Chapter Thirteen

What She Is Made Of

Emily's POV

Training started the next morning before the sun was properly up.

Lucas's head warrior was a woman named Alena — compact and fast and completely without sentiment about the fact that I had never thrown a proper punch in my life. She looked me over once, decided something, and handed me a pair of training gloves without comment.

We worked for three hours. By the end of the first hour my knuckles were sore through the gloves and my arms were burning. By the end of the second I had learned three things that Alena said were the most important: how to protect my face, how to use my size as an advantage rather than a liability, and how to fall without breaking anything. By the end of the third I was on the ground more than I was on my feet and I was finding it harder and harder to get back up.

I got back up every time.

Alena watched me stand after the seventh fall and something shifted in her expression. Not softness. Something more like respect, which felt better.

"Tomorrow we work on instinct," she said. "You think too much before you move. Your body knows what to do before your brain does. You need to learn to trust that."

I thought about the wolf in my chest. About the pressure that had been building for days, which had settled into something steadier since Lena's house. Present and calm, like a hand resting on my shoulder. Not impatient anymore. Just there.

"I know something about learning to trust instinct," I said.

Alena almost smiled.

Lucas watched the training sessions from a distance. I noticed him there but I did not acknowledge it partly because I did not want to be distracted and partly because having him watch me fall repeatedly was embarrassing enough without making eye contact about it. But I could feel him there. That awareness of him that had been growing since the first night, warm, directional, like a compass finding north.

Yoana found me in the hospital wing that evening, where I had gone to help her sort supplies. It had become a quiet routine over the past few days and I was grateful for it. Doing something useful with my hands while my mind worked through everything else.

"How are you feeling?" Yoana asked. She was not asking about the training.

"Complicated," I said honestly.

"That tracks." She set a stack of bandaging on the shelf. "The blood work I ran this morning shows the binding has degraded by another twelve percent since yesterday. It is accelerating." She looked at me carefully. "Emily, I need to tell you something. When it fully breaks, it is going to be physical. Not dangerous, but significant. You are going to need someone with you."

"You," I said.

"Yes. And Lucas." She said his name with a deliberateness that was not subtle. "The mate bond will help anchor the shift. Without an anchor, when the binding breaks on a carrier as strong as you, the release can be disorienting. Physically and emotionally."

I thought about the light in my hands at Lena's house. The way it had moved without my permission, warm and certain and completely its own. "I felt it starting," I said. "At Lena's."

"I know. Lucas told me." She paused. "He is worried about you going on the extraction."

"I know that too."

"Are you worried?"

I set down the roll of bandaging I was holding and thought about that honestly. Was I afraid? Yes. In the way that a person is afraid of anything that could go badly and hurt people there and there was a word I was not ready to use yet, not even in my own head, people they cared about.

"I am afraid," I said. "But not of being there. I am afraid of what happens to my parents if I am not."

Yoana nodded. She seemed satisfied with that answer.

I went back to my room late that night. The house was quiet. I stood at the window and looked out at the hills, which were silver under a three-quarter moon, and I talked to my wolf for the first time. Not out loud, just inside the way you speak to something that is part of you rather than separate from you.

I told her I was sorry it took so long. I told her I understood why she was angry. I told her that what was coming was going to be hard and I needed her with me and not in spite of me.

The warmth in my chest pulsed once. Long and slow.

It felt like an agreement.

I was turning away from the window when I saw the shadow move at the tree line below. Not a wolf, two legged, fast, retreating into the darkness between the trees. Gone before I could be sure I had seen it at all.

I watched the tree line for a full minute. Nothing else moved.

But something on the glass of the window caught my eye. Below where I had been standing. A smear. Fresh, dark, and wrong.

I pressed my fingertip to it and drew it back.

Human blood. Fresh, warm

Someone had been standing outside my window.

Alena had me doing balance work by the end of the third day. Not combat balance, structural. The difference between a larger body's centre of gravity and mine, and how to use the discrepancy in my favour rather than fighting it. She used a term that I had not heard before and that she explained with the matter-of-factness of someone who considered it obvious: mechanical advantage through displacement. The idea that a smaller body, properly positioned, could redirect a larger body's momentum using the larger body's own weight as the force.

It was, she said, one of the most reliably effective principles in wolf combat and one of the least taught because most wolves relied on size and strength and considered it beneath them to learn to use disadvantage as a tool.

I did not consider it beneath me. I had spent twenty-two years being small and disadvantaged and finding ways to survive that did not depend on size. Learning to do it deliberately was simply formalising what had already been practised through necessity.

By the end of the fourth session Alena had me working with Shannon — one of the younger border wolves, quick and compact, running the displacement principle in real movement rather than static demonstration. Shannon was fast and she did not go easy on me, which I respected. She hit what she was aiming at and when I successfully redirected her momentum on the sixth attempt and she ended up on the ground with a slightly surprised expression, Alena said nothing and made a note on the small pad she carried.

That evening my muscles were communicating with me in considerable detail about the past four days. I sat in the bath in the private bathroom that I had not yet fully stopped finding extraordinary and let the hot water do what hot water did.

My wolf was more present during training than at almost any other time. She did not want to fight, she was not aggressive by nature, I was learning. She was precise. She watched the training with a focused attention that was analytical rather than combative, and when I successfully executed something difficult she did not celebrate. She catalogued. She was building a library of what this body could do and she was doing it with the thoroughness of someone who intended to need it.

I trusted that. I was learning to trust her generally and I was finding, as I did, that she was more practical and less frightening than sixteen years of her absence had led me to fear.

Lucas appeared in the doorway of the training area on the fourth day only once. He stood for a moment, reading what he saw, Alena, Shannon, me with flour on my knees from the last fall, and then nodded once and left. He did not interfere. He did not offer encouragement that would have felt like observation. He simply confirmed that what was happening was happening and left it to happen.

That specific restraint was one of the things about him that I was building into my understanding of what trust looked like in practice.