CHAPTER FOUR: Kill Her Before She Awakens

Lyra's POV

They move me to the pack hospital before dawn.

I don't remember much of the walk there — just fragments. The Priestess's hand gripping mine the entire way, refusing to let go even when the healers tried to pry her off.

Guards flanking me on every side, more than I've ever seen assigned to one person, their eyes darting to every shadow like something might leap out of the dark and take me before we reached the doors.

By the time they lay me down in a narrow hospital bed, my whole body feels hollowed out, scraped clean, like whatever woke inside me during the ceremony borrowed every ounce of strength I had and hasn't decided whether to give it back.

I sleep. I don't mean to. It just happens — my eyes close somewhere between the healer pressing a cool cloth to my forehead and the low murmur of voices arguing outside my door, and the next thing I know, hours have passed and the window shows the gray edge of morning.

News, apparently, doesn't sleep.

(WRITER’S POV)

By sunrise, word has already crossed pack borders.

The True Luna may have awakened.

Six words, and they travel faster than any messenger wolf could carry them — passed between hunters at dawn patrol, whispered over breakfast tables, shouted between rooftops in packs three territories away.

By midday, every wolf within running distance of Blackmoor Pack knows the name Lyra, knows the word seal, knows the moon turned red the night an Alpha rejected a girl everyone had laughed at.

Not everyone celebrates.

In a pack that doesn't officially exist — one with no territory, no Alpha, no name spoken above a whisper — a different kind of meeting is already underway.

They call themselves the Shadow Council, though no outsider has ever confirmed that name, because no outsider has ever lived to repeat it. For centuries, their purpose has stayed the same: find the True Luna before she wakes, and make sure she never does.

Their leader sits at the head of a stone table lit only by a single dying torch, listening to a runner deliver the same four words that are already spreading through every pack in the region.

He doesn't ask questions. He doesn't need to.

"Confirmed?" he asks anyway, out of habit more than doubt.

"The seal appeared, sir. Blackmoor Priestess herself witnessed it. It's real."

The leader is quiet for a long moment, fingers steepled beneath a face no one at that table has ever seen fully lit.

"Every generation," he says finally, "we tell ourselves this will be the one that stays asleep. Every generation, we're wrong."

No one answers. No one is meant to.

He rises, and the torchlight catches the edge of a silver ring on his hand — old, worn smooth by centuries of the same decision being made over and over.

"Before sunrise," he says, voice flat, almost bored, like he's ordering someone to fetch water rather than end a life. "Kill the skinny girl."

Lyra’s POV

I don't know any of that yet. I only know that when I wake again, it's evening, my body still aches in places I didn't know could ache, and Draven is standing in the doorway of my hospital room.

He hasn't come inside. He's just standing there, one hand braced against the frame, staring at me like he's trying to solve something he doesn't have the pieces for.

"You're awake," he says. It's not a question.

"Barely." My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to.

He doesn't move closer. There's a wariness in the set of his shoulders that wasn't there before — not disgust anymore.

Something closer to unease, the kind a man gets when the ground under his feet turns out to be less solid than he thought.

"The Priestess says you're something ancient," he says slowly. "Something the packs haven't seen in generations."

"I heard."

"I don't know what to do with that." He says it quietly, almost to himself, like the admission costs him something.

Neither do I, I want to say, but the words stick.

For a moment, neither of us speaks. His eyes drop to the sheets, to my hands resting against them, and something in his jaw tightens — like he's fighting a battle I can't see the shape of.

He tells me, later, that his wolf hasn't stopped pacing since the ceremony. That for the first time in his life as Alpha, the animal beneath his skin is refusing to settle, refusing to agree with a single decision his human mind makes.

He doesn't say it kindly. He says it like a complaint, like his own body has betrayed him by wanting something he rejected out loud in front of three hundred witnesses.

"I made a decision," he says, more to himself than to me. "My wolf doesn't get to argue with it after the fact."

"Maybe your wolf knew something you didn't," I say.

His eyes snap to mine, and for a second, something passes between us that isn't disgust, isn't pity, isn't any of the things I've come to expect from an Alpha looking at me. It's closer to fear. Fear of being wrong. Fear of what being wrong might cost.

He doesn't answer. He just turns and leaves, the door swinging shut behind him, and I'm left alone with the hum of the healing room and the too-loud sound of my own heartbeat.

I don't know how long I lie there before exhaustion pulls me under again. It doesn't feel like real sleep — more like drifting somewhere just beneath the surface, aware of the room, the cold sheets, the quiet.

Aware, eventually, of something that isn't quiet at all.

A shift in the air. A change in the pressure of the room, subtle enough that anyone without my new, aching senses might have missed it entirely.

My eyes open a crack.

There's a figure standing at the foot of my bed.

Hooded. Silent. Still, in a way that human bodies aren't supposed to be still — no breathing I can hear, no shuffle of weight from one foot to the other, like he's been carved out of the dark itself and only just stepped free of it.

I try to move. My body doesn't listen — too weak, too slow, the aftermath of whatever woke inside me still pinning me to the mattress like invisible chains.

The figure steps closer.

Moonlight from the window catches a blade as it rises — long, thin, and unmistakably silver, the kind of metal that isn't meant for ordinary wolves. The kind meant for something that isn't supposed to survive it.

I try to scream. Nothing comes out but a broken breath.

The dagger lifts higher, catching the light one last time before the hooded figure's arm draws back, poised, steady, patient —

And falls.

Straight toward my heart.