Kade | She's Here

The wind shifts, and everything in me stills.

One foot stuck mid-turn, frozen in the dirt. My chest locks, breath caught beneath muscles coiled so tight I swear I hear something in my spine creak. A split second, no longer, and it hits me.

That godsdamned scent.

Lavender and ozone. Rain on hot stone, sweet and wild. The memory crashes through six years of barriers built to protect. One I'd buried deep and burned the ground over.

That doesn't matter.

The moment it reaches me, everything inside surges. Snarling, clawing as the wolf that lives just beneath my skin, the one I've caged and trained and starved of her, is triggered feral.

Cassia.

Her name detonates. Shrapnel in my blood. Flame under skin.

I stagger. Behind me, spars scatter. Conversations stall. Silence ripples through the clearing like something physical. The younger ones frown, confused. But the older warriors, the ones who'd stood beside me the day I banished her, they know. They smell exactly what I did.

Not just her. Grief. Rage. Power. Memory. Twisting through the trees and the snow like a storm coming too fast to outrun.

She's here.

And the second that scent touches me, I know whatever peace I've built in her absence is already gone.

My Beta, Marcus, jogs up beside me, breath fogging the air, clipboard in hand, rattling off something about drills, patrol rotations, a border scuffle near the ridge. His voice barely registers.

"Alpha, there's a—"

"She's here," I say, flat. Already moving.

He blinks. "Who?"

Not yet. Saying her name out loud will make this real in a way I'm not ready for. Will rip the fragile leash off the beast inside me, and I'm not convinced I'll survive what comes after. I don't need to say her name. Not when it's already carving itself across every nerve ending I have.

Every step toward the gate makes it worse. More real. A chain I thought broken but had only ever buried, tightening with every breath until it's all I can taste.

No. This isn't a memory.

This is her.

I round the final bend, gravel crunching under my boots, jaw clenched so tight it aches. The guards at the gate feel it before they see me coming and open the gate, steping aside without a word, shadows peeling from stone.

And there she is.

Standing just beyond the threshold, framed by snow and ruin.

She's in black from neck to boots, not a practical choice, a deliberate one. Mourning or war. Maybe both. She stands taller than I remember, chin lifted, shoulders squared like armour, spine drawn taut like a bow. The kind of stillness that comes from surviving something meant to kill you.

Cassia had always been fire. Reckless and beautiful. Wild enough to make me chase her, impossible enough to make me want to cage her.

But this woman is not that girl.

This is flame-wreckage and steel. This is a woman who has bled, hard, and kept walking.

And I hate that I still know the shape of her. Still feel the way her absence has carved out pieces of me I've never grown back. Still find her the most devastating thing I've ever looked at.

I just stare at the woman I'd once called mine and wonder how the fuck I'm supposed to survive her all over again.

Then my eyes drop.

And the world stops.

Two pups.

Twins.

Standing half-shadowed at her sides, small hands gripping the hem of her coat like anchors. Far too still for children their age. My vision narrows. My breath hitches. not from pain, not from fear, but from something older. Something that lives in the marrow.

The girl leans into Cassia's hip, wide golden eyes moving over me with open curiosity, barely veiled by the practiced caution of a child who already knows too much about the world.

And the boy…

He meets my gaze head-on.

Ice blue eyes. Jaw set. Chin tilted up in a challenge no six-year-old should know how to throw.

That stillness.

That temper.

Gods.

That temper feels like mine.

My chest doesn't just tighten. It seizes. Something cracks behind my sternum, hairline and devastating, the kind of fracture you don't feel until you move and the whole thing gives way.

I inhale. Sharp. Slow.

Their scent hits me, faint, masked, deliberately muddied, but it's there. A thread of her. Tangled with something else entirely.

They don't smell like pack-born pups. They smell like the wild. Exile and survival.

And still. My wolf knows.

On some ancient, marrow-deep level that has nothing to do with logic or reason or the six years I've spent building walls against exactly this.

My wolf knows.

I bury it. Lock it down. Let nothing show. Because she's watching, and she has always been able to read me in ways no one else could, and I will not give her that. Not yet.

Cassia steps forward, pulling a folded paper from inside her coat and extending it between us like a weapon dressed as paperwork.

"I have legal clearance," she says, voice flat. "I'm not here to cause trouble."

No apology or emotion. Not a single crack in the glass.

I take another step. Close enough now to catch the stress coiled in her blood, the adrenaline barely leashed beneath that perfect composure.

"No?" I ask, low. "Then what are you here for?"

Her lips twitch. Not even close to a smile.

"Would you believe me if I said… sanctuary?"

Her eyes don't leave mine and don't give me a single thing.

She's always known exactly what she's doing.

"You expect me to house you?" The words come sharper than I intend, flaring before I can catch them.

She doesn't flinch. Just extends the paper again, hand steady, voice colder than the mountain air around us.

"I expect nothing. But I have rights. This grants temporary sanctuary. Even the Council can't deny that."

Of course. Of course she's come armed with paperwork, with ironclad law, with conditions I can't argue without exposing myself. Nothing left to chance. She never did anything without a reason, and she's been planning this for a long time.

I turn to Marcus, jaw clenched. "Find them a room. Secure, but comfortable."

He hesitates, that twitch in his brow that means he's about to make a mistake. "Alpha—"

"Do it." The words come on a growl that ends the conversation.

Cassia dips her head, barely, just a twitch of her chin. Polite. Like I'm nothing more than a bureaucrat. A gatekeeper she's processed and moved past. Like we hadn't once laid claim to each other in ways that can't be erased. Like she hadn't once said my name like it was the only word that mattered.

Like I hadn't once sworn to make her my Luna.

I turn away before the weight of it breaks the surface.

She disappears inside with Marcus, the children at her heels.

The boy glances back once as they go.

Those eyes find mine across the distance, steady, ancient for his age and hold for just a second before he turns away.

I stand at my own gate like I've been turned to stone.

Because my wolf, the one I've caged and starved and disciplined into silence for six years, is not confused.

He's not rattled.

He's not asking questions.

He's certain.

And that is the most terrifying thing I've ever felt in my life.