Dawn slid between the pines like a knife that didn't care what it cut.
Elysia stepped from the small cabin they had given her and let the cold pull the last of sleep from her bones. The camp moved in purposeful lines: sentries changing posts, runners carrying quiet messages, warriors at the practice ring throwing each other into the dirt until they remembered how to land. She felt the looks on her back—some measuring, some hostile, none careless.
The air still held last night's nerves. Beneath woodsmoke and wet bark lay a sour thread she could name without smelling: wolfsbane. She had scrubbed it from her doorframe before sunup. Whoever laid it knew the exact dose to drop a body to its knees without stopping a heart. Careful. Experienced. Close.
"Elysia!"
She turned as Cathal bounded across the clearing, a grin forcing back the shadows under his eyes. The moonstone disc thudded against his chest with each step, bright as a defiance the night hadn't managed to steal.
"I thought you might want to see the river," he said, breathless with hope. "There's a bend where the water goes glass. It's the best place here."
Elysia hesitated. Eyes followed them openly. "I'm not sure that's a good idea."
"Why not? It's safe."
"It's not the place." She tipped her chin at the watching faces. "It's them."
Cathal followed her gaze, then set his jaw with a courage too big for his years. "They just don't know you yet."
It shouldn't have mattered. It did. She nodded once. "All right. Show me the river."
They had barely cut between two storehouses when a broad shape blocked the path. Kieran—Beta—stood with arms crossed, the scar along his jaw drawn white by the cold. His eyes flicked from Cathal to Elysia and hardened.
"What are you doing?" he asked, tone flat as stone. "You shouldn't be wandering with her, Cathal."
"I'm showing her the territory," the boy said, voice steady by effort alone. "She saved me."
Kieran's laugh held no humor. "Or staged what she saved you from."
Elysia felt her hands curl. She kept them at her sides. "If I wanted him dead, I wouldn't have bled for him."
"You're not one of us," Kieran said, stepping closer until his shadow fell over her boots. "You never will be. Your presence is a risk I didn't vote for."
"My being here was not your decision to make," came a voice behind him.
Dimitri's arrival bent the air. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to.
"Enough," he told Kieran, and the word had teeth.
Kieran swallowed whatever he had been about to say. He gave Elysia one more look—the kind meant to be remembered—and stepped aside.
Elysia and Cathal took the path toward the river in silence. When the trees opened to the water, Cathal plucked a twig and sketched patterns in the damp sand with the solemnity of ritual. Elysia stood at the bank, staring at the current until its cold steadied her.
"I don't get it," Cathal said finally, drawing a star and crossing it with two lines—a symbol she knew too well. "Why can't they see you're good?"
"Because they've been at war long enough to forget what good looks like," she answered. "Fear makes enemies out of everyone it doesn't recognize."
He looked up. "I'm not afraid of you."
The words landed where she kept nothing. She didn't trust herself to reply. She let the water say it for her, and after a while, he leaned against her hip the way children lean into the idea that someone might stay.
By afternoon she drifted to the training ring, drawn by the sound of bodies finding their brutal rhythm. Dimitri stood with his captains, watching. He moved toward her as if he had already debated three ways not to.
"You've grown close to my son," he said. Not accusation. Not blessing.
"He's the one who follows," Elysia replied, eyes on the sparring circle.
"Cathal is young," Dimitri said, tone fraying for the first time. "He's impressionable. He can't afford more losses. None of us can."
"I didn't ask for his trust." She turned to meet him. "But he has it, and I won't punish him for that. He deserves to believe someone will show up when he calls."
Something flickered over Dimitri's face—echo or recognition, she couldn't tell. He masked it as quickly as it came. "You're still a rogue," he said, softer. "My first duty is to the pack. If you're not staying—"
"Don't worry," she cut in. "I have no intention of getting in your way."
His mouth twitched at the corner—frustration or relief. "Good," he said, then seemed to resent the word and left before it could become more.
