Chapter 6

The Lycan Everyone Fears

Xavier ate alone most nights, and most nights, that suited him fine.

The eastern hall emptied out around him the way it always did once his presence was known, not through any order he gave, never that, but through the quiet, practiced instinct of wolves who had learned, over years, exactly how much space to leave a Lycan they didn't fully understand.

He was halfway through his meal when the council's second, a steady old wolf named Farron, took the seat across from him without asking. Not many did that either.

"You look like a man doing math he doesn't like the answer to," Farron said.

"Border reports."

"They're not good."

"They're not good." Xavier set down his cup. Two rival packs to the east had spent the last month testing Silver City's patrol routes, small incursions, nothing that demanded open conflict yet, but the kind of probing that always preceded something larger. "Whoever's behind it is patient. That's the part I don't like. Patient means planned."

"You think it's coordinated."

"I think someone's counting on Silver City being seen as an easy target because we take in strays other packs discard. They're wrong. But it'll cost us to prove it."

They spoke a while longer about supply lines and patrol rotations, and Xavier let the conversation carry him through the rest of the meal the way he let most conversations carry him, present, competent, thoroughly somewhere else.

Being a Lycan meant being alone in ways most wolves never had to understand. Rarer than any Alpha, stronger than most packs combined, and permanently outside the ordinary run of pack life that everyone else took for granted, mating, bonding, belonging to something that didn't require them to hold the whole structure up by themselves. He had made his peace with that a long time ago, or told himself he had, often enough that most days he almost believed it.

New kitchen staff moved through the hall as the meal wound down, clearing plates with quiet efficiency. He paid them the same attention he paid furniture, until one of them came close enough to reach for his cup and something happened that had not happened to him in longer than he could remember.

The air changed.

It wasn't scent, not exactly, though scent was part of it, something clean and unfamiliar cutting through the hall's usual smell of woodsmoke and roasted meat. It was underneath that. A pull, sudden and absolute, low in his chest, like a hook setting into something he hadn't known was hollow until this exact moment. He looked up.

She was young, tired-looking in the particular way of someone who'd recently survived something and hadn't fully recovered from surviving it. Dark hair pulled back plainly. Nothing about her, on the surface, marked her as anything other than one more stray who'd wandered through Silver City's gate looking for shelter. And yet.

She reached for his empty cup, murmured some automatic apology for the interruption, and their fingers brushed for less than a second before she withdrew, oblivious, already moving on to the next table.

Xavier sat very still.

"You've gone pale," Farron said, watching him with sudden, sharp attention. "What is it?"

"Nothing." The word came out rougher than he intended.

It was not nothing. He knew, with a certainty that made no sense and refused, stubbornly, to care that it made no sense, exactly what he had just felt. He had heard of it,  every wolf had, in old stories told around fires, the kind of story meant more as caution than comfort. A bond, breaking somewhere far from here, recently enough that the echo of it still clung to her like smoke. And beneath it, impossibly, the first threads of a new one, reaching for him specifically, out of every wolf in that hall.

Lycans didn't rebond. It wasn't a rule so much as a fact, immovable as gravity, something no one in his life had ever suggested might not apply to him.

He watched her move to the next table, unaware, and felt something in his chest that he did not have a name for and was not at all certain he wanted one for.

"Farron." His voice came out steadier than he felt. "That kitchen girl. Find out who she is."

Farron followed his gaze, clearly puzzled by the request, clearly deciding not to ask why. "I'll have it by morning."

"Tonight," Xavier said. "I want it tonight."

He didn't wait for Farron's agreement before rising from the table, his meal forgotten, his mind already circling a question he had spent his entire adult life certain he would never have reason to ask.

What if the stories were wrong.