07 Your Mate Wants You Dead

Seraphina’s POV

The road north went quiet in the way roads go quiet before something breaks them.

We'd been walking since dawn, four guards, myself in chains, Darian riding a little ahead with the exile papers tucked into his coat. I hadn't spoken much. There wasn't much left in me to say. Isolde had gone still somewhere under my ribs, conserving whatever she had left the way you conserve warmth in the cold.

It was past midday when the captain called a halt at a fork I didn't recognise, not the border road I'd travelled once as a child, but a narrower track cutting east through denser trees.

"This isn't the way to the border," I said.

"Shortcut." The captain didn't look at me when he said it. "Faster through the ravine trail. Keep moving."

Something in his voice was wrong. Isolde noticed it before I consciously did, a low, wordless unease pushing up through my chest like a held breath.

‘Something's wrong,’ Isolde warned. ‘Their scents have changed. Fear-sweat. Not yours. Theirs. Four armed men frightened of one chained woman, how flattering.’

"They're just guards on an unpleasant assignment."

‘No. Listen to me.’

I looked for Darian. He was no longer riding ahead of us. I searched the trail behind me, but he had disappeared sometime during the last hour without my noticing. And that absence settled into my stomach like a stone dropped into still water.

The trees closed in tighter around the trail, and the captain slowed his horse, and two of the other guards drifted wide to either side of me in a way that had nothing to do with escort formation and everything to do with a net closing.

"Stop." I stopped walking on my own, because some animal instinct older than fear told me the moment was already here, whether I moved into it or not.

The first blade came from my left.

‘Now,’ Isolde snapped, already surging. ‘Let me out. Full shift, claws, teeth, I don't care. Give me something to work with, and I'll teach the one on the left to regret having a throat.’

I reached for her the way you reach for a door in the dark, certain it's there, certain your hand will find the latch, and instead I felt the chains at my wrists flare into sudden, blinding agony, a burn that had nothing to do with metal and everything to do with what metal it was. Silver. I understood it a half second too late, the way you understand a wasp sting only after it's already found you. Someone had bound me in silver chains, and Isolde recoiled from the burn of it so violently that I felt her retreat somewhere deep and dark inside me, whimpering, useless, gone.

‘I can't,’ she snarled, fear and fury tearing through her voice. ‘I can't reach you through this. You're on your own. If we survive, I'm feeding those chains to whoever put them on us.’

There was no time to grieve that. The blade was already coming.

My father had spent years teaching me to fight with my hands, my father who always said a wolf without her shift was still a wolf with a spine, still a wolf with training, still a wolf who didn't have to lie down just because the Goddess had been slow to finish her. I had hated those lessons as a girl. I had complained about bruised knuckles and early mornings and a father who wouldn't let me quit even when I cried from exhaustion. I was grateful for every single one of them now.

I twisted under the first strike instead of away from it, chains and all, and drove my bound hands up and into the guard's jaw hard enough to snap his head back and buy myself a half second. The second guard grabbed for my hair; I dropped my weight straight down and out of his grip the way my father had drilled into me a hundred times in the training yard, came up inside his reach, and slammed my elbow into his throat. He choked and staggered back, gagging, and for one wild, impossible second I thought, I can do this. I can actually do this.

"She’s fighting back!” someone said, somewhere behind me, disbelief cutting through the panic in his voice. "Why is she fighting? I thought they said she was useless?”

"Doesn't matter." The captain's voice, tighter now than it had been a moment ago. "Get her down."

I didn't give them the chance easily. I caught a third guard across the face with the chain itself, using the length of it like my father had shown me once, half-joking, in case you're ever unlucky enough to be dragged somewhere in irons, little moon, at least make the irons work for you, and he went down cursing, blood streaming from a gash along his cheekbone, and for one more heartbeat I was winning, or close enough to winning that I let myself believe it.

Four against one, with my wrists bound and my wolf burning uselessly behind silver, was never a fight I was going to walk away from. I knew that even while I fought. I fought anyway, because stopping felt like agreeing with them, and I refused to agree with anything they wanted from me ever again.

The captain came at me from the side while I was still turning to face the guard I'd cut. I felt the impact before I understood it, something hard across the back of my skull that dropped me straight to my knees, the whole world going white and ringing at the edges, and by the time my vision cleared enough to matter, there was a boot on my shoulder pressing me into the dirt and a blade at my throat close enough that I felt its edge without it cutting yet.

"Who ordered this?" My voice came out steadier than I felt, blood running warm down the back of my neck. "Tell me who ordered this?"

The captain crouched down far enough that I could see his face clearly, a shallow cut across one cheek where I'd caught him with the chain, some grim, grudging respect flickering behind his eyes despite everything, and he pulled something from inside his coat. A seal, pressed into wax. The same seal I'd watched close an exile order two nights before.

"Your Alpha."

"No." The word came out of me before I could stop it, pure reflex, pure refusal. "No, he wouldn't; he exiled me, that was the mercy; he wouldn't...”

"He said to make certain you didn't reach anywhere you could talk." The captain's voice was flat, almost bored, a man reciting an assignment he found distasteful but not worth arguing. "Said to remind you, if you asked, of a promise made at a fire pit. Something about whatever happens, you stand beside me."

The world stopped. No one outside that platform, outside the handful of people closest to him, could have known those exact words. I hadn't repeated them to anyone. I hadn't needed to. They belonged to a night I'd already buried under everything that came after it. He knew them anyway.

Something inside me that had fought until the last possible second finally let go.

"Kael." I don't know who I was saying it to. Not the captain. Not anyone who could hear me and mean anything by it. Just the name, falling out of me the way blood falls out of a wound too deep to close.

The blade found my side before I finished saying it. I felt it go in wrong, too deep, a white-hot line of fire that stole the air out of my lungs before I could even scream properly, and then hands were on me, shoving, and the ground dropped away from under my feet entirely, and there was nothing beneath me at all but open air and the long grey drop of the ravine rushing up to meet me.

I didn't scream on the way down. I don't know why. Maybe there wasn't enough air left in me to spend on it.

I only fell.