Evening carried in on a wind that tasted like iron. Elysia sat by the river again, letting the water's slow voice unknot the day. The first howl came clean and high, too far to be a warning, too sharp to be a call for home. The second cut closer. Alarm answered from the watch posts—a low horn that turned every head in camp.
Dark shapes broke the tree line at the perimeter. Shadowclaw met them with fangs and steel. Elysia was already running, the ground a drum under her feet.
The fight at the eastern fence was teeth and mud and breath burned white in the cold. Elysia slid into its heart without needing permission. A Darkclaw wolf lunged—she dropped under it and drove her elbow into its ribs hard enough to make it forget its name. Another came from the blind side—she pivoted, grabbed a wrist where fur met leather, and twisted until the blade fell. She moved as if her body remembered a song she had sworn never to sing again.
Across the churned earth, Kieran barked orders, face knotted with fury that didn't seem aimed at the enemy in front of him. His eyes found Elysia, and his mouth flattened like a wound sealing shut.
The fight ended as quickly as it began. Darkclaw peeled back, leaving blood and the sour smoke of cracked wolfsbane vials in the churned snow. The perimeter held. Warriors howled the all-clear. But the air didn't relax.
This wasn't an attack. It was a test.
Dimitri strode through the wreckage, taking counts, giving quiet orders. He stopped at Elysia, gaze dropping to the faint gray smear still caught in the seam of her boot—the remnant she hadn't been able to wash free.
"What did you find on your door this morning?" he asked.
Wary glances swung their way; Kieran's head tilted, listening without seeming to. Elysia kept her voice low. "Someone brushed wolfsbane across the threshold. Measured. Subtle."
"Hunters' hands," Dimitri said.
"Or hands that know their work," she returned.
Their eyes held a beat too long. Then a young runner skidded up, chest heaving. "Alpha. The northwest post found this on the fence. Fresh." He held out a strip of leather, cut clean. A small iron catch clung to it, smeared with gray paste.
A collar clasp. Elysia's throat tightened. She could still feel the weight of iron that wasn't there.
Kieran reached for the evidence. Dimitri didn't hand it over. He turned the clasp once, twice, then slid it into his own belt pouch.
"Double watches," he said. "No one moves alone after dark."
His captains scattered to obey. The clearing thinned to a few figures—Dimitri, Elysia, Kieran, and the sentry who had brought the find. The Beta's stare never left Elysia's face.
"Whatever this is," Kieran said softly, not bothering to hide the threat, "it started when she arrived."
"Whatever this is," Elysia echoed just as softly, "started long before I did."
The horn sounded again. Not alarm. A single note—the same secretive tone Elysia had heard the night before, thin as a blade slipped between ribs.
No one else seemed to hear it.
Elysia's skin prickled. She turned instinctively toward the laurel beyond the northwest fence. The air there shimmered—not with heat, but with intent. The same sour thread rode the wind.
"Where's Cathal?" she asked, the question tearing loose before she could cage it.
Kieran blinked, surprised by the target. "With his guard."
"Which guard?" Elysia pressed.
Dimitri's head snapped up. He scanned the ring of sentries. A beat. Another. The name that should have answered didn't. He went very still.
Elysia didn't wait for orders. She ran.
Branches whipped her cheeks as she cut behind the storage sheds and into the trees that hemmed the high fence. She dropped to a knee where the snow was thinnest and found what she expected: a child's scuff, a man's deeper tread keeping pace, and a third print that kissed the ground with the care of someone who didn't want to be read at all. The careful one carried the same ash-gray residue she'd scrubbed from her threshold.
She followed the line toward the northwest corner, a snarl building low in her chest. The fence there had been eased open and shut again with a gentleness that insulted the word breach. Whoever did it had done it before.
A twig clicked under a boot. Elysia didn't turn her head.
"Step out," she said quietly.
A figure peeled from the pines two trees back, slow clap mocking the quiet. The collector's hood was down now; his smile was still wrong.
"I was beginning to think you'd stopped hunting," he said.
"You're not a hunt," she answered. "You're a stain."
He laughed, delighted. "And yet you come when I whistle."
"I came because you whistle at children."
