LOGINNerissa POVTraining became the shape of my mornings.Every day at dawn,the lower yard. Just the two of us in the cold grey light before the rest of the fortress found its rhythm for the day. Zayden didn't ease into sessions the way I imagined a patient teacher might. He started from where we ended the day before and pushed further. I stopped expecting anything different after the third day.I started looking forward to it after the fifth.My body ached in places I hadn't known could produce ache and Zayden's standard for what constituted improvement was set at a height that most wolves would have found discouraging.Every morning in that yard I knew exactly what was required of me. Just movement,learning,the cold air and the stone beneath my feet and Zayden's voice telling me what was wrong and how to fix it.Nine days into training I managed the redirect cleanly for the first time with full speed. He came at me and I planted and found the angle. His momentum turned and he went s
Nerissa POVI found out about the training by accident.Kaelor mentioned it in passing the way he mentioned most things. He just dropped it into the space between one thing and the next like it was already decided and the telling was just for formality."Training starts tomorrow," he said. "Dawn at the lower yard."I looked up from the supply crate I was sorting. "For who?""You," he said.Then he walked away.I stood there holding a folded cloth and staring at the space he had just vacated and tried to decide if I had heard him correctly.Mira confirmed it that evening too. "Alpha Zayden's orders," she said. She was helping me re-bandage a small cut I had caught on a supply shelf edge that afternoon. "He told Kaelor two days ago apparently.""He didn't tell me," I said."He told Kaelor,that's how it works here. He decides,and Kaelor executes. The person it concerns finds out somewhere in the middle." She said, "That's not how decisions that affect me should work," I said.Mira ti
Nerissa POVI didn't tell anyone about the word on the floor.I stood in that corridor for a long time after Zayden disappeared up the eastern staircase looking at it. Turning it over in my mind the way you turned something sharp over in your hands, carefully, aware that the wrong angle could cut you.Ashwood,Written in blood on the floor of the lower training hall. By a warrior who had been repeating Red Claw gossip about me casually in the corridor that morning like it was nothing worth keeping to himself.A warrior who had traveled with Alpha Magnus.A warrior who was inside Obsidian Keep right now.I filed it. Locked it into the part of my mind where I kept things that needed more information before they came to conclusions. Then I picked up the linen stack I left on the corridor bench and finished the morning duties and said nothing to anyone.Mira noticed my silence at midday."You're quiet," she said."I'm always quiet," I said."You're quieter than you're quiet," she said.I
Nerissa POVEdna examined me for forty minutes.She didn't speak much during it. That was fine because I didn't want to have a conversation. I sat on the edge of the examination table in the healer's room on the second floor and let her hands move where they needed to move and kept my eyes on the wall opposite and thought about nothing deliberately.Edna's hands were precise and clinical. She catalogued everything with detached efficiency. But her hands stilled twice,once over my ribs.Once over the scarring across my left shoulder blade that I had forgotten about because it had been there so long it stopped registering as separate from the rest of me.She didn't comment either time.She made notes on the small parchment beside her and kept moving.When she finished she stepped back and looked at me with those unreadable grey eyes."Dress," she said."The rib,third from the bottom on the left side. It healed incorrectly. There was a break at some point that wasn't set properly." She s
Nerissa POVThe water in the bathing room was hot,steam rising from the surface and curling toward the low stone ceiling in slow lazy patterns.Mira arranged it without being asked.She didn't explain why. She just told me the bathing room at the end of the east corridor would be available for an hour before the morning duties started and left a clean towel folded on the bench outside the door without making anything of it.I stood in the water up to my waist and let the heat work into muscles that had been carrying tension for so long I had stopped noticing how heavy they were.Red Claw didn't have hot water for omegas.Cold pumped water from the barrel outside the servant quarters. In and out quickly because the barrel was shared and taking too long meant someone's hands across the back of your head and a lecture about selfishness.I turned my face up toward the steam and closed my eyes.For approximately four minutes I let myself not think about anything.Then I reached for the soa
Calista POVHe said her name in his sleep,that was the first time.I lay completely still beside him in the dark and listened to it leave his mouth like something that had been sitting behind his teeth all day waiting for the moment his guard came down enough to escape.‘Nerissa.’Like even unconscious he wasn't sure what to do with it.I stared at the ceiling for a long time after that.My jaw was tight enough to ache. My hands were flat against the sheets on either side of me because losing composure in the dark over something Rowan didn't even know he had done was beneath me and I did not spend the last three years positioning myself exactly here to come apart over a sleeping man's unconscious confession.But the name sat in the room like a living thing.‘Nerissa.’I rose before dawn and dressed without waking him and went to sit in the outer chamber where nobody could see my face until I rebuilt it into something appropriate.Breakfast in the main hall was a performance I have bee







