Chapter 3: Alpha of Ash

The first thing I did when I saw Silverstone's banner was smile, and that frightened me more than the blood did.

Smoke rolled across the field so thick I could taste it, ash and iron and burning pine, sticking to the back of my tongue. A body hit the ground to my left. Someone screamed on my right, high and cracked, a boy's voice. I didn't turn. Three years ago I would have thrown up. Now I stepped over the dead like I was crossing a kitchen floor.

*Who did that to you?* I thought, and didn't like the answer.

"Fall back!" The shout came from the Silverstone line, ragged and breaking. "Fall *back*!"

Good. Let them hear what it sounds like when nobody comes for you.

I lifted two fingers. Behind me, my pack stopped as one, no growl, no snarl, just stillness, four hundred wolves in black and silver holding their breath because I'd asked them to. Even the wind seemed to wait. I'd stopped questioning that. I'd stopped questioning a lot of things.

"Nobody kills unless I say it." My voice came out level. It always does now. I'd practiced in the dark until it stopped shaking.

A Silverstone soldier staggered out of the smoke ten feet ahead, blood down one side of his face. Young. Maybe my age. I recognized him, and I hated that I did. He'd been one of the boys on the wall that night. He'd laughed. I remembered the sound exactly.

His eyes found me and went wide, and his sword arm started to shake.

"You're dead." He said it like a prayer, like he'd been saying it for years. "You were *supposed* to be—they told us you didn't make it past the first night."

*They told you.* Something ugly and quiet turned over inside me.

"Who told you?"

He blinked. His mouth opened, but nothing came out, and I watched him realize he'd never once asked.

"I'm not dead," I said. "Ask your Alpha Prince why he lets people believe that."

He stumbled backward. The sword dropped an inch, then two. Behind me, my second line slid into place without a word. They didn't need orders. That was the thing nobody in Silverstone would ever understand. I hadn't built a pack by commanding it. I'd built one by being the only person who'd ever noticed them.

Then the smoke shifted, and the pressure hit.

I knew it before I saw him. My spine knew it. Every muscle in my body locked, a reflex I'd spent three years trying to kill, and I hated it, I *hated* it, but my heart stuttered like a dog that heard its old master's whistle.

Kael walked out of the smoke like it was something he'd arranged.

Golden eyes. Same cut of jaw. Same stillness that made rooms bow. His armor was dented along one shoulder and there was blood on his sleeve that wasn't his, and he walked straight through his own retreating soldiers as if they were air.

His eyes found mine.

The field went so quiet I could hear a flag snapping somewhere far off.

Behind him, his men whispered. *It's her. That can't be her. She's with them now.* One of them said *traitor,* and Kael didn't even blink, which was how I knew he'd heard it.

One of them. I almost laughed. I'd never been one of anything until I walked away from him.

He took a single step toward me, and the whole battlefield felt it.

"Lira."

My name. In his mouth, after three years. It sounded wrong, worn at the edges, like something he'd carried in his pocket and turned over too many times.

I looked at him properly. I'd promised myself I wouldn't. But I looked, and he was the same, and he wasn't. There were shadows under his eyes that no sleep would fix. A tightness at his mouth. He looked like a man who'd been holding something heavy for a long time and had stopped noticing the weight.

I didn't care. I told myself that, and I mostly believed it.

"Yes," I said.

One word. His jaw flexed like I'd hit him.

"Stop this."

I almost admired it. The *gall.* Three years, a burned border, forty dead on his side by dawn, and the first thing he said to me was an order.

"You're asking me to stop." I kept my voice low, but it carried across the smoke anyway. It does that now. "You. You, of all people."

Around us, the fighting thinned. Swords lowered. Even the wounded stopped moaning, as though the field itself leaned in to hear.

His hands curled at his sides. "I didn't know what you'd become."

The laugh came out of me before I could stop it. Short, cold, hollow. It startled me more than it did him.

"No," I said. "You didn't care what I'd become. That's different."

He had no answer. I watched him look for one. I watched him go through every sentence a prince has, and none of them fit. It should have felt like winning. It felt like pressing on a bruise.

His eyes slid past me to the banners moving through the smoke behind my shoulder. Black and silver. Mine. The sigil I'd stitched with my own hands in a cave, bleeding, while an Alpha who wasn't his taught me what a pack was supposed to be.

"You're standing with my enemy," he said.

"I'm standing with *mine*."

Something crossed his face. I couldn't name it, and I refused to try. Regret, maybe. Or shock. Or the first honest expression he'd ever worn in my presence, and I didn't want it. I wanted it three years too late. I wanted the girl in the mud to have gotten it.

"You don't have to do this." Quieter now. Almost gentle.

That nearly broke me. *Nearly.* For half a heartbeat I was nineteen again, on my knees, ready to forgive anyone who spoke to me kindly.

Then I remembered the gates. The laughter through stone. The way my wrist went cold and quiet.

I stepped closer, close enough that he had to look down at me, the way I'd once had to tilt my head back to look up at him.

"You already decided what I was worth." My voice dropped until only he could hear it. "You don't get to decide twice."

His expression cracked. I saw his hand lift, an inch, a *reach*—

And the ground *groaned*.

A sound rolled across the battlefield, low enough to feel in my teeth. Not a horn. Not a howl. Something older, patient, wrong in a way I couldn't explain. My wolves went rigid behind me. Every one of them. I felt it through the pack link like a hand closing around my spine.

Kael turned his head. Only slightly. And I saw his face change.

I'd never seen Kael afraid. Not once, not in all the years I'd watched him from the back of the hall. But the color left his face, and his hand fell back to his side, and he looked at the smoke the way people look at a verdict.

"What is that?" I whispered. I hadn't meant to.

"Alpha." Doren, my second, was suddenly at my shoulder, and I'd never heard his voice shake before. "We're not alone."

The smoke behind Kael split open. Slowly. Not blown apart, *pushed,* as if something enormous had put its hand through a curtain. The pressure that came with it wasn't Kael's, and it wasn't mine. It was older than both of us. It had been here before either of us had a name.

I knew that feeling.

I'd felt it once. In the rain. At the gates. Right before a stranger in a black cloak had held out his hand.

*They've been waiting for you since the day you were born.*

Kael took a step back. Then another. The Alpha Prince of Silverstone, retreating from a shadow.

It stepped out of the smoke and stopped. Exactly between us. Not closer to him. Not closer to me. Perfectly, deliberately in the middle, like a thing that had measured the distance in advance.

Too tall to be a man. Too still to be a beast.

Nobody breathed. I could hear my own pulse in my ears.

Then it turned its head toward me. And it spoke, calm and unhurried, in a voice I'd heard once before, on the worst night of my life, when I'd thought I was alone.

"She finally came home.”