Chapter 4

Aria 

"You have to braid it tighter," Rowan informs me, very serious, holding still on the stool while I work the leather cord through his dark hair. "Cassian does it tighter. So it doesn't come out when I wrestle."

"Oh, does he?" I tug a strand, and he grins without flinching, missing a tooth on the bottom. "And does Cassian also let you wrestle the bigger pups, or is that another thing I'm going to pretend I didn't hear about?"

"I win," my son says simply, and tips his head back to beam up at me with storm-grey eyes, and my heart does the thing it has done every single day for five years. It cracks straight down the middle with how much I love him, then seals back over harder than it was before.

He's four, and he's already too strong. He throws pups twice his size and looks puzzled when they cry. Last week, he split a practice post clean through with a child's wooden sword and was more surprised than anyone in the yard. 

The Citadel healers don't say it out loud where I can hear, but I catch the way they watch him, the way they go quiet when he laughs too hard, and the windowpanes hum. Alpha blood, their eyes say. And then, lower, the part they think I don't see: and something older underneath. Something silver.

I tie off the braid, smooth it down, and turn him by the shoulders toward the door, where Cassian leans against the frame with his arms crossed and that steady scarred-brow patience that has been my anchor since the night he carried me out of the snow.

"He goes to the training yard with you," I tell him. "The west yard. Not the east field, the rogues have been bold this far north, and I won't have him anywhere near the wards while I'm gone."

"I know how to mind your cub, Silver." Cassian's mouth twitches. "The question is whether you know how to mind yourself. Theron's posting you to Thornridge."

The name drops into the room like cold water straight down my spine.

I've known it was coming. I've tracked the rogue pattern across three territories with my own nose, watched it tighten like a noose, watched it converge, the way everyone at the Citadel has, on the strongest pack on the northern range. The one pack in the whole realm, I swore on the Goddess herself I would never set foot in again.

Kael Thorne's pack.

"Give it to someone else," I say, though we both know he can't, not without me telling Theron why, not without saying out loud the thing I have never said to a living soul but Cassian: that is the Alpha who rejected me in front of three hundred wolves, and that is the man whose heir I have hidden from the world for five years.

"You're the best hunter the King has," Cassian says, gentler now, pushing off the frame. 

"And it's your wolf they need up there. A silver reads old blood and bad magic the way the rest of us read a fresh trail. Whatever's driving those rogues, you'll scent it before anyone. The Silver is a story in Thornridge, Aria. A title. Nobody up there is going to look at a legend and see a Hollis runt." 

He holds my eyes, steady, unflinching. "Nobody alive in that pack knows your face anymore. You buried Aria Hollis at the treeline, remember? You can walk in there as the King's enforcer, do the job, cut out whatever's killing them, and walk back out. And this boy stays exactly where he is, safe, here, with me watching every hair on his head. Kael Thorne never has to learn that either of you exists."

Rowan tugs my sleeve, having long since lost the thread of grown-up talk. "Are you going hunting, Mama?"

I crouch to his level and memorize his face the way I do before every hunt, just in case the Goddess is in a cruel mood, and this is the last time. The grey eyes that aren't mine. The stubborn jaw that isn't either. "I am, baby. So you be brave for me. Mind Cassian. And don't throw anyone who doesn't deserve it."

"I only throw the ones who deserve it," he says, deadly solemn, one small hand over his heart, and I have to stand and leave the room before he sees his mother laugh and cry at the same time.

The run north takes half a day. I tell myself I feel nothing as the Thornridge wards rise grey out of the trees, the same wards they walked me out through five years ago, the last thing I ever saw of my old life, blurred then through tears I'd sworn would be the last. I tell myself the ache under my ribs is nothing but the cold and the long miles.

I tell myself a great many things on that run. Not one of them holds.

The gates open. I square my shoulders and walk in as the Silver, the King's enforcer, lethal and controlled and five full years stronger than the girl they threw into the dark.

My wolf slams into the inside of my skin the instant his scent reaches me, five years of starving in one lunge, and I put her down the way I put down everything, with both hands and no mercy.

And there, at the top of the great hall steps, Alpha Kael Thorne goes utterly, perfectly still. He lifts his head and looks straight at me, and I watch five years of his certainty drop out from under him in a single stolen breath.