The Blackwood Highlands held its breath.
Silence pooled between the pines, heavy and damp, as if the forest itself were listening for a name no one dared to speak.
Elysia stood at the treeline with her hood low and her sharp green eyes combing the underbrush. The scent of earth and wet bark steadied her hands but not her heart. This had once been sanctuary. Now it was only distance—distance from the wars, the oaths, and the night she'd burned every bridge she had left.
She crouched by the stream. Cold water slid around her fingers, catching leaves and thin slivers of light. For a heartbeat the ripples turned to memories—silver fur flashing past, a child's laugh ringing bright, a smile she could no longer touch. She shut her eyes until the images drowned.
"Not today," she breathed.
The cloak's weight settled across her shoulders when she rose. The breeze shifted and carried with it the faint musk of wolves—pack wolves—from far off. Far, but not far enough. Elysia slung a half-empty basket over her arm and followed the worn path home.
Her cabin appeared the way it always did: a low roof swallowed by ivy, windows that caught light like tired eyes, a hearth that held the day's last warmth. The walls knew every piece of her she refused to remember. They had kept her alive. They had also kept her alone.
Inside, she shook leaves from her hem and stirred the slept-in embers. Orange leapt up—the briefest imitation of sunrise. She held her hands to it until her scar ached, that pale line dragging along her forearm like a thread that refused to break.
A howl split the quiet. Not a cry for dominance. A cry that bled panic.
Elysia froze with the iron poker halfway to the grate. Then another howl rolled over the ridge—closer, sharper, flayed with urgency. The air shifted with it; the silence felt crowded.
She went to the door and stood there, palm on the latch, counting her own breaths. She had stayed out of pack business for years. She wouldn't step back into the fire. Couldn't.
The wind carried a third sound—ragged, wrong—the dull crashing of something large forcing its way through brush it had no strength left to part.
The hairs along her neck stirred. Whatever was coming did not know how to hide.
Elysia stepped into the chill and pulled the door quietly shut behind her. The forest knotted around her cabin like a fist. She moved to the edge of the clearing, eyes narrowed, every sense reached outward.
A shape lurched from the green—a wolf, dark fur matted and slick. It staggered, legs folding. The body hit earth with a thud that seemed to shake the ground beneath her feet.
For a breath she didn't move. Blood spread in a black bloom beneath his side. The scent of it chased all doubt from her mind.
Not a rogue. The shoulder bore a symbol, nearly hidden by blood. Not ink. A brand. Elysia cleaned it with the corner of her cloak. A claw slashed through a crescent moon—the mark used by Shadowclaw to warn trespassers. But the lines were wrong, doubled, as if someone had carved it over another.
"Who did this to you?" she asked.
The wolf's eyes fluttered open. Gold met green.
"Help… the Alpha's son," he rasped, voice thready and broken. "Cathal."
Elysia's jaw clenched. Dimitri's heir. A boy caught in the jaws of a storm that should never have found him.
"How far?" she pressed a steadying hand to the wound even as she knew it would not matter.
The wolf's breath hitched. "Ravine… west ridge… trap."
His gaze went glassy.
Elysia held there a moment and then closed his eyes with two fingers. "Rest," she whispered. "I'll find him."
She rose, blood wetting her palm, and looked toward the dark web of trees. The world she had fled had just crawled to her doorstep and died there.
You promised yourself you wouldn't go back.
Her body had already chosen. She took a long breath and slid into the forest's ribs.
The Highlands shifted as she moved—trunks looming, deadfall tugging at her boots, the scent of blood threading the air. It grew stronger as she went. Beneath it ran something acrid: wolfsbane smoke, old and sour, clinging to bark. Hunters? Or packs that fought like hunters?
Shadows stirred ahead. Elysia dropped into a crouch behind a pine and took in the clearing beyond. Three wolves circled something small—no, someone—backed against a scarred birch. Limp. Bleeding. A boy with pale hair, maybe thirteen, clutching a leather thong at his throat as if it were the only thing keeping him on his feet.
Cathal.
Her muscles tightened and everything narrowed to the space between her and them. No time to think. No time to weigh the years she'd spent making sure she never had to do this again.
Elysia stepped out.
"Enough."
The wolves turned, teeth baring white. Her cloak snapped like a banner in the wind. The largest lunged first, expecting a woman in a cape. It found a fighter. She slid past the arc of its jaws and drove her elbow into its ribs. Bone gave. It yelped and rolled, scrambling.
Another came in low. She pivoted, heel slamming beneath its jaw. A crack. It crumpled, stunned. The third feinted right, then left, trying to draw her away from the boy. She didn't follow. She moved between the wolves and the child and stayed there, a wall where there shouldn't have been one.
"Get away from him," she said, voice low and steady.
