Chapter 14

FREYA

The world came back to me in pieces, none of them in order.

Cold air first, and then the feeling of moving without walking, a rhythm under me that didn’t match my own footsteps. My cheek was pressed against something warm, something that smelled like pine and rain and skin, and for a long, disoriented stretch I let myself believe it was Dante.

That scent had haunted me for weeks after the night we met, faint traces of it clinging to memory even after he’d made it clear he wanted nothing to do with whatever the bond between us was trying to become. I hadn’t smelled it since. Feeling it now, wrapped around me while my body refused to fully wake, stirred some emotions I would preferred locked forever. 

“Dante,” I mumbled, or tried to. My mouth wasn’t cooperating. My whole body felt like it belonged to someone else, heavy and slow, refusing every order I gave it.

The arms carrying me went very still for a second.

“Wrong twin,” a voice said above me, low and amused even through what sounded like genuine concern underneath it. “Try again.”

I forced my eyes open, just barely, just enough to catch a blurred outline of a jaw, dark hair falling forward, eyes that caught what little moonlight there was and held it in a way that felt different from what I remembered. Similar, but not the same. The shape of Dante’s face on someone whose eyes moved differently, whose mouth was already curved into something wry even in the middle of what was clearly an emergency.

“Damien,” I got out, and my voice came out cracked and small, nothing like the voice I’d used to strip my father’s family apart in that hall a few hours ago.

“There she is.” He shifted me slightly, adjusting his grip like I weighed nothing at all, which I knew wasn’t true, not in this dress, not after everything. “You’ve been out for almost twenty minutes. I was starting to think I’d have to carry you the rest of the way just to have something to complain about at dinner.”

“Put me down.”

“No.”

“I don’t need—”

“You collapsed face-first past your own pack’s border in a ball gown with no shoes and blood on your feet,” he said, not unkindly, but with an edge that told me he wasn’t going to be argued out of this one. “You need quite a lot of things right now, actually. Being carried is the least of your problems.”

I wanted to be angry about it. I didn’t have the strength to manage anger, not on top of everything my body was already fighting to process, so I let my head drop back against his shoulder instead and gave up trying to hold myself upright through sheer will.

“Why are you even out here,” I mumbled. “This isn’t your territory.”

“It’s about to be, for the next few minutes, because I’m about to carry you straight through the border marker whether you like it or not.” His voice had gone quieter now, less performance in it, something more careful underneath. “You’re on Hamilton land in about thirty seconds, Freya. I need you to understand that before we get there, because I have a feeling you’re not going to love how my father reacts to finding an Ashford unconscious in his front hall.”

Hamilton land. My stomach dropped even through the fog still clouding my head. Hamilton was the pack every Ashford story I’d grown up with painted as the enemy, old blood between the two territories going back longer than I’d been alive, a rivalry my father had never once let any of us forget.

“No,” I said, trying to push against his chest, finding I had almost no strength to do it with. “No, take me back. Anywhere but there.”

“Back to what?” His voice was gentle when he said it, which somehow made it worse than if he’d been cruel. “Freya. I know what happened tonight. Word travels fast between borders when a pack banishes its own Alpha’s daughter in front of nine other packs. There is no back.”

I didn’t have an answer for that. I felt something in my throat close up instead, and I turned my face into his shoulder so he wouldn’t watch me lose whatever composure I had left, and he let me, didn’t say anything else, just kept walking with that same steady, unhurried pace. Like carrying an unconscious enemy’s daughter across a hostile border was something he did every other Tuesday.

I must have drifted asleep again, because the next thing I knew there was light, warm and gold, spilling out from somewhere ahead of us, and the ground had changed under Damien’s feet from packed earth to stone.

“Alpha,” Damien said, and something in his voice shifted, straightened, all the easy humor tucking itself away somewhere I couldn’t see. “Found her past the Ashford line. She’s Ashford’s daughter. Was, I suppose, given what I’ve heard.”

I forced my eyes open again, fighting through the fog, and found myself looking up into a face that made every hair on my arms rise at once. Older than Damien, harder around the eyes, carved from the same bloodline but weathered into something far more dangerous. Alpha Kendrick Hamilton, the name my father had used my entire childhood as a kind of warning, the man half our territory’s ghost stories were built around.

He studied me for a long moment, unreadable, the way you’d study a lost puppy you found on your doorstep and hadn’t decided yet whether to keep.

“Interesting,” he said.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​