"YOU CAN ONLY SAVE ONE"

Lyra’s pov

"Hold her still. She's fighting the needle again."

"I'M NOT FIGHTING—" My voice cracked as the physician's assistant pinned my shoulder to the bed. "I'm telling you, something is wrong. My wolf can't breathe—"

"Sera's fever is at forty degrees," my mother said from the doorway. She didn't look at me. She never did, not during these. "Lyra, please. Just endure it like you always do."

Like you always do.

The needle slid into the crook of my elbow — the right arm this time, because the left was still bruised yellow from last week. Dark red threaded through the tube, slow and thick, winding its way toward the glass canister where my blood would be stored, labeled, and carried down the hall to my sister's room.

My *adopted* sister. The girl who got my bedroom, my mother's songs, my father's pride. The girl whose mysterious illness had only one cure in the entire pack.

Me.

"Mother," I gasped, as the room tilted sideways. "Please. Just this once — look at me."

She was already gone. Her footsteps faded down the corridor, quick and light, hurrying the blood to Sera's bedside.

"Four hundred milliliters," the physician announced. "Same as last time. She's stable."

Stable. I'd learned what that word actually meant over the past year.

*She's stable* meant *she's conscious enough to walk out on her own.*

*She's stable* meant *we can take more next month.*

I sat up too fast and the world went white at the edges. The physician didn't catch me. The assistant didn't catch me. I caught myself — palms flat on the mattress, head down, breathing through it, the way I'd breathed through all of it.

"You should eat before you stand," the physician said, not unkindly, scribbling on his chart. "Red meat. Iron."

"When is Sera getting better," I said.

He didn't answer. Nobody ever answered that .me

I made it exactly six steps into the hallway before my legs folded.

The floor rushed up — and then a pair of hands caught me. Warm, familiar hands. I knew them before I looked up. I'd know them anywhere.

"Kael."

The Alpha's son. My fated mate. You can call him my boyfriend. The boy who'd carved my name into the oak behind the training grounds when we were thirteen, right beneath the words *MINE, THE MOON SAID SO.*

"Lyra." He lifted me like I weighed nothing. "Goddess, you're freezing. They took too much again, didn't they?"

For one heartbeat — one stupid, hopeful heartbeat — I believed he was angry *for* me.

Then he carried me three doors down the corridor. Past my room. Past the living room. And stopped in front of the white door with the silver handle, the one Mother had decorated with fresh lilies this morning.

Sera's room.

"Put me down," I said quietly.

"She asked for you."

"She *always* asks for me. That's the problem."

His jaw tightened. "Lyra, don't start. She's dying."

"SO AM I."

The words hit the corridor like a slap. Kael stared at me. Down the hall, a maid froze with her dusting cloth halfway raised.

I grabbed his collar with my weak, shaking hands and pulled myself close enough that he couldn't look away.

"Kael. Listen to me. Something is wrong with my blood since the transfusions started. My wolf doesn't answer me anymore. I can't feel her. It's like she's drowning somewhere inside me, and every time they open my veins, the water rises."

For a moment — a real moment — his eyes flickered. Doubt. Fear. The boy from the oak tree, surfacing.

Then Sera's voice drifted through the door, soft as petals:

"Kael? Is that you...? I feel so cold... Is Lyra there? Tell her... tell her I'll never forget what she's doing for me..."

The doubt in his face died like a snuffed candle.

"She's grateful to you," he said, setting me down gently against the wall. "We all are."

He opened Sera's door and closed it behind him.

And I sat on the floor of my own house — my father's house, the Alpha's house — pressing my forehead to my knees, listening to my fated mate laugh softly at something the girl draining my blood said.

*Three doors down from where they store my blood.*

***

My father summoned me at midnight.

I knew something was wrong because he was waiting in his study instead of the council hall — just him, my mother, and my older brother Caspian, standing in a triangle of lamplight like three judges.

"You've been spying," my father said.

Not *hello*. Not *are you feeling better*. Not *we heard you collapse twice today.*

"I haven't—"

"Don't lie." Caspian tossed something onto the desk. A paper. My handwriting. A transcription I'd made of the physician's notes — the ones I'd overheard two weeks ago. *Her blood isn't just compatible. It's reacting. Almost like it's being consumed.*

"You went through my room," I whispered.

