Chapter 3: Calloused Hands

Zephyrine Vesper POV

The wool of the ceremonial gown sat on me like lead while Thaddeus's words hung in the cold air. Vivienne didn't flinch, but I caught the twitch in her jaw, the sound of her mind rearranging itself around new information. Before I could process the blood on his armour, she waved the tailors out with one sharp motion. They fled without being asked twice.

"Out," she told Thaddeus, her voice dropping low. "Not here. The antechamber."

"Matriarch, you need to see this now." He didn't move. He pulled something from his belt pouch and set it on the vanity, hard enough that it rattled the mirror.

Kaelen's axe. The hickory handle split down the middle, blood dried dark into the grain.

The air left my lungs not from the corset this time. That axe never left his side. It was the tool that had put the calluses on the hands that had cupped my face by the creek hours ago.

Vivienne's eyes narrowed on the wood. "Explain. Quickly."

"Found abandoned on the lower logging trail," Thaddeus said, wiping soot from his brow. "Nobody. Signs of a struggle: torn brush, boot prints, and a wolf scent that isn't ours. Someone crossed the border, Matriarch. And left proof of it."

I kept my face still while my blood went cold. No body meant he wasn't dead. It also meant they were still hunting, still following the scent he'd carried out of the woods. Every part of my wolf wanted to shift and run straight through the snow to find him. Instead I stood in silk and silver while my mother watched every twitch of my face like she was reading a ledger.

"Leave us," Vivienne said. "Double the northern patrols. If there's human filth on our land, I want it in the cells alive. I'll handle the rest myself."

Thaddeus threw me one suspicious look before he bowed out and pulled the doors shut.

The lock clicked, and the room felt smaller. Vivienne didn't look at the axe again; she looked at my reflection instead.

"You're shaking, Zephyrine. A future Luna doesn't tremble over a woodcutter's tool."

"It's the corset." My voice held, barely. "The threading restricts my breathing. Nothing to do with trash in the woods."

She crossed the room until she stood behind me, close enough that her hair brushed my cheek in the mirror. She picked up the axe herself, wrapping her fingers around the bloodied handle.

"Trash," she said, watching my eyes in the glass, "is easy to sweep away. But every so often a piece of it wanders too close, thinking it can claim something that isn't his to take."

She ran a finger along the blade without looking away from me. It wasn't cruelty that was loud, it was patience, testing how much I could take before I broke and told her everything.

"If they find him," I asked myself, "what happens?"

"He's put down. Like any animal that strays where it doesn't belong." She turned the axe over once more, unbothered. "Humans have their place in the timber lines, the soil outside our border. Not inside Silver Ridge. And never near what belongs to the Alpha line."

She dropped the axe back onto the vanity. The sound of it made my heart jump then she walked to the door. She paused with her hand on the handle, not turning around.

"Rest. Malakai arrives tomorrow to review the rites. You'll look radiant, you'll be obedient, and you'll forget whatever foolishness happened in the dark."

The door shut. I was alone with the axe, the chandeliers, and a reflection I barely recognised.

I couldn't sit with that silence. If I stayed in this room while her enforcers hunted him through the snow, I'd lose him before I ever got a say. My hands shook as I tore at the laces of the gown until it gave and dropped to the floor.

Down to my underclothes, I grabbed my cloak from the wardrobe and wrapped it tight. I needed the armoury weapons, supplies, a way past the perimeter before the watch changed. I bent down and pulled the pendant from my boot, its rough edges warm against my cold fingers.

“Hold on, Kai,” I said it out loud, to no one. *I'm coming.*

I went out through the balcony doors onto the frost-slick ledge above the drop. The wind cut straight through the cloak, but I didn't stop to feel it. I climbed the railing and worked my way down along the timber beams toward the stables, pressing flat against the wall with every handhold.

My chest ached with every movement the rejection sickness flaring again but I bit down until I tasted copper and kept going.

I dropped the last few feet into the snow outside the stable doors. The air smelled of horses and wet hay, and under that, faint but unmistakable, fresh blood that wasn't a pack animal's.

My wolf came fully alert. I dropped low and moved toward the open paddock where the supply carts sat hitched for the morning.

Then I stopped.

Beside the middle cart, in the weak light of a single lantern, stood Thaddeus. He wasn't alone. Pinned against the wheel, bleeding through a torn jacket, was someone else.

Even bruised, even in that light, I knew him instantly.

It was Kaelen.