They understood the meaning if not the words. One crept forward, hackles high. Elysia lifted her hands, palms loose, stance rooted. When it sprang, she met it midair and turned its weight, sending it slamming into the trunk. It slid, dazed.
The remaining wolf paced, eyes bright with a hatred that felt rehearsed. Its gaze flicked not to the boy but to Elysia's face. Recognition? Or orders remembered?
"Leave," she warned.
The wolf's lip curled. It let out a guttural sound, then spun and vanished into the treeline. The others dragged themselves after it, limping. Not a retreat. A report.
Elysia's chest rose and fell too fast. She turned to the boy.
"Are you hurt?"
He stared at her as though she had been pulled from a story he wasn't sure he believed. "N–no," he stammered. "You—"
"Saved you," she supplied, scanning the shadows. "For now." She crouched to his height. "Can you run?"
He nodded, throat bobbing. Up close, she saw the charm gripped in his fist: a thin disc of moonstone, edges worn smooth. Her breath caught. The stone bore a sigil—two crossing branches framing a single star.
Her sigil.
No. Not yours anymore.
"Where did you get that?" she asked before she could stop herself.
Cathal looked down as though seeing it for the first time. "It was my mother's," he said, quiet. "She said it belonged to someone who would always find me."
The words slid under her ribs like a blade turned kindly. Elysia swallowed hard and pushed to her feet.
"We have to move," she said. "More will come."
They left the clearing and bled into the trees. The forest thickened, shadows knitting. Somewhere beyond the ridge a second fight raged—the air trembled with it. Cathal kept close to her heel, breath coming quick.
"They'll come back," he whispered, voice shaking. "Won't they?"
"Yes," she answered, more sharply than she meant. "But we won't be here when they do."
"How did you… fight like that?" he asked a minute later, as if the curiosity couldn't be quiet.
"I learned," Elysia said.
"From who?"
"From losing."
He made a small sound and said nothing more.
They climbed through brambles and over slick stone until the trees fell away and the ridge opened, a narrow spine over a steep cut of earth. The ravine sliced the Highlands like a wound. Elysia glanced along the rim, eyes mapping routes and chances.
"Listen." She gripped Cathal's shoulders and waited until his gaze steadied. "Follow this ridge down to the low point. You'll see a fallen cedar bridging the ravine. Cross it, go another hundred paces, and hide in the laurel. If I'm not there in ten minutes, you keep moving east until you hit the creek. Understand?"
"What about you?"
"I'll buy you those ten minutes."
His mouth trembled. "But—"
"No arguments." The voice that used to command pack halls slipped out before she could call it back. "Head down. Quiet feet."
Cathal nodded, fighting tears he didn't want her to see. He took one step away, then another, then broke into a careful run along the ridge, small against the world.
The first howl that answered came from the north. The second, closer, from the hollow behind her. Elysia rolled her shoulders back and turned to face the trees.
Three wolves spilled from shadow, darker than the first trio, eyes reflecting what little light the sky still gave. She stepped to the ridge edge so they couldn't flank her easily and planted her feet on uneven ground.
The lead wolf snarled. The other two spread like ink.
"I don't want this," she said—truth, not threat.
They leapt.
She moved with an economy learned over a life she no longer claimed. Strike, turn, strike, break. But even calculation bleeds when numbers stack. Teeth closed on her forearm, turning her sleeve red. She hit the offender hard enough to hear it yelp and release. Another raked claws across her shoulder. Heat flared; her vision pinholed.
Breath in. Breaths are bridges. Cross.
She snatched a fallen branch and turned it into a quarterstaff, driving the root end into a chest, cracking across a jaw. The wood vibrated. Her knuckles split and stung. She pushed through the pain, through the old voice that told her to give in, to let the other shape take her bones and make this easy.
No. Not that. Not again.
The last of the three circled, reassessing. Then its ears pricked, gaze cutting to the trees beyond her. The hair on Elysia's arms rose.
She pivoted.
Shadows moved between trunks—hunters' silhouettes, not wolves. Men in dark leather, faces covered, moving with a precision packs didn't love. Metal flashed. The air soured with a stronger thread of wolfsbane.
Reinforcements. Not theirs. Not ours. Something else.
A figure stepped out ahead of them, tall and lean, wearing no hood. His eyes gleamed iron-pale under the clouded light. He smiled like someone greeting a debtor.
"Stand down," he called to the wolves, voice cutting cleanly through the wind.
To Elysia, he inclined his head the way assassins bow in temples. "You run well for a ghost."
Elysia kept the branch angled, blood dripping from her sleeve onto her knuckles. "You brought men into pack lands," she said. "Bold or foolish."
"Neither," he said. "Profitable." He gestured, and two of his men fanned left, two right, careful of the ridge edge. "Hand the boy over."
"He's gone," she said.
His smile widened, untouched by humor. "No. He ran where we wanted him to run. Your appearance was the only variable." His gaze flicked to her forearm, to the scar. "Elysia, is it? Once-Luna. Once-mate. Once-everything."