"You're a danger to this pack," my father said, and his voice was so calm it was terrifying. "The physician says your blood reacts strangely. That it may carry contamination. If that is true, everything you've given Sera—"

"IT'S NOT CONTAMINATION!" The scream tore out of me before I could stop it. "It's MINE! It's MY blood reacting because it's ROYAL, it's ANCIENT, I can FEEL it—"

"Enough." My mother finally looked at me. Really looked. And what I saw in her eyes wasn't worry.

It was disgust.

"You always do this," she said quietly. "Sera is upstairs fighting for her life, and you're down here making it about yourself. You were born jealous of her, Lyra. You've been jealous since the day she arrived."

"I was EIGHT. She took my ROOM—"

"She is our DAUGHTER—"

"SO AM I!"

Silence. The lamp flickered. My father's face had gone gray and hard, the way it went when he signed execution orders for rogues.

"There's a sanatorium," he said. "In the northern mountains. Isolated. Good air. You'll stay there until your blood stabilizes, and the council can decide what to do with you."

"Until I *stabilize*?" My voice didn't sound like mine. "You mean until Sera doesn't need me anymore."

My brother wouldn't meet my eyes. My mother was already walking toward the door.

"You'll leave at dawn," my father said. "This conversation is over."

******

They sent me with two guards and a sealed letter for the sanatorium director.

I never found out what the letter said.

The ambush came at the tree line — the exact border of our territory, where the patrol schedule had a gap I knew about because Caspian used it to sneak out at night. Too convenient. Far too convenient.

Rogues poured out of the snow like ghosts. The guard's father sent to go with me died before they finished drawing their swords.

Someone's hand closed in my hair. Dragged me off the carriage. My head hit the frozen ground, and the world shattered into white sparks — and the last thing I saw, through the red spreading across the snow, was one of the rogues pulling the sealed letter from the dead guard's coat.

Reading it.

Then looking down at me with an expression I couldn't understand.

Not hunger. **Recognition.**

"She's the one," he breathed. "The one he said to bring back *alive.*"

I tried to crawl. Got exactly one arm's length before the darkness took me.

*****

I woke to firelight and the smell of pine smoke and blood — my own, dried and crusted. Someone had cleaned the wound, but the smell lingered, because wolves can always smell their own blood.

A man sat across the fire from me.

Tall. Black-haired. Dressed in dark furs that no pack would allow, marked with a silver sigil no pack bore. One of his eyes was gray. The other was scarred white, and yet I had the strangest feeling that *that* was the eye that saw more.

Every instinct I had left screamed at me to run.

My wolf — my silent, drowning, half-dead wolf — lifted her head for the first time in months.

And **whimpered.**

Not in fear.

In recognition.

"You're awake," the man said. His voice was low, unhurried, the voice of someone who had never once in his life been interrupted. "Good. You've been burning with fever for two days, and I was getting tired of waiting."

"Waiting... for what?"

"For you to be strong enough to hear this without dying of it."

He leaned forward, and the firelight caught the scar running down his face — old, deliberate, ritualistic. The mark of an exile.

"My name is Darius. I was the Alpha of the Eastern Territories before your grandfather had my pack burned to the ground." His gray eye fixed on mine, and when he spoke next, every word landed like a stone in still water.

"And you, little moon-blood... are the last descendant of the goddess they cast out into the snow."

I laughed. It came out broken and wet, and I tasted blood. "You have the wrong girl. My family just threw me away like spoiled meat."

Darius smiled then — slow, dark, and almost gentle.

"They have no idea what they threw away." He stood, and offered me his hand across the fire. "Come. We'll eat, you'll heal, and then..."

"And then?"

"And then we'll teach you what your blood can actually do." His scarred eye gleamed. "I want to be there the day your family comes begging for it."

Behind him, through the cave mouth, the northern lights were beginning to burn across the sky — silver-green, the exact color of my wolf's eyes, the night she'd first answered me.

I looked at his hand.

I thought about my mother's disgust. Kael's closed door. My father's executioner's calm.

I took it.