Four

Killian's POV

I had spent six years at war. I had learned to read a battlefield the way other men read maps — calmly, without the luxury of feeling. You looked at what was happening. You calculated. You acted. Feeling came later, in the dark, when there was nothing left to do about it.

That was the discipline I had built. The thing I had become.

It shattered the moment I watched Kaia fall.

She had been winning. That was the part that lived in me afterward, the part I could not let go of — she had been winning. She was in the top five, climbing the final rock face with a speed and certainty that had silenced the crowd, and I had watched from the judges' platform with every muscle in my body locked into stillness because I could not let them see what was on my face. I could not let them know that I was not watching the Gauntlet.

I was watching her.

The way she moved was different from the other competitors. They climbed with brute force, throwing power at the problem. She was efficient. She used the handholds I hadn't even noticed, the cracks in the rock that looked too small to matter. She had clearly memorized this ravine — every shelf, every fault line, every place where the stone crumbled and every place where it held. She knew this territory the way I knew the inside of a barracks. She had been here before. Many times. Alone.

Something about that understanding settled in my chest like a weight I was choosing to carry.

I had found the records, the night after the feast. Tactical class rankings, endurance run logs. I had asked Dax to pull them quietly, casually, as if it were a minor curiosity. He had raised an eyebrow and said nothing, which meant he knew exactly what it was. The records showed a girl who had broken every unofficial benchmark in the pack while officially placed in the kitchen rotation. Years of data. Years of being better than almost everyone who was given credit for being good.

She was twenty feet from the finish line when Jace appeared on the ledge above her.

I noticed him before she did. He was not climbing. He was standing still, which was wrong — wrong for the trial, wrong for the moment, wrong in a way that made the soldier in me sit forward before my mind had fully processed why. His eyes were not on the rock face. They were on Kaia. And his body had the quality of someone who had been waiting.

The shift was illegal. I knew it before it happened. There were no rules in the Gauntlet, Marcus had announced, which was technically true, but shifting in a confined space with another competitor below you — that was not competition. That was an attack.

He shifted mid-air.

Two hundred and fifty pounds of grey wolf hit her in the chest like a battering ram, and she was gone. There was no other word for it. She was there, and then the edge swallowed her, and the sound she made on the way down was not a scream — it was the sound of air leaving a body that had no time to prepare.

I do not remember deciding to shift.

I remember the platform. I remember the crowd's sound — that particular collective inhale that means something has gone wrong in a way that cannot be pretended away. And then I was the wolf, and I was at the ravine edge, and I was roaring.

The sound that came out of me did not feel like mine. It was too large, too raw, dragged from somewhere below the place where I kept things controlled. Dax told me later that half the pack flinched. That several wolves shifted involuntarily from the sheer force of it. That my father's face went white.

I did not see any of that. I was already going over the edge.

The descent was not graceful. I was moving too fast, driven by something that had bypassed every lesson I had ever learned about patience and strategy and calculated action. I hit the ravine floor in seconds and shifted back before I had fully landed, my boots skidding on the gravel, and I was already calling her name.

The sound did not come back to me.

What came back was a scent.

I have a good nose — Alpha blood, years of combat training, the specific refinement that comes from learning to track things in the dark. I know the scent of my pack. I know the scent of stone and water and old wood and the particular cold that lives at the bottom of ravines where sunlight doesn't reach.

And I know the scent of the Shadow Fang pack.

It hit me like a second blow. Not Kaia's scent — the pine and warm ember and something underneath that I had been trying not to think about since the night she had kissed me — but the foreign musk of another pack entirely, heavy and recent, coating the rocks in every direction. There had been people down here. Many people. They had been waiting.

She had not landed alone.

I stood at the base of the ravine with her scent already dissipating in the cold air and understood, with a clarity that was almost peaceful in its devastation, that I had failed her. Not in the moment of her fall — I could not have stopped that, could not have crossed the distance in time — but in the days before it. I had known the Shadow Fang pack was moving against our borders. I had known there were whispers of spies and coordinated pressure. And I had filed it away as a future problem while a girl with fire in her eyes climbed into a ravine I had not thought to check.

A hand came down on my shoulder. My father's guard — four of them, which meant Marcus had anticipated this, had sent them down the moment the shift happened.

"Your Highness." The lead guard's voice was careful. "We need to return to the platform."

I looked at the place where her scent ended. At the drag marks in the gravel that I had not wanted to name.

"She was taken," I said. My voice was very quiet. "Shadow Fang."

"Yes, sir." He did not deny it. He had seen it too.

"Then why," I said, still very quietly, "are you asking me to go back to the platform?"

A long pause. "The Alpha has requested—"

"No."

"Your Highness—"

I turned and looked at him. I did not raise my voice. I had learned, a long time ago, that an Alpha who shouts is an Alpha who has already lost. "She is a member of this pack," I said. "She was attacked during a sanctioned trial by her own brother, and then taken by an enemy force that was positioned in this ravine before the trial began. Which tells me this was planned. Which tells me someone made this possible." I held his gaze. "Go back to the platform. Tell my father I will be there shortly. Tell him to make sure Jace does not leave the grounds."

He went. They all went.

I stayed at the base of the ravine for another moment, alone with the cold and the fading traces of her scent. I memorized the direction the drag marks ran. North-northwest. Into Shadow Fang territory.

I had been to war. I had learned to read battlefields. I had built a discipline around not feeling things until later, when there was nothing left to do about them.

I made a vow, there at the bottom of the ravine, to the stone and the cold and the fading trace of pine and ember.

I was coming for her.

And when I found her, I was going to burn down everything that stood between us — laws, politics, my father's plans, every neat and bloodless arrangement this pack had built its comfort on — until there was nothing left but the truth.

I turned and climbed back up toward the light.