FAZER LOGINI don't see it happen.That's the thing. I'm in the training room at the time, running the third sequence for the fortieth time, left shoulder locked, weight still, transition clean. Brek watching. Rynn watching Brek watch me, which she's started doing as a secondary activity.I don't know Vayne is in the building until I smell the chamomile.Not Dara's chamomile — the other thing underneath it. The older thing I've never been able to name. Dara's scent has two layers and I've been cataloging the second one for two years and the closest I've gotten is: something that has been carrying a weight for a very long time.I stop mid-sequence.Brek looks at me."Again," he says."Someone's with Dara," I say.He waits."Vayne," I say.The training room.Rynn, from the doorway, goes very still. Not her normal assessment-still. The other kind — the kind that comes from a name landing in a room and taking up more space than a name should.Brek puts down his notes."You're sure," he says.I think
Seven days.That's how long I've been thinking about it. Seven days of training with Brek, seven days of Rynn watching from the doorway, seven days of Pell in the east corridor not making eye contact with anyone, which he never has, which I always filed under: Omega survival strategy.Now I file it under: man who lost everything and kept showing up anyway.I haven't told Rynn yet that I know where he is.I've been trying to understand why.I think it's because telling her means watching her face do something I can't take back, and I've been managing outcomes for so long that the habit of control is stronger than the impulse toward kindness. I'm working on that. It's slow work.The east corridor at noon is quiet. Most wolves are at midday meal. I'm scrubbing the floor outside the supply room — old habit, comfortable habit, the kind of work that lets the brain do something else while the hands do this.The something else my brain is doing is: what did he say.North ridge. Eight days ago
Brek hits me at ninth hour.Not hard. Controlled, measured, the kind of hit that's designed to test response rather than cause damage. He's been doing this for three days and every time his fist connects I can see him doing math in his head — calculating what should happen versus what does.What should happen: I go down. Compensate. Recover slow.What does: I don't go down.He doesn't say anything about it. That's the thing about Brek — he's a professional in the specific way of someone who has decided that his job is the forms and the techniques and the calibrated hits, and everything else is above his pay grade and he is keeping it firmly above his pay grade.I respect that."Again," I say.He hits me again.Left side this time. I've been working the shoulder — drop it, raise it, feel where the gap is, close it. Four days of this. The gap is smaller than it was. Not gone. Smaller.Rynn is watching from the doorway.She's been doing this since yesterday, when I told her she could obs
I find her at the border wire at dawn.Or she finds me. Hard to say which — I was running the perimeter because Brek told me to and she was tangled in Ironveil's trap-line because someone set it three inches lower than regulation and didn't tell anyone.Three broken fingers on her left hand. Wire around her ankle. She's not crying.She's furious."Don't," she says when she sees me. Not don't help. Just: don't. Like she's said it to enough people that she leads with it now.I crouch down anyway and look at the wire.Standard Ironveil trap-line — the kind used for rogues and trespassers, not animals, because the tension is calibrated for wolf-weight and the release requires hands. Which means whoever set it knew exactly what they were catching. Her ankle isn't broken but it will be if she keeps pulling."Stop moving," I say."I wasn't moving.""You were about to."She looks at me. Small — smaller than me, which isn't saying much — with dark eyes and hair that's been cut with something t
I train for six hours.Brek comes at ninth hour — I asked him, which he wasn't expecting, I could tell by the way he stopped in the doorway like he was checking he had the right room. He's professional about it. Shows up on time, runs me through three sequences, corrects my left shoulder twice, doesn't ask about anything that isn't the forms.He leaves at midday.I keep going until my arms don't want to anymore and then I keep going after that, because wanting to stop and needing to stop are different things and I need to know the difference in my body before the challenge circle and not during it.At some point in the late afternoon I sit down on the training room floor with my back against the wall and eat the bread I brought this morning and drink the water and look at the chip in the northeast corner of the — no. Wrong room. There's no challenge circle here. There's just floor. I've been staring at a scuff mark for the last thirty seconds as if it means something.I'm more tired t
She finds me before I find her.I've been going to the north ridge every morning since the challenge announcement — before dawn, before the pack wakes, before anyone can have opinions about where an Omega who has called a Blood Challenge should or shouldn't be. The ridge is mine in a way nothing else in this pack has ever been mine. I claimed it without anyone noticing, which is the only kind of claiming I've ever been good at.She's sitting on the ground when I arrive. Back against the largest pine, legs crossed, eating something from a cloth wrap with the focused efficiency of someone for whom food is still primarily fuel and hasn't been anything else in a long time.She looks up when she hears me.Doesn't move.I sit down. Not next to her — six feet away, which is close enough for conversation and far enough that we're both making a choice about it. She watches me settle. Her silver eyes in the pre-dawn light are the same shade as what I see when I catch my own reflection doing som







