CHAPTER 12: The Unopened Letter

POV: Rhydian

The fog never really left the garden these days. It just sat low in the grass, turning the stone paths grey and slick. I stood back under the shadow of the archway, my boots damp, watching Freya drop into her training stance.

Sable was circling her, whispering things I couldn't catch even with my ears straining. The drills they did didn't look like any pack work I’d ever seen on the border. Freya wasn't just learning to defend herself. She was digging for something deep inside her own skin.

Every single time she shifted now, her wolf came out larger. The fur was turning darker,, looking less like a standard pack omega and more like something born out of the ancient woods before the treaties were signed. Her movements had gone from careful to lethal and precise.

Watching her grow stronger made this weird knot form right behind my ribs. It was a tight, annoying pressure that I absolutely refused to put a name to. I was the guard. I got paid to keep her alive and keep everyone else out. That was the boundary.

The problem wasn't the rogues anymore, though. It was the guy signing my coin.

Zevren stood a few paces to my left, his arms crossed tight over his chest. The smug, proud look he used to wear during her early training sessions had completely soured over the last few days.

When Freya broke her shift, stumbling slightly as the bones snapped back into her human form, Zevren was moving before she could even catch her balance. He stepped right into her space and caught her by the waist. His long fingers dug into the fabric of her loose shirt, lingering there, holding her against his side just a little too hard.

“You're adapting well,” Zevren said. His voice was smooth, but his eyes were tracking the line of her throat, watching her pulse jump like a wolf sizing up meat. “Sable tells me your capacity is doubling with every session.”

Freya didn't pull away, “I'm just doing what she tells me to do, Zevren.”

“Good,” he murmured, not letting go of her waist. His thumb brushed against her side, a public claim for anyone in the courtyard to see. “Everything you are building here belongs to this pack. It belongs to me. Remember that, Freya.”

My hand twitched before I forced my fingers to go flat against my thigh.

I wanted to walk right out onto the grass. I wanted to tear his hand off her skin, stand directly between them, and tell him to back the hell up. It was a stupid urge. It was dangerous, it was suicidal, and it was exactly the kind of thinking Zevren had warned me against on my first day here. 

“She isn't for you.”

I knew the rules of the game. I knew what happened to grunts who forgot their place. But watching the way his eyes followed her when she finally pulled away and turned her back, tracking her like a prize he couldn't wait to lock in a vault, made the blood in my veins turn cold.

This place wasn't a sanctuary for her. It was just a prettier cage, and Zevren was already turning the key.

The morning mist didn't stand a chance.

Sable had told her to reach past the wolf, but Freya didn't stop where the old woman wanted her to. I could see it in her eyes the second she went too far.

The temperature didn't just drop this time; the air around her literally started to shimmer like a heat mirage in the middle of winter. Her eyes flooded with this blinding, violent silver light that didn't look like any wolf reflection I’d ever seen. Then, she screamed.

The power erupted.

A massive blast wave surged outward from where she knelt. The stone fountain behind her instantly webbed with deep fractures before exploding into a shower of sharp gravel, and the nearest oak tree split clean down the middle with a deafening crack, wood splinters flying like arrows.

My brain didn't even consult the rest of me. I was already moving.

The impact hit me as I felt two of my ribs snap and the heat of the surge scorched the skin across my neck and shoulder. The blast lifted me right off my feet, throwing me backward until my spine slammed hard into the stone garden wall. The air rushed out of my lungs in one bloody gasp, and everything went dark for a second.

When my eyes finally cracked back open, the entire world was tilting sideways.

The smoke was thick, but Freya was right there. She was kneeling over me in the dirt, her face white with terror, her small hands pressing flat against my chest right over the broken bone. That terrifying light was still bleeding out of her skin, swirling around her fingers, dripping down until it mixed directly with the dark red blood soaking through my torn shirt.

“Rhydian,” she choked out, her voice trembling so violently she could barely form the syllables. “Rhydian, stay still. Don't move. God, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—I couldn't stop it.”

“Freya,” I wheezed, the taste of blood thick in my mouth as I tried to draw a breath.

Her touch was freezing, but where the light sank into my chest, the agony in my ribs started to dull into a strange, numbing heat. She was healing me. Or the thing inside her was.

I reached up, my shaking fingers catching her wrist to try and pull her back before she drained herself completely, but she wouldn't budge. She just pressed down harder, her silver eyes locked onto mine, binding us together in the middle of the wreckage.

