Chapter 2

They don't put her in chains.

Selena expects them, braces for the cold bite of iron around her wrists the entire ride out of Veyne territory, and it never comes. Instead a cloak lands over her shoulders, rough wool that smells of woodsmoke and someone else's sweat. A guard drops it without a word, without meeting her eyes, like he can't decide if she's a prisoner or something else and would rather not find out today. She's given a horse of her own instead of being slung over a saddle like cargo. There's silence, mostly, cut through by the creak of wagon wheels behind her, carrying whatever's left of her people.

She counts them as the caravan moves. Forty-three.

Forty-three faces she's known her whole life, wrapped in blankets that aren't theirs, staring at nothing.

Her father commanded thousands.

The Blackthorn territory announces itself before the castle ever comes into view. The trees thicken, grow older, the kind of forest left alone for a century because nobody was foolish enough to test whoever claimed it. Then the wall. Stone, high, patrolled — but bare. No skulls mounted along the top. No trophies. Nothing that matches the stories she grew up hearing about the boy who burns kingdoms.

She hates that she notices. Hates that some traitor part of her keeps a running tally of every place the stories don't match the reality in front of her, building a case for something she refuses to name.

Kael doesn't ride beside her. He's somewhere ahead, near the front of the column, and she only catches glimpses of his back — straight-shouldered, unhurried, a man who's never once needed to check over his shoulder.

She hates that too. Files it away with everything else.

The room they give her isn't a cell.

That's the first thing she registers when the door shuts behind her — no bars, an actual bed with actual blankets that don't smell like mildew. A window, unbarred. She stands in front of it a long time, half expecting a guard to burst in the moment she touches the latch.

Nobody comes.

She opens it anyway, just to prove she can, and the cold air that rushes in smells like pine and far-off rain. Nothing like home.

A knock startles her out of the thought. She doesn't answer fast enough, and the door opens anyway — a girl about her own age, apron dusted with flour, a tray balanced on one hip.

She sets it down without asking. "Eat. Alpha's orders."

Selena doesn't move. "I'm not hungry."

The girl doesn't argue. Doesn't linger either. She's already at the door by the time she says the last of it, not even turning around. "Starving yourself won't punish anyone but you."

The door clicks shut behind her.

Selena stares at the tray a long time. Bread, still warm. A bowl of something that smells almost exactly like her grandmother used to make, back before the fire, back before all of it.

She eats standing up. Refuses to sit. As if that single, stupid act of stubbornness is the last piece of her father's kingdom she has left to defend.

Kael finds the report on his desk an hour after the caravan settles — Rhen's handwriting, cramped and fast in the margins. Forty-three survivors housed. No injuries beyond what the fight itself caused. The girl, Selena, refused an escort and walked to her room alone, chin up the whole way, like she expected an ambush around every corner.

He isn't surprised. He remembers exactly how she looked at him in the courtyard — ash in her hair, bare feet on freezing stone, refusing to be the one who flinched first.

He'd almost respected her for it, standing over her father's body.

Almost.

Rhen finds him still at the desk near midnight, the report untouched beside him, Kael's eyes fixed on nothing. Rhen is the only person alive in this second life who knows what Kael actually is — not just Alpha, not just the boy the pack elders raised from a pup they thought had no past worth mentioning. Rhen is the only one who knows there was a first life at all. A first death. A friend who smiled while he poured poison into Kael's cup and called it loyalty right up until the end.

Nobody else in the castle knows. Not the elders. Not Kael's own cousin. Rhen carries that secret the way you carry something heavy enough to break your back if you set it down wrong, and he has never once asked Kael to explain more than what he's been given.

"You should sleep," Rhen says.

"I don't."

"You should try." He leans in the doorway, arms crossed, the weight of old, careful friendship in the way he doesn't bother pretending this is an ordinary conversation. "It's done. Darius is dead. You got what you came for."

Kael doesn't answer right away. Somewhere in the east wing, forty-three people who used to belong to another man are trying to sleep in beds that don't smell like theirs. One girl in particular is probably still awake, hating him with everything she has left.

There's a version of himself, somewhere back in his first life, who would have found that satisfying.

He isn't sure he finds anything satisfying anymore.

"It's not done," he says finally.

Rhen goes still, reading something in his face that makes the easy posture fall away. "There's more."

"There's always more." Kael looks up, and whatever Rhen sees there makes him straighten off the doorframe entirely. "Darius didn't teach himself how to poison a friend, Rhen. Someone taught him. Same someone who set our fathers against each other before either of us was old enough to understand what a border dispute even was."

The words sit heavy between them, an old wound neither of them has found the nerve to reopen since Kael's eighteenth birthday, since the memories came back all at once and nearly put him on the floor.

"You think whoever it was is still out there."

"I know they are." Kael's jaw tightens, the calm cracking just enough to show what's underneath — old, tired, and furious in a way that has nothing to do with tonight. "And now they're going to find out I didn't stay dead."