....

Pain exploded like glass inside my knees and I fell forward, hands scraping the dirt. Rowan’s cry was muffled by the flow of my own blood. Everything narrowed to one bright line: the rope biting into flesh, the net tightening, hands reaching.

They dragged us both to the clearing. The lantern light painted everyone in ugly colors, the men who’d trapped us were not the Alpha’s hunters; their sigils were different — a crooked hand clutching a knife. Rogues, then, or mercenaries on the pack’s payroll. The distinction didn’t make me feel safer.

“Pack law,” one of them said with a grin that showed broken teeth. “You harbor rogues, you forfeit your place. Maybe you’ll buy your life with a secret.”

“How dare you—” Rowan spat, fierce as a blade. He was half-limping, one shoulder already reddened with a bruise. “You don’t get t-"

“You sheltered him,” the leader cut in. He turned to me and his eyes glanced along me like a measuring rod. “You thought you could hide him.”

“If you hurt her—” Rowan’s voice was a thin thing, weak and injured

The leader laughed and reached for my wrist. “We’ll let the Alpha decide.” The words should have been final, but before they could move I heard the crack of a whip and a commanding voice-

“Kellan!”

He arrived like weather — arriving is not the right word; he tore into the clearing with the kind of calm fury that announces itself in the bones. The men who’d captured us staggered back as if a wall had moved them. Kellan’s eyes were intense with rage. His hand landed on the leader’s shoulder with a force that would have broken a lesser man.

“You have no right,” Kellan said, voice low and lethal. “You carry the mark of Ravencroft’s mercs, you camp on our borders without permission.”

The leader tried to laugh and the sound died. “Alpha heir,” he muttered. “We do as we wish.”

“Not while I breathe,” Kellan said. He turned to me, for one small, impossible moment his face was soft and weary with something like regret. “Ivy, go back to the house, do not leave again, now go.”

Rowan’s hand was in my sightline and he squeezed it hard. “I will not leave her,” he said.

Kellan’s jaw clenched; “You will be taken to the healer and then released on the border,” he said. “If you are a rogue, you will be dealt with according to law.” He said commanding

“You’re sending me away?” Rowan’s voice broke. “You saved her from your pack and now you will send me away?”

Kellan’s eyes flicked to Rowan, then to me. “You should not have been here.” His voice held more than guilt; it held a calculus I could not parse. “Rowan — do not come within sight of the pack again.”

Rowan’s face went pale, as if some inner spring had been cut. “I did not ask for mercy,” he said. “I asked for safety.”

“Mercy is a rare coin,” Kellan said, jaw clenched. He looked at me once more, and this time his face hardened. “Ivy, if I find you keeping rogues or consorting with them, I will remove you from the pack.” He said with a commanding and somewhat angry tone

“You can’t—” I began, but sweat slicked my palms and the world tilted. Rowan put himself between me and Kellan, hazard and hope binding him.

The pack men muttered; their hands slipped toward weapons. They thought they had a right to take me — to make an example. Kellan stepped forward then, and his shadow fell long and dangerous across the clearing.

“You will take the runner,” he said to the mercs. “And the rogue. But leave her.”

The mercs looked at one another, and, seeing the heir’s face like a wall, lowered their heads. They bound Rowan and dragged him toward the road with a roughness that made my stomach pitch. I felt bad for Rowan,very

“Wait,” I cried out. “Please!”

Rowan’s mouth moved and when he looked at me the expression was small and terrible, like a man holding a secret he knew would break someone. “Keep the blue scrap,” he said, blood hollowed all over his mouth, with a little smile in the pain, that was at same time hot and depressing to see, pressing the small coin back into my palm. “If you go to the river when the moon is quarter-high, you’ll find the bridge unguarded. If they ask who helped you…say nothing.”

The lead merc said something to the others and Kellan’s hand tightened on my shoulder for a moment — a touch that was both comfort and dark ownership. “We’ll watch the border tonight,” he said, low. “And you will stay inside.”

