Chapter 2

The word should have sent me running. Report to the Warriors. Let them handle it, let them drag him to the border, let them add his body to the mounds I'd just left.

Instead, I knelt. I couldn't just leave someone to die.

His face was carved from something harder than bone, even slack with unconsciousness—high forehead, blade of a nose, lips pale and parted around shallow breaths. His fingers twitched against the snow, long and calloused, nails packed with dried blood.

God, he'd lost so much blood. How was he still alive?

I touched his throat. The pulse beat against my fingertips, fever-hot and thready, a rabbit's kick.

"Hey." I shook him, gently. Nothing. Harder. His head lolled, exposing his throat, and I saw the scar— sitting above his collarbone like a moon mark. 

I frowned. That mark looked so familiar, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't remember where I'd seen it before.

I looked back at the pack's distant lights, yellow and warm and utterly closed to me now. I looked at the mounds where my parents lay, at the life I'd built from sweat and smithy work and stupid, stupid hope, now burning as thoroughly as the east warehouse.

Then I lifted his arm across my shoulders and stood.

He weighed more than he looked, dense muscle packed tight as a wolf's. My knees screamed. My back groaned, my hips straining against my coat's seams. I walked anyway, one step, then another, dragging him through deepening snow that soaked my boots and froze my ankles and didn't matter at all.

The cottage door fought me, swollen with damp. I kicked it open, dumped him on my parents' bed—the only bed, I'd given Lily hers after the fire—and fetched water from the bucket, tearing my last decent underskirt for bandages. Washed the blood from his face, revealing cheekbones that could cut glass, a jawline meant for coronations rather than frozen ditches.

His eyes opened.

Gold. Not amber, not honey. Gold, like molten metal catching the firelight, fully conscious and assessing me with a predator's flat calculation. I froze, cloth dripping red water onto my floorboards.

"Who are you?"

"Ella." The name escaped before I could catch it, stupid, too late. "Ella of Moonshadow Pack."

His pupils contracted, a flicker of something—recognition? 

I let out a breath. What was I so nervous about? He was just a rogue. He posed no threat to me.

"This is Moonshadow?"

"Yes. Why are you in our pack? I've never seen you before."

Silence stretched. Wind rattled the window, found the gap beneath the door, made the fire dance. His fingers twitched against the blanket, spasming, and I saw the effort it cost him to keep still.

He seemed to be turning something over in his mind. Then, at last, he said — voice scraped raw — "I belong to no pack."

Rogue. Confirmed.

The stories said they were moon-cursed, feral, wolves without law or witness.

I looked at his hands, at the dried blood beneath his nails, at the scar on his throat that matched no weapon I knew. I looked at my door, thin wood and leather hinges, and at the window where snow piled against the glass.

"You're wounded," I said. "Badly. I'll find herbs tomorrow."

"You'd just take in a stranger like that?" He laughed — but it was the kind of laugh that cost him something, half-swallowed by the time it reached the air.

I thought about it, then nodded. "Sure, it's dangerous. But I probably won't live much longer myself, so — might as well save who I can. Consider yourself lucky." I said it bright, almost breezy, the way I always did when the truth was too heavy to hold straight.

"Even without knowing my name?" His fingers traced the edge of the blanket — slow, deliberate, the only part of him that seemed to move with any leisure. He was flat on his back, wounded, half-dressed under my spare quilt, and yet something about him pressed against the room like a weight. Not aggression — something older, quieter, the kind of authority that had never needed to announce itself. His eyes tracked me from beneath heavy lids, unhurried, and I felt, absurdly, like I was the one being assessed.

"Fine. What's your name?"

"First time," he said.

"First time for what?" I frowned.

"First time anyone's spoken to me like that." A beat. "Call me Theron."

I nodded, not thinking much of it.

I turned to the fire, jammed the last black bread on a stick to roast. My stomach gnawed at my spine, a constant grinding I'd learned to ignore.

"Eat this." I set the bread by the bed, didn't touch him. "I work at the slaughterhouse. I'll return at dusk."

"Work?" His voice scraped. "In your condition?"

I looked down at myself. Bloodied. Ripped. My coat gaped over the chest I'd always tried to hide, the waist that never narrowed, the hips that filled too much space. I laughed, and it came out broken, ugly. "I have to eat somehow."

I reached the door. His voice stopped me, stronger now, almost normal.

"Why?"

I didn't turn. "What do you mean?"

"Why did you save me?" I heard him ask.

I turned away, not wanting him to see my face, the cuts and swelling, the body that had cost me everything, or the eyes that had watched Caleb walk away without looking back.

"Because," I said, my hand finding the latch, the cold iron pressing against my even colder palm, "we are same"

He let out a short laugh. "We are same? What makes you say that?"

"Yeah. We're both miserable souls with no home, no family, and no one to turn to." As I spoke, he gave me a mocking smirk, but I ignored it.

The door slammed. Snow hit my cheeks like tiny blades, and I pulled my torn collar higher and walked toward the slaughterhouse, my footprints filling behind me, my shape vanishing into the white.

****

Theron's POV

The door slammed. I counted her footsteps until the wind swallowed them.

Then I sat up.

Blood welled from my shoulder, hot down my chest. I ignored it. I'd had worse—Adrian's ambush in the forest three days ago had left me with six wounds, this one the shallowest. My brother thought he'd finished me. He'd been wrong before. He was wrong now.

I walked to the window. Cold should have bitten. It didn't. Lycan blood ran too hot.

She was still visible. Broad-hipped, shoulders hunched, coat gaping where stones had torn it. I saw the curve of her waist, the swell of her hip, the way she moved with weight most she-wolves lacked. Not fat. Substantial. The kind of body that suggested she could carry more than strangers through snow.

I watched until the snow took her. Then I reached for the mind link I'd kept sealed since Adrian's arrow found me.

Kael. My Beta.

The response came instant, shock vibrating through the connection. Theron? The hells—you're alive?

"Spread word. Prince Theron. Assassinated at the moon ceremony. Dead."

Silence. Then Kael's voice, careful, testing: ...Adrian's already claiming it. Celebrating. The King's bedridden, hasn't spoken in days. Your brother's moving fast, securing alliances, naming himself heir apparent.

"Let him." I looked at the window where she'd vanished. Only white now. "Three months. Then I return."

Three months without a guard, a healer, or anyone to—

"Find someone for me."

"Yes, Your Majesty. Who should I look into?"

"Ella. Moonshadow Pack."

“Parents dead recently, father called traitor. Find how. Find who benefits."

A local? For what purpose?

"Do you think she was involved in the plot against you, Your Majesty?"

I remained silent. I'd found something on the pillow: a curl of brown hair, soft as lamb's wool, caught in the stitching where her head had rested. I rolled it between my fingers and inhaled its scent. Blood, soap, and something underneath I couldn't name.

I remembered the pressure against my ribs, the effortless way she'd hoisted me over her shoulders, when someone of her size should have buckled under my weight.

"She... saved me," I said. "But no Omega can lift a Lycan that easily. Find out what she really is."

And if Adrian's people find you first?

I tucked the hair into my breast pocket, against bare skin.

"Then I'll know Kael failed me." I let my breathing slow, grow shallow, the dying man settling back into my bones. "Three months. Don't contact me unless it's war."

I cut the link.

The fire crackled. Outside, wind howled. Somewhere distant, a small wolf cried to a moon that didn't answer.

I lay back, let the blood soak the sheets, and planned how to kill my brother.

But first, I would learn why a she-wolf built for bearing kings had been left to starve.