Chapter 3

Kael · Now (Five Years Later)

The third farm in a month burns on the eastern border, and I stand in the ash of it and feel my pack dying around me one acre at a time.

"Rogues again," Beta Dorian says at my shoulder. He doesn't say the rest. He doesn't have to. We're both looking at the same wrong thing: the grain store gutted, the warriors' bunk hit clean, the easy prey two fields over left entirely untouched. 

Rogues don't coordinate. Rogues don't choose targets and ignore others. Rogues don't move like they have a map of my territory drawn in a steady hand and a grudge older than this season.

Something does. Something that knows us.

"How many dead?" I ask.

"Two. The Mearns boy and his father. The boy was nine." Dorian's voice is flat in the way that means he is holding it that way on purpose, because the alternative is breaking. "That's nine of ours in the ground this season, Alpha."

Nine. While I rule the strongest pack on the northern range, I cannot stop a single one of them. Nine families looking at me across the pyres, waiting for their Alpha to be what I promised them I'd be.

I crouch and pick up a fistful of cold ash and let it sift through my fingers. Five years I have poured into Thornridge: the alliance, the borders, the strength I sold my own soul to buy. Thornridge needs strength. 

I said that, once, to a girl on her knees with her whole heart in her eyes. I have never once managed to unhear my own voice saying it. Most nights, it's the last thing in my head before I fail to sleep, her face turning to stone as the warriors took her, the vow she made me in a voice meant only for us. 

One day it will gut you. 

She was right. She is always, infuriatingly, right, even five years gone.

I don't let myself think her name. I've gotten good at that, at least. Mostly.

"There's more," Dorian says, and holds out a scroll heavy with the Alpha King's wax. "Came an hour ago. The King's answer to our petition for aid."

I crack the seal. Read it twice.

By order of King Theron, an enforcer of the Royal pack is dispatched to Thornridge to root out the source of the rogue incursions. The Alpha of Thornridge will extend full cooperation. In this matter, the enforcer's authority supersedes his own.

Supersedes mine. In my own territory, over my own warriors. A year ago, the pride would have choked me. Tonight, something loosens in my chest that I refuse to name as relief, because relief would mean admitting, out loud, that I cannot save my own people alone, and an Alpha who admits that is an Alpha already halfway to losing his throat to a challenger.

"Which enforcer?" I ask.

"Doesn't say. Only that it's the King's best." Dorian almost smiles, the way warriors do when they speak of a legend they half don't believe in. 

"They call this one the Silver. The story goes that it's never lost a hunt. Came out of nowhere five years back and started bringing down whole rogue packs single-handed. Some of the younger warriors don't think it's a real wolf at all. Think it's a tale the King tells to keep the borders honest."

"The Silver," I repeat, and file it away beside everything else I can't afford to feel tonight.

We ride back as the light turns amber, then grey. Seraphina is waiting in the great hall in pale silk, perfect and cold, my Luna in name and treaty and absolutely nothing else. We have never marked. We have never bonded. There is no thread between us, only a contract and a roof and a careful, brittle silence, and some nights I am certain she hates me exactly as much as I have earned, which is to say a great deal.

"You smell like smoke," she says, not looking up from the fire.

"People died, Seraphina."

"People always die." She rises and turns for the stairs, silk whispering over stone. "The King's dog arrives tomorrow. Do try to look like an Alpha who has things under control. For the pack's sake, if not your pride's."

I don't follow her up. I go out onto the balcony instead and let the cold scour the ash and the day off me. The wind comes down off the north range the way it always does this time of year, carrying pine and snow and distance and the iron promise of a hard winter.

And I stop breathing.

There's a scent threaded under all of it. Faint. Impossible. 

But my whole body knows it before my mind can name it, knows it the way I know my own heartbeat, and the old scar under my sternum, the one that has ached dull and constant for five years, gives a single hard pull toward the north. Like a hand closing around my heart. Like a thread I cut a long time ago, going taut again across a great distance, testing whether I'll still feel it.

I feel it.

It can't be. She's gone. Dead, most likely, a rejected runt turned out at the treeline in rogue season, and I am the one who gave the order. I made myself believe that. I had to, to keep getting up in the mornings, to keep being the Alpha they need.

But my wolf is on his feet inside me, hackles up, ears forward, and for the first time in five years, I let myself hear the word he is howling.

Mate.