Luna POV
The Ironveil Pack is on fire.
Not metaphor. Not rumor. Actual fire orange and roaring, eating through the eastern ward buildings like they were made of paper. Luna could smell it before she heard the screaming. She was already running when the first explosion cracked through the night air and shook the ground under her feet.
Now she has her brother's arm over her shoulders and his blood on her hands and she is not stopping.
"Stay with me," she said. "Calder. Eyes open. Stay with me."
"I'm with you." His voice was thin. Wrong. Too thin for someone his size, someone who had always been the loudest person in any room. "I'm right here."
He was not right here. He was fading. She could feel it in the weight of him the way he was leaning into her more with every step, letting her carry more, trusting her with more than he should have to.
The wound across his ribs had gone through something important. She did not let herself think about how important.
Keep moving. Get him behind the grain store. Think after.
The grain store was at the far edge of pack territory, old and mostly forgotten nobody stored grain there anymore, but the walls were thick stone and the Ashen Claw soldiers were tearing through the inner buildings first. It was the safest place she could think of.
Safe. That word had never meant much at Ironveil.
She got him there. She got him down against the back wall, in the shadow and the cold, and she pressed both hands hard against the wound in his ribs the way she had seen the pack healers do. The blood was warm and it did not stop.
"Luna." He reached up and put his hand over hers.
"Don't," she said.
"I just"
"Don't say it. You're not leaving me here. I won't allow it." She pressed harder and felt him wince and hated herself for causing it and did not move her hands. "You don't get to die tonight. That is not happening tonight."
He looked at her the way he had always looked at her like she was the most important thing he had ever been responsible for. Like she mattered. Like her existing in the world was something that made the world better.
Nobody else in the Ironveil Pack had ever looked at her that way. Not once.
Their father looked through her. Her half-sister Mira looked at her like a problem. The pack looked at her like a mistake the Alpha's illegitimate wolfless daughter, taking up space, serving food, staying quiet, staying small.
Calder had never once looked at her like that.
"You are the strongest person I know," he said. "You know that, right? Not me. You."
"You're delirious from blood loss."
"Luna."
"Calder."
He almost smiled. "Run without me. If they come this way"
"No."
"Listen"
"No." She said it the same way both times. Flat. Final. Not a discussion. "I am not running without you. Stop asking."
He stopped asking. He closed his eyes just for a second, just to rest and she dug her fingers harder into the wound to keep the pressure and watched his face and counted his breaths and tried not to hear how close the screaming was getting.
The Ashen Claw Pack had been enemies of Ironveil for three years. Border disputes, resource fights, the usual reasons wolves destroyed each other. Luna had never thought they would actually breach the wards. Their Alpha a brutal man named Sorn had always seemed like a problem for tomorrow.
Tonight was tomorrow.
She could hear them through the walls. Orders barked in the Ashen Claw dialect. Boots on gravel. The specific sound of a door being broken rather than opened.
Don't move. Don't breathe loud. Think small.
She had spent twenty-one years thinking small. She was good at it.
Calder's breathing steadied slightly. Not better just not worse. She took it.
"Father got Mira out," he murmured without opening his eyes. "I saw the transport leave the north gate."
Luna said nothing.
"He'll send someone back for us."
She still said nothing. She had seen the transport leave too. She had been standing in the smoke of the east ward trying to reach Calder when she saw it the black vehicle, the north gate, her father's distinctive grey coat getting inside. She had seen him pause at the door and look back across the yard.
He had seen her.
She had been close enough that she knew he had seen her. Not close enough that he had to acknowledge it.
The transport left.
"He'll send someone," Calder said again, softer this time.
"Yes," Luna said. She said it the way she had learned to say things that were not true but were necessary. Gently. Without weight.
That was when the shadow fell across them.
She felt it before she saw it the darkness shifting, something blocking the thin strip of light coming around the corner of the grain store. She looked up fast, one hand still on Calder's wound, her body already angled between him and whatever was coming
Not an Ashen Claw soldier.
The uniform was wrong. The stance was wrong. She knew that uniform. She had been looking at it her whole life.
Ironveil. One of her father's personal guards. A man named Crest, broad and blank-faced, who had been at the pack house since before Luna was born.
For one burning second she thought: he came back. Father sent someone. Calder was right.
Crest looked at her without any urgency. Without any fear for them. He looked at her the way someone looks at a job they have come to finish.
He said: "The Alpha requests your presence at the secondary gate."
Luna's hands went still on Calder's wound. "Both of us," she said. Not a question. A demand.
Crest's face did not change. "Just you."
The words fell into her chest like cold water. She looked at him. She looked at the total lack of anything in his expression no guilt, no conflict, no apology.
"There is a buyer waiting," Crest said. "The Alpha has made arrangements."
The screaming was still going somewhere on the other side of the walls. Calder's blood was still on her hands. Her father's transport was already gone.
And she finally understood.
He had not forgotten her.
He had planned for her.
Calder's eyes opened. He looked at Crest. Then he looked at Luna. And in his face she saw the one thing she had never seen there before helplessness.