LOGINSergio's POV The healer had stopped. Her needle was still in her hand, and she was looking at Tomás. Her face had gone pale."I would have protected them," Leandro told him, and his voice was still quiet. "I would have sent guards to the village, and I would have moved your family to the castle. I would have done it without asking a single question."Tomás did not answer."I would have done it for you, for twenty years of service." Leandro did not look away from him. "For the west watch, and for the night you held the northern gate against a rebel charge and did not lose a single man.""I remember that night, because I thought I was going to die." Tomás's eyes were wet, and he did not wipe them. "I did not think I would be standing here twenty years later, in chains, being told I was worth protecting."His voice cracked on the last word, and he did not try to hide it. He did not wipe his eyes, and he just stood there and let it crack."I did not know that," Tomás said."That is the
Sergio POV Leandro did not say the name out loud.He sat in the chair with his hand around mine, and his thumb moved once against my knuckles and then went still. For a long moment he did not speak at all.Then he turned his head toward Dario, and his voice was quiet."Bring him to me," Leandro said. "Tonight, before the night ends."The words landed flat on the stone, and nobody moved to obey them at first.Dario did not go to the dungeons to fetch the traitor. He went to the west watch barracks, and he came back with Tomás in chains, and the look on his face was the look of a man who had just cut off his own hand. The chains at Tomás's wrists rang softly with every step.He walked into the hall with his back straight and his jaw set and his eyes fixed on the doors. He did not look at Tomás, and he did not look at anyone. His boots left wet prints across the floor.Leandro was still in the chair beside the alcove. The healer was kneeling at his side with her hands on the silver woun
SERGIO'S POVI heard the chains before I saw him, and I knew before the doors opened that Dario had brought Ramiro home.The great hall had changed in the hours since the fight. The wounded had been moved deeper into the alcove, and the dead had been carried out through the side corridor.The children were asleep against the far wall with two elderly nobles keeping watch. The hall was quieter than it had been all night, and the quiet was the kind that comes after a long storm.I had not heard the bell in hours. 'Where is the bell?' I thought, and I looked at the tower without meaning to. 'Ring. Something. Anything.' Nothing rang.Leandro was in a chair beside the alcove. The healer had moved him from the wall in the night, and she had propped him up with cushions and wrapped the silver wound again.His face was still grey, but he could sit upright now, and his eyes were open, and he was watching the doors.I was standing beside him. The chair had been brought for him and not for me, a
DARIO'S POVThe shape on the ridge followed us all the way back to the cave, and it did not come down, and it did not leave.I pushed Ramiro ahead of me along the trail with my hand flat against his back. His wrists were bound behind him with the strip of cloth torn from my own tunic, and he walked with his head down and did not try to run again.He had learned what running cost him. I had made sure of that in the ravine.The shape kept pace with us. When we walked along the ice shelf, it walked along the ice shelf. When we dropped into the tree line, it dropped with us.When we crossed the open ground, it crossed above us and did not come down.It did not hurry and it did not fall back. It moved with the patience of something that had all night and nowhere else to be.I had hunted wolves in this waste before. Wolves are fast, and wolves are loud, and wolves give themselves away. This thing did not give itself away at all.Ramiro's voice was thin. "What is it?" Ramiro asked."I do not
Dario's POVI took one step forward, and Ramiro took one step back and found the ice shelf behind him. His shoulder blades hit the wall and he stopped."If the man is still in the castle, I will find him tonight, or tomorrow, or the day after, and he will not live to see the spring," I told him.The smile came back. "And how will you find him without a name?" Ramiro asked."I have a name, because you just gave it to me," I told him.Something moved behind Ramiro's eyes, and it was not fear yet, but it was the beginning of fear, and I had seen it before and knew what came after it.He changed his tone a third time, and this time he spoke softly, and he called me by my first name the way he used to call me on the border."Dario," Ramiro said, and he said it the way a man says the name of a dead friend. "Do you remember the winter we spent in the eastern fort, a hundred men and no food and the snow up to the second-floor windows?""I remember," I told him.He leaned his head back against
Dario's POVRamiro said the name, and I did not lower my sword, and I did not swing it, and the waste around us had gone very still.The ravine was narrow enough that if I reached out, I could have touched both walls at once. The ice was old and grey and scarred where other men had carved their names into it in years past, and the snow on the floor was packed hard from the boots of a man who had been running for hours.The ice shelves rose on either side of us and cut the sky down to a thin strip of black. Ramiro was three paces away, backed against the far wall, with his torn cloak hanging off one shoulder and his chest heaving.His face was red with the cold, and the skin at the edge of his jaw had gone white where the wind had bitten it. He had lost his gloves somewhere in the run, and his hands were red and raw at the wrists. His eyes were the same eyes I had seen across the throne room a hundred times.I kept my sword level. "Say it again," I told him.He did not answer at once.
Sergio's POVThe morning after Leandro stayed in my room, I woke to find him gone.The space beside me was still warm, and the indent of his body was still pressed into the mattress, and I could smell him on the pillows, like snow and smoke and something wild that I was starting to recognize. I la
The room had a fire, and that was the first thing I noticed when the guard shoved me through the doorway and closed the door behind me with a click that echoed in my ears like the sound of a cage locking shut.It was a real fire, with logs burning and flames dancing and heat pouring off it in waves
I had expected a monster, the kind of monster that lived in the stories my mother used to tell me before bed, with sharp teeth and claws and eyes that glowed in the dark, but when the doors of the throne room opened and Lycan king Leandro walked in, I realized that I had been wrong about everything
The snow burned my knees through the holes in my trousers, and I had been kneeling for what felt like hours, though time moved differently when you were waiting to die, and I had been waiting to die for as long as I could remember.The chains bit into my wrists, the metal so cold that it felt like







