The pines around Wylder’s territory didn’t crowd me. They gave us room to run.
By the fifth day, our training had stopped feeling like a sequence of drills and started feeling like a conversation. We ran three hours every dawn and two more before dusk. Every time I shifted, the tearing ache grew fainter, replaced by a deep, vibrating heat that set Seraphine’s paws humming against the damp earth.
Through the mind-link, Wylder’s presence was a steady, quiet pressure. Not an anchor meant to drag me down, but a bank holding a river.
*Corner pivot,* he sent, his dark Lycan wolf flashing through the ferns thirty paces ahead. *Keep your flank protected. Close the gap.*
He didn't pull his punches. He drove hard into a feint, his shoulder striking mine with enough force to kick up clods of dirt. My back legs scrambled for purchase. In the past, the panic would have made me shrink, choking Seraphine back until my ribs locked up.
Not today.
Seraphine didn’t just brace; she flared. A pulse of blinding, raw pressure cracked out from my chest like ice shattering on a frozen lake. It was a biological shockwave, humming with ancient frequency.
Wylder stopped dead. His massive dark paws dug into the loam, skidding three feet before his weight halted. His head snapped toward me, ears pitched forward, eyes wide with pure, predatory shock. The air between us crackled, so thick with the silver aura that neither of us could move.
We shifted back in the cold mountain air, our breathing ragged.
Wylder pulled on his shirt, but he didn’t speak right away. He stood by a moss-covered boulder, utterly still, watching me with that unhurried intensity of his.
"What was that?" I asked, my voice thin. My fingers trembled at my collarbone.
He looked at the torn ferns between our feet, then up to my face. "That was always in you."
It was the most he had said at once since I arrived. He didn’t offer a smile, but the cedar-and-rain scent around him deepened, wrapping over my raw edges until the trembling stopped.
***
That evening, the kitchen smelled like roasted garlic and stewed beef. It was warm. The wood stove in the corner ticked softly as the iron expanded.
Wylder set a heavy ceramic bowl in front of me, full of hot stew and steaming potatoes. He sat down across from me with his own bowl, reaching for a piece of crusty bread. He didn't hover. He didn't demand I praise the meal.
I picked up my spoon, but the steam rising against my chin made my chest tighten with an old, familiar ache.
I saw the cold formica counter in Ironridge.
Thanksgiving.
I had roasted a turkey for eight hours, carefully brushing butter over the skin until it was golden, setting out cloth napkins and the good silverware Lukas liked. At seven o’clock, the kitchen had gone dead silent. At eight, the bond had carried his flat, careless voice into my head: *Delilah’s family invited me over. She needs support with the territory borders. Eat without me.*
In the background, through the open line, I had heard Delilah’s bright, peeling laughter. *“Lukas, tell my brother that story again!”*
I had eaten cold dark meat with my fingers, standing over the sink so I wouldn't dirty a plate, while the mark on my neck burned with humiliation. I had told myself he was doing Alpha work. I had lied to myself until the lie became a cage.
My fingers froze on the spoon. The food in front of me blurred.
Wylder didn't ask what was wrong. He didn't say my name or tell me I was safe now. He just paused his own spoon halfway to his mouth. His gray eyes rested on my hands, reading the white knuckles, the shallow rise and fall of my collarbone. Through the faint, tentative brush of the bond growing between us, I felt his wolf nudge mine—warm, solid, asking for nothing.
Without a word, Wylder stood up. He walked over to the cabinet, pulled out a second kettle, and set it on the stove for tea.
"We'll skip the evening footwork," he said quietly, his back to me as he watched the water. "Rest tonight. The arena will be there tomorrow."
He didn't ask me to explain the shadow on my face. He just changed the world around me so I could breathe inside it.
I swallowed, the tightness in my throat finally easing. "Thank you," I whispered.
He only nodded, leaning against the counter while the kettle began to hum.
***
Seven hundred miles southeast, in the Ironridge training yard, the dirt was being torn to shreds for all the wrong reasons.
"Again!" Lukas roared, his voice cracking with an Alpha tone that carried none of its old weight. "Your lines are ragged! Delta unit, recover!"
The warriors scrambled, but their movements were stiff, unsettled. They weren't moving with precision; they were flinching. Lukas stood on the observation platform, his silver-grey fur dull and patchy, stripped of the vibrant sheen it had carried for years. His shoulders were drawn high, his jaw tight.
Beside him, Delilah stood in her sleek red training gear, the gold Luna circlet gleaming in the gray light. But when the front line collapsed during a mock charge, her copper wolf couldn't close the gap. She missed the intercept by two full seconds, snarling as she tumbled into the dust.
The lower-ranked wolves whimpered, glancing nervously at each other. The air smelled foul—sour with anxiety and thin authority.
Beta Caleb Merritt stood near the fence, arms crossed over his chest. He watched Lukas bark another pointless order. Caleb had stayed quiet for ten years, watching Emory smooth over every fracture, watching her quiet presence absorb the jagged edges of Lukas’s temper until the pack felt whole.
Now, Emory was gone. And the rot was showing.
Delilah shifted back, brushing dirt from her thighs with a sharp scowl. "They aren't listening, Lukas. You need to discipline them."
Lukas drew that slow breath through his nose, but his hands were shaking at his sides. His wolf was pacing inside his skull, frantic, starved of the cool, silver calm it had fed on for a decade. The bond with Delilah was tight, but it was hollow—a knot tied in dry grass.
"Shut up, Delilah," he snapped, turning on his heel.
He told himself it was the cold weather. He told himself the pack was just undisciplined. He told himself Emory Sullivan was nothing more than a rogue wandering toward her own grave.
He told himself everything except the truth: that the woman he had thrown away was the only reason he had ever been an Alpha at all.
