Twenty-Three: Wren

The moon hangs like a guillotine over the Nightwind courtyard, sharp and pitiless. I stand at the stone’s edge, shackled to the eyes of a hundred wolves, their faces rendered in shades of frost and loathing by the floodlights overhead. The air is so cold it bites, and my breath—ragged, uncooperative—comes in quick gasps that make my ribs ache.

They’ve made a spectacle of it. Not just the pack, but the banners and the torches, the rows of elders in their ancient coats, all arranged for maximum humiliation. I taste sweat and old blood at the back of my mouth, but nothing so much as the sour, electric tang of fear.

Lucian stands above me on the dais, posture so perfect it’s a challenge. He doesn’t look at me, not really. He gazes just over my head, as if I’m a problem he can’t quite solve, a stain he intends to bleach from memory. The mate-bond thrums between us, thin and fragile and so goddamn loud I think the others must hear it too.

He speaks, and every head turns to catch the syllables as they hit the air:

“The law is clear,” he says, voice flat and metallic. “Mate-bond is sacred, but the law is final.”

I want to spit at his feet, but my mouth is dry and the guards at either side would probably rip my arm off for sport. I settle for glaring up at him, willing him to see me, not the stray or the turned or the “accident,” but the woman he couldn’t quite kill even when the Moon herself demanded it.

He lifts his hand, and the room—because that’s what the courtyard is, a living, breathing room—goes quiet in an instant.

“Tonight I name you mate, and tonight I break it.” The words shatter something inside me. “You are unbound. You have no claim. You are nothing to me and nothing to the pack. The law stands.”

It’s not just words. The bond, whatever it was, snaps like a cable inside my chest. My heart stutters and I nearly drop to my knees, vision blurring at the edges as if the moon’s just blown out every bulb in my head. My hands clench, then splay, desperate for any anchor.

The crowd’s reaction is delayed—shock is always slow in a pack. Then it hits, a collective flinch, a hiss of breath sharp as silver. Some faces twist with disgust, a few with something like pity, but most are just blank. They’d rather see a clean execution than this.

The two guards—betas, both, hulking and joyless—step forward as the echo dies. One pulls a set of manacles from his belt: polished silver, heavy as guilt, the inside lined with something that looks like burnt felt. I don’t need a manual to know what happens next.

They grab my wrists, not gently. The pain is immediate—raw, stinging, like dunking open wounds in battery acid. I try to pull back, but the world is swimming and my legs are mush. They snap the cuffs shut and the jolt of it makes me yelp. The sound is pathetic, more animal than human, and the nearest wolves in the front row smirk.

The silver is designed to weaken, to strip the wolf out of a body and leave only meat behind. I feel it like a rot, crawling up my arms, sapping everything good and hot and alive from my veins. My fingers tingle, then go numb. I flex them anyway, refusing to give the crowd the spectacle of collapse.

My coat is some borrowed thing, three sizes too big, but the sleeves ride up when the guards wrench my arms. The bandages on my forearm are visible now, the edges stained red and puckered with fresh scabs. The guards glance at them, then at each other, then at Lucian—like they’re waiting for an excuse to finish what the Moon started.

The taste in my mouth shifts, coppery and bright. I realize I’ve bitten my tongue hard enough to bleed. I smile, just to show them the stain on my teeth.

The pack’s silence is even heavier now. I scan the crowd for a friendly face and find nothing but wolves in human skins, hungry for the next part. There’s a woman in the second row—hair long and glossy, jaw set like concrete—who meets my eyes for a single heartbeat. There’s something behind the mask, something almost sad, but she looks away fast, as if it’s contagious.

Lucian steps down from the dais. The crowd parts for him, even the betas bowing their heads as he passes. He stops in front of me, close enough to touch, but he doesn’t. He stares into my face, searching for something. Maybe fear, maybe submission. I hope he finds neither.

He leans in, voice pitched for my ears only. “You could have made this easier,” he says.

The words land like a slap. I grin wider, blood pooling behind my molars. “You could have made it mean something,” I whisper back.

He straightens, motioning to the guards. “Secure her,” he says, louder now, for the benefit of every eavesdropper in the yard. “We don’t take chances.”

The guards haul me upright, the silver cuffs digging into bone. The pain is clean now, almost clarifying, and I focus on it—on the burn, on the stench of my own skin searing under the metal, on the humiliation of being paraded past a thousand eyes that will never remember my name but will recall the night they saw the Moon’s “mistake” unmade.

As they drag me across the stone, I look up one last time at the sky. The moon’s gone pale, half-hidden behind a cloud, as if it’s ashamed of what’s happening here.

Good. Let it be ashamed.

I don’t lower my head. I don’t cry. I don’t give them anything.

They want a ghost. They can have one, but I’ll be the kind that haunts every last one of them.

The doors close behind, swallowing the noise, the light, the only world I’ve ever known.

All that’s left is the burn of the silver and the echo of Lucian’s voice, repeating: “You are nothing to me and nothing to the pack. The law stands.”

I taste the metal on my tongue and decide I prefer it to the taste of his lies.