"Only the valuable ones." His gaze darted past her shoulder, toward where the trail thinned into dark. "The boy keeps slipping out to meet the voice that tells him what he wants to hear. Mothers make such effective lures—especially when they're dead."
Elysia's vision ghosted red at the edges. "You talk a lot for someone standing inside my reach."
He lifted his hands as if in surrender, revealing the thin leather braid at his wrist—double-carved brand: Shadowclaw slashed over another sigil. "I'm only here to collect on a debt. But it seems your Beta pays late."
The last word hit like a thrown stone. Elysia didn't let her body move. Her heartbeat did that for her.
"Say his name," she said.
The collector tilted his head. "Why? So you can deny it properly?" He took one step back into shadow. "Bring me the Ashen Wolf and the boy forfeit dies slow," he said lightly. "Bring me the boy and the Ashen Wolf may keep her head. Darkclaw pays for trophies. Shadowclaw pays for silence. Either way, I win."
"Not tonight," said another voice—low, lethal.
Dimitri stepped from the opposite side of the trees, eyes pale iron, blade bare. He didn't look at Elysia. He didn't need to.
"Run," he told the collector.
The man smiled—frightened, but only a little. "You were always better at chasing than choosing," he said—and whistled.
Bolts hissed from the dark. Elysia moved into Dimitri without thinking, shoulder to shoulder, turning the angle of their bodies into a shield. One quarrel thudded into a tree, another sparked on rock. A third slammed into her bandage and sent fire racing up her arm.
Wolfsbane.
The ground tilted. Dimitri's hand caught her elbow, hauled her upright. "Stay with me."
Footsteps broke left—two fast, one small. Cathal.
Elysia's body answered what her mind couldn't. She ripped the bolt from her arm, ignoring the way her fingers trembled, and threw herself after the fleeing shapes. The world narrowed to prints and breath and the moonstone's faint clack against a running chest.
Branches clawed. Wind knifed her lungs. Ahead, the trees thinned around a sinkhole where the earth had given way long ago and filled with deadfall and black water. The collector's men vaulted the lip and slid down one side. The boy hesitated, looking back only once—toward the sound of someone he trusted calling his name.
"Cathal!" Elysia's voice tore the night. "Down! Now!"
He dropped. A bolt whispered past the space where his head had been and took a chunk of bark instead.
Elysia hit the rim, boots skidding on frost. Behind her, Kieran crashed through the brush from the opposite direction, breath ragged, eyes fever-bright. He raised a hand—not to shield, not to reach—but to signal.
Shadows answered his sign.
For a heartbeat the world hung still—Dimitri breaking the trees above, Elysia on the rim with poison burning her blood, the boy crouched in the pit clutching the moonstone, the collector's men fanning out like patient wolves—and Kieran, Beta of Shadowclaw, facing Elysia with a look that told the truth he hadn't dared speak aloud.
"Traitor," she breathed.
His mouth twitched. "Survivor."
"Call them off," Dimitri thundered from the ridge.
Kieran didn't flinch. "Step back from the rogue, Alpha," he said, voice even. "Or your son's neck opens first."
Something inside Elysia unclenched and then snapped. The wolfsbane in her veins screamed; the collar burns at her throat flared like coals. Her bones whispered that other language—the one she'd promised never to speak.
Dimitri's gaze cut to her. He didn't ask. He didn't have to. The pack's law, her vow, the boy's life—they all balanced on a blade's width.
Elysia bared her teeth—not in a smile. "Touch him, and I'll show you what the Ashen Wolf does to hands that steal children," she told Kieran, every word smoke and iron.
He raised two fingers.
Crossbow strings sang.
Elysia chose.
Heat tore through her as the change roared up from the place she'd buried it. The first arrow shattered against the bone that wasn't bone anymore. The second kissed fur where skin had been. The third took the moonstone chain and snapped it clean.
The pendant arced once in the air like a falling star.
Cathal screamed her name—
—and the chapter breaks as Elysia launches off the rim into the sinkhole, mid-shift, straight through a net of wolfsbane and steel that slams shut around the boy.