The smell of damp stone and stale tallow candle wax was the first thing that drifted back into my head.

I blinked against the dim light, gasping as a sharp, white-hot line of pain tore across my ribs. My chest was wrapped so tight in linen bandages that I could barely expand my lungs. I was back in my own quarters—the small, drafty room down in the lower barracks where they kept the low-level enforcers.

I turned my head slowly, my neck stiff, and found Freya. She was curled up in the battered wooden chair beside my cot, her knees pulled up to her chest, her dark hair falling over her face. She hadn't left. My tracker senses picked up the faint, bitter scent of dried blood and old tea lingering on her clothes—the healers had obviously tried to shove her out of the room, and she’d dug her heels in until they gave up.

As I shifted, the old mattress gave a loud creak.

Freya snapped awake instantly. Her head jerked up, her eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep and swollen from crying. The moment her gaze landed on mine, her face twisted into this look that was furious and absolutely terrified all at once.

“You're a complete idiot,” she choked out, her voice raw. She leaned forward, her hands clenching into tight fists on her knees. “I could have killed you, Rhydian. Do you understand that? That blast... I lost control. I couldn't stop the hunger. If you hadn't thrown yourself in front of me, you wouldn't be breathing right now.”

“But I am,” I muttered, my voice sounding like gravel being ground under a boot. I managed a tiny, weak shrug that made my side burn. “You didn't kill me. I'm too stubborn to die in a garden, Freya.”

She let out a shaky breath that was half a sob, dropping her forehead into her palms.

For the first time since they assigned me to her, there were no stone arches, no training fields, and no Alpha lurking in the shadows to watch where my hands fell.

“Why did you do it?” she asked quietly, looking back up through her fingers. “You're just a guard. Zevren pays you to watch the fence, not to take a blast for me.”

“I used to do a lot worse for Zevren's network,” I said, staring up at the cracked rafters of the ceiling. The pain medication was making my head swim, but the words needed to come out. 

“Before they put me on border patrol, I was in his enforcement ring. The black ops stuff. I did the jobs that didn't go into the ledger. Jobs where people didn't come back.”

Freya stayed still, listening.

“I followed orders,” I whispered, the taste of guilt heavy on my tongue. “Never asked who gave them. Never asked why a family had to disappear from a sector or why a rogue pack’s camp had to burn. People died because I didn't care enough to look at their faces. I was just a weapon with a paycheck.”

I turned my head to look at her. “But the morning they assigned me to you... I saw you standing out in the dawn light. You were just trying to learn how to breathe again after everything they did to you at Shadowbrook. You were broken, but you were still trying to stand up. I looked at you and decided I wanted to be better. I wanted to protect something that actually mattered, for once in my miserable life.”

Freya didn't say a word for a long time. The quiet in the room stretched out until the candle on the small table gave a loud pop, the wick drowning in grease. Her hand moved automatically, her fingers sliding down to rest flat against the curve of her belly.

It was a gesture I’d watched her do a hundred times in the garden, but tonight, her hand was trembling.

“Rhydian,” she said, her voice dropping so low I had to strain to hear it over the wind outside. “It's not just one.”

I frowned, my chest tightening against the bandages. “What?”

“The baby,” she whispered, her eyes locking onto mine with an intensity that made the hair on my arms stand up. “There are two and I've been carrying them alone, hiding the second pulse from Veda, from Sable, from everyone. Especially from Zevren.”

Twins. An Omega carrying twins from a rival bloodline, developing a magical hunger that could level a courtyard, all while living under the roof of an Alpha who treated her like a personal trophy. The math was catastrophic. If Zevren found out she was carrying two heirs instead of one, he’d lock her in the deepest vault in the valley and extract them like ore from a mine.

I lay perfectly flat on the cot, feeling the massive, terrifying weight of that secret settle over my chest like a wet wool blanket. It changed everything. It turned a simple guard assignment into an execution order if we got caught.

“Hey,” I said, reaching out from under the blanket. My fingers were shaky, but I found her wrist and held on, “Look at me.”

She lifted her eyes, her breath catching.

“I'm not letting him have them,” I said, and for the first time in ten years, my voice didn't have a single trace of doubt in it.

“I don't care what it costs me. I don't care if I have to burn this entire valley to the ground to give you an opening. I will protect you, Freya. All three of you.”

I meant it. More than I’d ever meant anything since the day they put a sword in my hand. And looking at the small nod she gave me in return, I knew the cage was finally cracking.