Twenty-One: Lucian

The double doors spit us into the open air, the night colder than any room I’ve ever sat in. The courtyard is packed—wolves on every step, every flat surface, even the rooflines where the youngest brats have climbed for a view. All of them pointed one direction, eyes hungry and white-rimmed in the torchlight, chins high so the breath comes out like foggy confession.

The banners are out for spectacle: every house and bloodline’s, layered in blues and grays and bone-white, but ours—mine—dominates. The Vale wolf, all jaw and hunger, stitched in silver on midnight blue, frost riming the snarl. Wind snaps the canvas so the edges whip like whips, sharp and angry.

They’ve salted the dais, a low semicircle of stone raised just enough to put me over the crowd. It’s cold up here; the wind slices through the wool and into my marrow. The back of my neck prickles with static, old instincts screaming that too many eyes are too close for safety.

I scan the rows: the old guard in front, faces mapped with the scars of every rule enforced and every debt collected; then the betas and their seconds, chins up, hands clasped behind backs in a show of unity. Behind them, the rest—the workers, the omegas, the children who couldn’t be kept in their beds. The line of their bodies points at me like a river’s current, but it’s the silence that’s loudest. Not a cough, not a shuffle. Just waiting.

Jace waits at my right, chin tucked in, stance perfect. He gives a barely perceptible nod.

I step forward, let the crowd see the set of my jaw, the bite of my voice. “Bring her,” I say.

Two of the guards move to the corridor, boots crisp on stone. The mate-bond, which had dulled to a background hiss, spikes so suddenly I flinch. There’s no warning—just a sharp, radiant pulse that swamps every other sense for half a second. I steady myself against it, refusing to show the tremor.

They bring Wren out through the old service door, the one used for deliveries and garbage. The symbolism isn’t subtle, but it’s effective. She looks smaller than I remember—barefoot, coat hanging open and slipping off her left shoulder, the raw skin at her wrists gone red from the shackles. The bandages on her arms have already bled through; the white turns rusty, then brown. She smells of pain and sweat and the stubborn, bright acid of her own refusal to break.

They make her kneel at the base of the dais. Jace tenses, but I keep my face flat. She tips her chin up anyway, refusing to give them the satisfaction, eyes locked on mine. The mate-bond howls between us, loud as the full moon’s scream. It rattles my teeth, lights up my gut, almost drowns out the taste of metal in my mouth.

I try not to look at her, but there’s nowhere else. Her eyes are a punch: defiance, hate, some other thing I’m not ready to name. They make it hard to breathe.

I clear my throat, taste old blood. The words come out perfect anyway.

“Nightwind,” I say, and the word thuds through the air. “You know why we’re called tonight.”

A ripple: shoulders squared, attention doubled. Even the brats on the roof freeze.

I pace the dais, hands clasped behind my back. Every movement calculated.

“Last night, our territory was violated. Not by outsiders, not by the lost, but by our own.” My gaze cuts to Wren, then snaps back to the crowd. “By someone who carries the wolf, but not the blood.”

A murmur—subdued, but definite. I sense the debate begin: is she wolf, or just the mistake the law was written to correct?

“In our history, we have survived by drawing the line. Bloodline. Pack. Law.” I let the words echo, each heavier than the last. “We don’t tolerate dilution. We don’t reward the accident of a bite. We survive because we’re ruthless when we need to be.”

Jace is watching me, expression granite. He knows I’m off-script, but only by a hair.

“Tonight, tradition says we should cleanse the blood.” I look at the elders, every face gone sharp. “Tonight, I would honor that, but—” My voice catches, just enough to make the air in the courtyard crackle.

I taste Wren, raw and vital, alive in a way that has no name in the old laws.

“She ran,” I say, voice hoarse. “She survived the first shift, the hunt, and the cull. That’s not luck. That’s will.” Another ripple, this one confusion. “We are taught to destroy what the moon does by accident, but we’ve never seen an accident like this.”

The wind shifts, brings the scent of pine smoke from the kitchen chimneys. It mixes with the musk of hundreds of wolves, the tang of sweat and anticipation.

I step to the edge of the dais, voice dropped to the register I use for private warnings.

“There’s something else,” I say. “A thing none of you know, but you’ll all feel it soon enough.”

I look down at Wren. Her hands are fists, white-knuckled despite the blood loss, but her jaw is set. Our eyes lock. The mate-bond surges—a punch and a caress, all at once. My pulse stutters, then doubles.

I turn back to the crowd, let them see the mask drop for half a breath. “The mate-bond is real.” The words are a stone thrown into a frozen lake: silence, then crack, then chaos.

The crowd erupts, not with sound but movement—a hundred tiny shifts, bodies reorienting, mouths opening then snapping shut, the urge to speak stamped down by discipline or fear. The elders lean in, old eyes gone cold. The young wolves stare, mouths open, as if the idea is obscene.

I raise my hands for calm. “I have not chosen this. The moon does not ask.” My voice is steel now, every syllable precise. “But I will not pretend it didn’t happen. And I will not pretend I am above the law.”

A pause, the longest yet.

“The law says a turned wolf cannot live,” I say. “But the law has never met this wolf.” My gaze finds Wren again, and this time I let the mask crack, just a little, just for her.

The silence stretches, full of the metallic taste of blood and the weight of every life in the yard.

I finish the line, voice flat as the winter sky: “Tonight, I choose the law. But tomorrow, I will question it.”

I step back, letting the words do what they must. The banners whip in the wind, frost falling like confetti. The crowd absorbs it—some faces harden, some go soft, some look away.

I look at Wren one last time. The bond is a wound, a promise, a curse. It burns hotter with every second I don’t move.

“Take her inside,” I say, not loud.

Jace signals the guards. Wren stands, unassisted, and walks ahead of them, never flinching, never bowing.

The crowd parts for her, and for the first time in a thousand years, I think I see the law blink.

The wind carries her scent after, sharp and clean, and I breathe it in like medicine.

Tomorrow, I tell myself. Tomorrow, the world will be different.

Tonight, I hold the line.