Chapter 5: Nerve

Layla's POV

From my window, the banquet hall glowed across the courtyard. Music and laughter poured from every lit window. Three hundred wolves celebrating Aurora Thorne's eighteenth birthday with food and wine they didn't know I'd paid for.

On my side of the estate, the east wing sat dark and empty. Two guards patrolled the grounds below in a lazy circuit. Father never wasted manpower guarding the daughter who didn't matter. Not even to keep her locked in.

I stripped off the banquet dress and pulled on the clothes I'd worn from the border. Dark pants, fitted jacket, flat boots with soles worn soft from years of forest running. The dress pooled on the floor like a shed skin.

The window latch was old. One sharp twist and it gave.

I dropped into the shadows below, landed silent, and pressed my back against the stone wall. The guards' footsteps crunched past twenty feet away. I counted their rhythm, waited for the corner turn, and moved.

Three months of playing the quiet daughter hadn't erased what the border built. I knew how to disappear. I'd earned the name Phantom long before Night Veil made it official.

The east wall was low, an old section they'd never reinforced because nobody attacked from the forest side. I cleared it in two moves and hit the treeline at a sprint.

Pine and dirt and cold air sharp enough to sting. The border smells flooded my lungs, and something deeper stirred. Something clawing at my chest since the moment I opened my eyes in that banquet hall.

My wolf.

She'd been awake all night. Snarling beneath my skin when Kaelen appeared. Pulling at my bones during the phone call with Brenna. I'd held her down. Not inside the estate, not surrounded by enemies.

Now there was no one. Just trees and darkness and open ground.

I let go.

The shift hit like a wall of fire. Every bone cracked and reformed. Muscles tore and rewove. Then the pain stopped. Replaced by power.

Raw. Ferocious. Alive.

My paws hit the earth and I ran.

In my first life, I'd never shifted. I gave my wolf to Aurora before I ever had the chance. Back on the border, I'd watched Brenna and the fighters run in wolf form, all speed and raw joy, while I trailed behind on two human legs, longing for the world they saw through wolf eyes.

Now I knew. Everything.

The trees blurred past. Wind tore through my fur. I could smell every creature, every stream, every territorial marker within a mile.

The clock in the back of my mind counted down.

I smelled the convoy before I saw it. Horse sweat, iron, leather. The Lycan King's carriage appeared on the road below the ridge, three vehicles flanked by mounted guards, royal banners catching moonlight.

I broke from the treeline and sprinted for the road. The guards reacted instantly. Shouts went up, spears lowered, a crossbow swung toward me.

"Halt! Stand down or we—"

The arrow came from above.

Not from the guards. From the ridge, the assassin's shot.

I leaped. My jaws caught the shaft, wrenching it sideways. But the arrowhead carried too much force and punched through the carriage window. Glass shattered inward.

My blood went cold. I spun around, bracing for the worst. The arrow had buried itself in the interior wall, six inches to the left of his head.

It had missed.

And then I saw his face.

The breath left my lungs.

Valerius.

He was younger than I remembered. Sharper. He didn't look hollowed out yet. He sat in the ruined carriage with glass in his hair and an arrow in the wall beside him, and his face was all calculation.

My chest seized. The last time I'd seen that face, it was raw with exhaustion and fury.

The memories hit in fragments.

His guards pulling me from the burning wreckage of that car. Three years in his shadow, watching him fight something inside himself that wasn't rage — not yet. The way he'd sit alone past midnight, gripping the armrest until his knuckles went white, holding himself together through sheer will.

And the last conversation. He sat motionless behind his desk when I told him I was leaving.

Where do you get the nerve to resign from me?

I told him he knew he couldn't keep me.

Then the explosion. Books swept off the shelf, glass shattering against stone, a chair leg cracking on the floor. "Then go!" he snapped. "Get out!"

I picked up the books. Set the chair upright. Swept the glass into the bin. He watched me from the shadows, saying nothing, until the room looked like nothing had happened.

Then, so quiet I almost missed it: You can always come back.

My family had never given me a place I belonged. But the Mad King, the one the whole kingdom feared, told me I could always come back.

I'd almost stayed. The plan was simple: visit home, see my family, return within the week.

I never imagined those would be the last words between us.

But he was alive. Unharmed. Twenty-three and sharp-eyed and whole. Before the madness. Before the kingdom broke him. Before everything.

I stared too long. The adrenaline drained and the shift reversed. Bones snapped back. Fur receded. I was standing on the road in human form, barefoot, my clothes torn from the transformation.

Guards surged forward. Valerius raised one hand, and they froze.

He stepped out of the carriage, crossed the distance in three strides, and caught my arm. His grip was iron. His eyes swept over me, the torn jacket, bare feet, scratches from running through branches, and I recognized the look behind them. Not concern. Assessment. A king sizing up a problem.

"Why are you here." Not a question.

He didn't know me. Three years I'd spent at his side, and he looked at me like a stranger.

The sting cut deeper than it should have. I crushed it flat.

"I came to stop the assassination." My voice came out steadier than I'd expected. "There are more shooters on the ridge. I know their employer."

His gaze didn't waver. The full weight of the Lycan King's attention pressed down like a physical force. I'd felt it before, in another life. My wolf pressed against my ribs, urging me to bare my throat.

I didn't.

"I want to negotiate," I said. "I have intelligence you need. In exchange, I want an alliance."

His hand left my arm and caught my jaw instead. Fingers pressed into the hollows beneath my cheekbones, tilting my face up.

He leaned in, close enough that I could count the gold flecks in his irises, close enough to feel his breath on my skin. Every instinct I had screamed danger.

He studied me for a long time. Then the corner of his mouth shifted. Not a smile. Something colder. Something that reminded me of the man he would become.

"Where do you get the nerve," he said, "to negotiate with a king — Layla Thorne?"

The ground tilted under my feet.

He knew my name.

This Valerius, the one who'd never pulled me from a fire, never shared three years of midnight conversations, never watched me leave, knew my name.

How?

My heart slammed against my ribs.

Unless he remembered. Unless he'd been reborn, like me.