastern woods were empty at dusk, or so I had thought, right up until a shape dropped down from the tree line behind me, gloved hand clamping over my mouth before I could shout.

I fought the way Briar and I used to practice as children, elbow back, heel down hard on an instep, twisting free enough to see my attacker for half a second, a masked figure, human shaped but moving wrong, too fast, too silent, a blade in one hand that caught the last of the sunset with an unnatural, silvery gleam.

Silver. My stomach dropped even as I scrambled backward. Silver was not a weapon anyone carried by accident.

“Who are you,” I managed, voice shaking.

“Someone who knows exactly what you are,” the figure said, closing the distance again, “even if you don’t yet.”

The blade caught my shoulder as I twisted away, a thin burning line of pain unlike anything I had ever felt, hot and wrong in a way that made my vision swim. I heard myself cry out, and somewhere past the ringing in my ears, I heard something else, a sound like the whole forest inhaling at once.

Kade arrived before I even saw him move, a blur of motion that slammed into my attacker with enough force to send them both crashing through the underbrush, and then there was snarling, low and vicious, nothing human left in the sound at all. I pressed my hand to my burning shoulder and watched, half in horror and half in something closer to awe, as Kade fought with a speed and control that made every story I had ever heard about Alpha strength feel suddenly, completely real.

The masked figure broke free, throwing something small and metallic that Kade knocked aside with his forearm, and then they were gone, vanishing into the tree line faster than either of us could follow, leaving nothing behind but the silver blade, abandoned in the dirt, and the sound of Kade’s ragged breathing as he turned back toward me.

“You’re bleeding,” he said, already crossing the distance between us.

“I noticed.”

“That’s silver,” he said, crouching to examine my shoulder without asking permission, hands surprisingly gentle for someone who had just torn through the woods like a storm. “It won’t kill you, but it burns worse than it looks, and it doesn’t heal clean unless someone treats it properly. Can you walk?”

I could, barely, leaning more of my weight against him than I wanted to admit as he half carried me back toward the keep, bypassing the main halls for a smaller side entrance, clearly avoiding an audience for reasons I understood without asking.

He sat me on the edge of a table in what turned out to be his own private quarters, gathering supplies with the efficient calm of someone who had done this before, for himself or for others, more times than he probably wanted to count.

“This is going to hurt,” he warned, cleaning the wound with something that stung sharply enough to make me hiss through my teeth.

“Everything about tonight has hurt,” I said. “Might as well be consistent.”

That earned me the faintest ghost of a smile, gone almost before it arrived. “You have a talent for finding the worst possible moment for humor.”

“Comes from years of practice being the Omega nobody expected to say anything worth listening to.”

His hands stilled on my shoulder for a second, something shifting in his expression, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped lower, rougher. “I’m starting to think that pack of yours never had any idea what they had.”

The air between us went thin and charged, the same pull from the courtyard humming louder now with him this close, his hands still resting against my skin, his eyes tracking down to my mouth and back up like a man fighting something he had already half lost. I felt myself lean in, just slightly, before either of us could think better of it.

A sharp knock at the door broke the moment apart like glass.

“Kade.” Ronan’s voice, tight and urgent, through the wood. “You need to see this. Now.”

Kade closed his eyes for one long breath before stepping back, putting distance between us with visible effort, and opened the door. Ronan stepped inside holding the silver blade wrapped carefully in cloth, expression grim in a way I had not seen from him yet.

“There’s a mark on the hilt,” Ronan said, unwrapping it just enough to show a symbol etched into the metal, an old, worn crest neither of us recognized at first glance. “I’ve only seen this mark once before, in my grandfather’s records. It belonged to a pack that was supposedly wiped out during the Blood Moon War.”

My whole body went cold.

“Which pack,” Kade asked, though something in his voice told me he already suspected the answer.

Ronan looked at me, not at Kade, when he finally said it.

“The Vane pack. The same one your father blames for starting the war that killed your mother. And whoever just attacked Wren was carrying their blade like it still belonged to them.”