Her grip tightened. "Who are you?"
"A collector," he said. "Of debts."
"I owe no one."
"That's the trouble with ghosts," he said lightly. "They forget the living still remember them."
The wolves lowered themselves, muzzles near the dirt, obeying his raised hand. Not pack. Bought. Or broken and branded until obedience tasted like safety.
"Why brand them twice?" Elysia asked, nodding to the scarred symbols she'd seen. "Why carve Shadowclaw over another mark?"
His head tilted. "You noticed. Good. Then you know the answer. Fear travels faster with a familiar face."
The branch creaked in Elysia's hands. "You staged a Shadowclaw raid to draw me out."
"To draw out whoever still cared enough to come," he corrected. "The Highlands whisper about an exile who does not shift, who does not bow, who buries her past beneath moss and smoke." He looked pleased to find the whisper wearing flesh. "And yet here you are, bleeding for a boy not yours."
Not yours. The words slid over the memory of a moonstone disc pressed into a small palm by a woman with eyes like winter.
"Last chance," he said, raising his hand. "Call the boy, or I take your head. Either gives me what I want."
"What you want?" Elysia asked, buying seconds. Her breaths raked her throat.
"To sell you to the highest bidder," he said pleasantly. "Shadowclaw pays for problems. Darkclaw pays for trophies. Either would pay to collar the Ashen Wolf."
The old name cracked something in her chest.
Behind him, a soft cry carried on the wind. High. Young.
Cathal.
He hadn't made it far enough.
Elysia didn't turn her head. She couldn't. The men angled toward the sound. The wolves' ears sprang to attention.
"You think you can take me before I take five of you?" she asked softly.
"I know it won't matter," he said, and flicked his fingers.
The first bolt sang through the air so fast her eyes barely found it. It wasn't aimed at her heart. It struck the branch, shattering it from her hands. Another hissed from the opposite side. She pivoted and batted it aside with her forearm; agony seared—wolfsbane in the metal.
She staggered. Movement blurred. A third bolt arced and kissed her throat. Not a killing shot—an iron collar with a latched head, the kind hunters used on captured alphas. It bit and locked, burning her skin where wolfsbane had been painted along its inner rim.
Her knees hit dirt. She tasted iron. The collar's weight was worse than its sting—symbol heavier than metal.
"Good," the collector murmured. "Stay."
Men moved around her, measured and sure. One pulled a length of chain; another drew a blade not meant to kill quickly. The wolves paced, breath steaming, waiting for the part they'd been promised.
"Don't," came a small voice from the trees to the right, shaking but loud enough to reach the ridge. "Don't hurt her!"
Every face turned. Cathal stood among the laurel at the ravine's lip, fists tight at his sides, eyes huge and bright. He'd left his hiding place because he was a child and children think courage can stop arrows.
"Run," Elysia said, voice raw.
He took a step closer instead. The moonstone glinted at his throat. In the failing light, the sigil there mirrored the one scarred into Elysia's memory—the symbol she had once worn when she stood in halls made for howls and vows.
The collector's eyes lit with satisfaction. "There he is."
"Touch him," Elysia said, and something old as bone uncoiled inside her, "and I will end you before you draw your next breath."
He looked almost delighted. "There it is," he said softly, as if hearing a note he'd been waiting for. He raised a hand. His men tightened their circle. "Shift, Luna," he told her, voice patient and cruel. "Or watch the boy die."
The collar burned hotter as if it could hear him. Elysia locked her jaw so hard it ached. She had vowed never to wear the other shape again. She had promised the dead and the living both.
Cathal's small shoulders squared. "Please," he whispered. "Whoever you are."
Whoever you are.
Elysia lifted her head. The forest held its breath a second time. The wolves leaned as one. The men raised their bows.
She didn't look at the collector. She looked at the boy and at the moonstone that should never have survived this long, and she made a choice she would pay for with every step after.
Something inside her cracked and then didn't crack—opened. Her bones remembered their other language. Heat rolled through her veins. The collar sizzled as fur threatened to break skin where skin wanted to stay.
She dragged the change back with a snarl ripped from a place that had no words. Not yet. Not on his command.
"Last chance," the collector said.
Elysia spat blood onto the ground and smiled with her teeth.
"Come and take me."
He dropped his hand.
Arrows sang. Wolves sprang.
And Elysia launched herself into the black mouth of the clearing—straight at the collector—just as an answering howl shook the Highlands, a sound so deep the ground seemed to tremble.
It came from the ravine. It carried an old claim.
Every head turned at once.
"Down!" someone shouted.
Elysia's world flashed white, then red, as something enormous moved in the trees beyond Cathal—silver in the failing light, terrible and beautiful as winter—and the last thing she saw before the wolves hit her was the boy's moonstone catching that silver like a star.