They took Rowan down the road like an excilled dog . The lanterns bobbed and his figure grew smaller and then was swallowed by the dark. I fell to my knees and sobbed, not because I was weak but because a map of my life had been redrawn with one cruel line: the man who had saved me would be gone, by law or by fate.

That night I could not sleep. The hut seemed too small, too thin against the roar of wolves and the louder roar of my own thoughts. I wrapped the blue scrap in oilcloth and slid it under the mattress as if contraband.

At dawn, word spread through the pack: a traveler — one suspected rogue — had been caught on the border. The Alpha had decreed a hearing at dusk. As the day stretched long and colorless, I moved like a ghost through the tasks given to me, hands working but my mind a hawk circling the same thought: Rowan would be punished, or worse; dead!. And fear pressed down on my chest like hammer on nail.

When night came, the square in front of the hall was ringed with faces. The Alpha sat above us like a god in a cloak of scars and silver; his voice rolled across the crowd, practiced and cold. The accused were brought forth, shackled and sullen. Rowan was among them, a dark smear of a man in the alpha’s judgment

Kellan watched the proceedings from the side, jaw like a clenched fist. When the Alpha spoke of law and order, I saw Rowan’s jaw snap, jaw muscles working as he swallowed something that might have been pride, might have been fear.

“Because he was found on our border with stolen goods and unauthorized crossing, I decree he be bound and expelled,” the Alpha shouted. “He will be sent to the north wastes with one day’s food. Let it be a lesson.”

A cheer went up, dull and hungry. Rowan’s eyes flicked to me, and in them I saw the ghost of a promise: that he would return. Or that he would not.

He was shoved out into the night with guards who were not gentle to him. He did not look back. He left me without a goodbye

Something inside me snapped. I moved then, before thought could order me. “Wait!” I cried. “He didn’t— you can’t send him—” My voice was swallowed by the crowd.

Kellan turned and looked at me as if discovering a fact that had been hidden under the name he had given me. He took a step toward me and then stopped, conflict and command warring in his face. “Ivy,” he said quietly, almost private, “this is for your safety.”

“If his life is for my safety, then take mine,” I said. The words surprised even me. They landed like a storm, the crowd’s whispers edged closer.

Kellan’s hand rose. He touched my cheek softly. It was a brief, impossible kindness, then a thing of the world again. “You will not leave the house until dawn,” he ordered.

I should have obeyed. But I didn't

At midnight, blue moonlight sliced across the yard. I wrapped a cloak around my shoulders and crept toward the road where they’d taken Rowan. My ankle throbbed from the cut the net had left; my hands were raw from the day’s chores, but my feet moved like I had been summoned.

On the bridge by the river — the place Rowan had named — someone waited. A figure cloaked in shadow, tall and still, watched me approach.

As I stepped into the moon’s thin edge, the figure moved and the hood fell back.

It was not Rowan.

It was Kellan.

He smiled then, but the smile did not reach his eyes. “I thought of everything but this,” he said softly. “Why did you come?”

“Because you said the bridge would be unguarded,” I lied,

He stepped closer until I could see the fine scar at the corner of his mouth and the way his fingers curled like a fist. “You should not have lied to me,” he whispered.

His hand closed around the blue scrap in my palm before I could pull away. He opened the cloth and his face changed from gentle to something unreadable.

“You know him,” Kellan said.

“I—” I couldn’t finish.

He held the scrap to his face for a beat, then stuffed it into his coat. “Tomorrow,” he said, and when he said it the river behind us seemed to fill with a sound like glass breaking. “Tomorrow, I will tell you what you must do.”

“Do what?” I asked

“Survive,” he said. “And be ready to betray everything you think you know.”

The moon blinked out behind a cloud like an ending. The river dragged the sound of leaves and something else — footsteps — downstream into the dark.