Chapter Four: The King's Hunt

Cassian’s POV

"Three sets of tracks, maybe four." Rowan crouched low near the tree line, one hand pressed flat against the disturbed earth. "Moving fast. They know we're close."

"Then we move faster." I scanned the mist ahead of us, the Mooncrest border barely visible through the gray haze. "I want the poachers alive if possible. Someone's paying them to hunt this territory, and I want to know who."

"And if they're not cooperative?"

"Then I want them alive long enough to become cooperative."

Rowan huffed something like a laugh and rose to his feet. "Careful, Cassian. Almost sounded like patience, coming from you."

"Don't get used to it."

We moved through the mist together, silent, the way we'd learned to move since we were boys training under men twice our size. Ten years on this throne had taught me plenty about patience I didn't have as a younger man — patience with corrupt Alphas, patience with a Council that fought me on every decision, patience with a kingdom that still didn't fully trust a King who'd taken his crown from a battlefield instead of a bloodline ceremony.

Poachers stealing pack livestock along a border I didn't even govern, though. That patience ran thinner.

"There." Rowan's voice dropped to almost nothing. Ahead, through a gap in the trees, three figures moved low and fast, dragging something heavy between them.

I signaled left. Rowan peeled off right without a sound, and we closed the gap together, boots silent against the wet ground.

That was when the scent hit me.

I stopped walking entirely.

"Cassian?" Rowan's voice, low, questioning, somewhere behind me now. I'd lost track of exactly where.

I didn't answer. I couldn't, not right away, because every instinct I had — every instinct my wolf had — had just gone very, very still, and then very, very loud all at once.

Floral. Moonlit. Something underneath both of those things that I had no word for, something that made my chest tighten and my pulse slam harder than any fight I'd walked into in years.

"Cassian." Rowan again, closer now, a hand on my shoulder. "What is it?"

"You don't smell that?"

"Smell what?"

I turned my head slowly, following the scent instead of the tracks we'd been hunting, and my wolf surged forward so hard against my control that I nearly stumbled.

Mate.

The word rose up from somewhere ancient and instinctive, somewhere I hadn't accessed in ten years of searching, ten years of half believing the bond simply wasn't meant for me.

"I don't smell anything unusual," Rowan said, frowning, his hand tightening on my shoulder like he thought I might bolt. Which, to be fair, I very nearly did. "Cassian, talk to me."

"Something's close." My voice came out rougher than I meant it to, my wolf's instincts bleeding into my own. "Someone."

"The poachers?"

"No." I shook my head, trying to separate my own thoughts from the roaring insistence underneath them. "Not the poachers."

Rowan studied my face for a long moment, and whatever he saw there made him go very still. "Cassian. Is this—"

"I don't know," I said, before he could finish the question. "I've never felt anything like this before."

"Then let's find out."

We abandoned the poachers' trail entirely. I told myself it was strategic, that whatever this scent meant might matter more than livestock thieves, but the truth was simpler and far less dignified — my wolf had made the decision for me the moment that scent reached us, and I was simply following where it led.

The mist thickened as we moved deeper toward the border markers, and the scent grew stronger with every step, floral and moonlit and utterly unlike anything I'd encountered in thirty years of life. My wolf clawed against my control, desperate to run ahead, to reach whatever waited at the source of it.

"Easy," Rowan murmured beside me, though I wasn't sure if he was talking to me or to himself. "Whatever this is, we don't know what we're walking into."

"I know."

"Do you? Because you look about two seconds from shifting mid-stride."

He wasn't wrong. I forced my breathing to slow, forced my wolf back from the surface even as every instinct screamed to abandon caution entirely.

Then I heard the howls.

Three of them, maybe four, rising from somewhere close to the border itself, deliberate and circling. Not the poachers' careless movement from before. Something coordinated. Something hunting.

"That's not us," Rowan said sharply, already breaking into a run.

I didn't answer. I was already moving, faster than I'd moved in years, my wolf and I finally, completely aligned on a single, overwhelming purpose.

The scent led us through the last stretch of mist, past the mossy stone pillars marking Mooncrest's border, into a small clearing at the tree line beyond.

And there, collapsed at the base of an old oak, half-hidden beneath a plain gray cloak that clearly wasn't hers, lay a woman.

"Cassian." Rowan's voice again, but I barely heard him. I was already moving, already crossing the clearing, already crouching beside her before conscious thought caught up with instinct.

Silver-black hair spilled across the fallen leaves, tangled and damp with mist. Her face was pale, drawn tight with exhaustion even in unconsciousness, and just below her collarbone, visible where the cloak had shifted, a raw, angry mark burned dark against her skin.

A rejection mark. Fresh. Painfully fresh.

"Is she alive?" Rowan crouched beside me, scanning the tree line warily, one hand still on the hilt of his blade.

I pressed two fingers against her throat, and the moment I touched her, every instinct I had roared to life at once, louder and more certain than anything I'd felt in my entire life.

Mate. Mate. Mate.

"She's alive," I said, my voice unrecognizable even to myself. "Barely, but she's alive."

"Cassian, whatever's making those howling sounds is getting closer."

I barely registered the warning. My hands hovered over her, some ancient instinct warning me not to move her carelessly, another instinct entirely — one I'd never felt before tonight — screaming at me to gather her against my chest and never let go.

"Cassian." Rowan's voice, sharper now, urgent. "Whoever's hunting her is closing in. We need to move, now."

I looked up, finally, and saw shapes moving through the mist at the clearing's edge — deliberate, coordinated, closing the distance with predatory patience.

My wolf, already unsteady from the discovery of a mate I'd never expected to find, surged forward with a fury I barely recognized as my own.

Whoever was hunting this woman had made a fatal miscalculation tonight.

They just didn't know it yet.