Chapter Four: Walking Back Through Fire

Damien's POV

The pain had settled into a rhythm by then. A rise, a peak, a brief false calm before it built again — like waves that never quite finished arriving.

I'd stopped screaming somewhere around the third episode. Not because it hurt any less. Some stubborn, Alpha part of me had simply refused to give my mother the satisfaction of hearing it twice.

"You need to rest." Elder Mackenzie's hands hovered over my chest, tracing the black veins that had crept past my collarbone sometime in the night while I drifted in and out of something too ragged to call sleep. Her frown deepened with every inch they'd spread since she'd last checked. "Your body is fighting a battle it cannot win alone, Alpha. Fighting it harder will only—"

"I'm aware of the math, Elder." My voice came out rougher than I meant it to. "Five days. I remember."

She didn't answer that. There wasn't an answer that would have helped either of us.

The door opened without a knock — only one person in this pack house dared that particular liberty — and my mother swept in, her composure rebuilt sometime overnight, though I could see the cracks in it now if I looked closely enough. I was looking closely enough. I doubted I'd ever stop looking that closely at her again.

"Any change?" she asked Mackenzie, not me, like I was a report to be filed rather than her son dying slowly in the next room over from her own.

"Worse," Mackenzie said flatly. "Considerably worse."

My mother's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. "Then we need to accelerate the timeline. Send someone to retrieve her—"

"No." I sat up despite how the room tilted sideways at the sudden movement, despite the fire that lit up under my ribs. "No one drags her back here. Not after what you made me do to her."

"What *you* did," my mother said coolly, each word precise as a blade, "was protect this pack's future. If you'd rather die defending your pride than survive by swallowing it, that's certainly your prerogative, Alpha. But I won't stand by and watch three hundred wolves suffer for your wounded feelings."

"You don't get to weaponize the pack's wellbeing after you're the one who put me in this position." My hands curled into fists against the sheets, knuckles white. "You told me the Adeyemi line was cursed, unworthy. You made it sound like doing this would save us from some disaster, and instead you nearly killed me and destroyed the one person who—"

I stopped myself there. I wasn't ready to finish that sentence in front of her. Wasn't sure I was ready to finish it even alone.

My mother's eyes narrowed, sharp and assessing in a way that made my skin crawl beneath the sheets. "The one person who *what*, Damien?"

"Get out." I said it low, dangerous, the last of my patience burning away faster than the curse itself was burning through me. "Get out of my room before I say something neither of us can take back."

For a moment I thought she might push it — might remind me, again, that she was still Alpha Mother, still owed a certain deference even from a dying son. Instead something flickered across her face, not quite guilt but adjacent to it, close enough to make me wonder, and she turned and left without another word.

Mackenzie exhaled slowly once the door clicked shut behind her. "She's not wrong about the timeline, Alpha, whatever else is true. Whatever pride remains between you and Dara Adeyemi, this pack doesn't have the luxury of waiting for it to heal on its own timeline."

"I know." I closed my eyes, pressing the heel of my hand against my sternum, where the pain had settled into something low and constant, a fire banked but never fully out. "I know, Elder. Believe me. I know it better than anyone."

---

**Dara's POV**

The gates of Cross pack territory looked exactly the way I remembered them — tall, iron-worked, flanked by two carved wolves mid-howl, frozen in a moment of triumph that felt almost cruel given the circumstances. I used to think they were beautiful. Now they just looked like teeth, waiting to close.

"You don't have to do this." Chidi walked beside me, close enough that her shoulder brushed mine with every other step, a small, steady anchor. "We can still turn around. Right now, this second."

"I know." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I'm doing it anyway."

Kai was waiting for us just inside the gate, and something in his expression eased when he saw me — relief, maybe, or something more complicated than relief that I didn't have the energy to name yet. He fell into step beside us without a word, leading us through the training grounds toward the pack house.

Wolves I'd known my whole life turned to watch us pass. I felt their eyes on me like heat against my skin, some curious, some wary, a few openly, unmistakably hostile. News like last night's traveled fast in a pack this size. By now, everyone knew exactly what I'd been, and what I'd become in the space of a single ceremony that had lasted less than ten minutes.

"Word of advice," Kai said quietly, not looking at me directly. "Don't let them see it get to you."

"I wasn't planning to."

"I know." A ghost of something that might have been a smile crossed his face, there and gone. "That's why I said it. A reminder, not a warning."

We reached the pack house, and Elder Mackenzie was already waiting at the door, like she'd been watching for us the whole way up the path. Her eyes moved over me with a kind of careful assessment I didn't fully understand yet, cataloguing something I couldn't see myself.

"You came," she said simply, no judgment in it either way.

"I'm here to see how bad it is." I kept my chin up, my voice even, steadier than the ground felt beneath my feet. "That's all I'm agreeing to right now. Seeing. Nothing else, and nothing more."

Something like understanding passed over her weathered face. "That's more than we hoped for, an hour ago."

She led us up the stairs, down the hallway I used to walk without thinking twice, past the room that used to be mine before all of this began, until we reached a door with two guards posted outside it — guards who straightened at the sight of me, visibly unsure whether I was meant to be stopped or welcomed through.

Mackenzie waved them aside without hesitation and pushed the door open.

The sight inside stopped me cold, right there on the threshold.

Damien lay propped against the headboard, and even from the doorway I could see the black veins mapped across his collarbone and up the side of his throat, stark and wrong against skin that used to be warm and golden in summer sun. His eyes were closed, his breathing shallow, his powerful frame somehow smaller than I remembered it being, folded in on itself like something bracing hard for another wave.

He looked like he was already dying. Like I'd arrived just in time to watch the last of it happen.

Some old, traitorous part of my heart cracked wide open at the sight of him, fast and involuntary, and I hated it — hated how little say I seemed to have in the matter, hated my own body for betraying me before my mind had even caught up.

His eyes opened before I could compose my face into something unreadable, and for one long, unguarded moment, amber met mine across the room, and neither of us said a single word.

"Dara." His voice came out cracked, disbelieving, like he wasn't fully convinced I was real and not some fever-dream his mind had conjured to torment him further. "You came."

"Don't." I forced the word out before the ache in my chest could turn into something softer, something far more dangerous than anger. "Don't you dare think this means anything. I'm here to see what I'm dealing with. That's all this is."

Something flickered across his face — hope, maybe, dimming fast beneath the weight of my tone — before he nodded once, slow and visibly pained.

"Okay." Quiet. "Okay, Dara. Whatever you need it to mean, for now. Just—" He stopped, swallowed hard, and I watched something in his throat move like the words cost him more than he had left to spend. "Thank you for coming anyway. Whatever else you decide."

I didn't answer him. I wasn't sure yet what my answer even was, or if I had one at all.

But standing there in that doorway, watching black veins spread beneath skin I used to know as well as my own, I understood, with a sick, sinking certainty settling low in my stomach, exactly how much harder this was going to be than simply hating him.