Chapter 4 – Eyes in the Dark (Aeryn)

I should have left after she did.  The tower ruins were empty now, save for the scent she left behind vanilla, berries, frost and dusk flowers, tangled with the electric tang of shared magic. It lingered on his skin like a memory.

I leaned against the crumbling wall, my head tilted back, breath steadying. I held her wrist. Touched the mark. Spoken words that could change the course of two bloodlines.

And still, part of myself still wanted to run. Not from her but from what she made me feel.

You’re not my fate. You’re my choice. I wanted to say it then. It had sat behind my teeth, heavy as iron. But it wasn’t time yet.  A crunch of gravel snapped me out of the thought.  Too late.  I wasn’t alone.

My wolf surged to the surface in an instant, sharpening his senses. Someone was watching. And they were close.

I turned just as a shadow moved behind the far wall. A flicker of movement fast, wrong. I drew my blade and moved without sound, a predator hunting another.

But when I reached the edge of the wall, the figure was gone, not vanished, retreated.  Clever.

I cursed low and crouched near the disturbed dirt where the watcher had stood. The prints were light, almost weightless. I recognized the spacing and shape.  Frostfang.  Not Kaela. Someone smaller. Younger. Fast.  A spy.

I didn’t linger. I knew better. If someone had seen Kaela with me, their already delicate bond wasn’t just threatened, she was in danger.  Back in the city, Kaela was already at the Frostfang quarters, standing before her father.

I stood and watched from the rooftops across the square; shadow cloaked.

Alpha Myras Frostfang was a block of carved ice in council robes, voice deep and controlled. Kaela stood with her hands clasped behind her back, expression unreadable, the mask of diplomacy she wore too well.

But I could feel her heartbeat through the bond. Fast. Tight.  She was lying.  Deflecting.  Protecting me.  I was shocked, no one ever stood and protected him. 

I turned before I could see the outcome. The bond tugged between them as I left, a subtle ache like an unfinished sentence.

That night, I returned to the edges of the ruins and found something tucked into the stone, small, sharp, and unmistakable.  A clan-blade. Frostfang-forged, ceremonial. Left behind as a message.  I wasn’t being watched anymore.  We were being watched and hunted.

I turned the blade over in my hand, thumb brushing the etched crest at its hilt, the Frostfang sigil, split by a single diagonal scratch. A mark of exile. Or warning, a threat. Maybe both.

I stood in the ruins until the stars rose, my wolf pacing beneath his skin. Every instinct screamed at him to run, to disappear into the wilds and leave the politics, the bloodlines, the impossible weight of this connection with Kaela behind.

But he didn’t. Couldn’t.

Not now.  Instead, I wrapped the blade in cloth and tucked it into the satchel slung across my back. The message carried was a message answered. If they wanted him to see it, they were expecting a reply.

By dawn, I was already on the move, slipping through back alleys and over the sleeping rooftops of the city. I avoided the council guard routes with practiced ease. I knew the Frost fang’s patterns, he’d studied them once as an outsider, and now again as something much more dangerous: an anomaly.

The scent of smoke and wildflowers hit me just before I reached the edge of Kaela’s quarter. A warding spell. Fresh. Kaela’s.

She was buying time.

I didn’t stop. I didn’t need to. The tether pulsed once, a flicker of heat across his chest. Her way of saying, I know you’re close. Don’t come further. It’s not safe.

I respected the line she drew. But I slipped something past it anyway, a slip of parchment, tucked in the hollow of the message tree outside her balcony. Just a few words.

They left a blade. I won’t run. Neither should you.

Then I was gone.

By the time the council convened again, the tension in the city had thickened. Rumors of wolves in the east, of rogue magic flaring at the borders, of a bloodline pact broken — or worse, forged in secret.

I didn’t attend. I stood at the threshold of the ruins once more, where stone met sky, waiting for the next move.

He wasn’t afraid of the hunt.

He was born for it.