AZRIEL
I walk out of the cave and don’t look back.
Behind me, the water is still.
Lillian is still submerged to her collarbone, defiant and furious and utterly unaware of what she does to me every time she looks at me like that.
I put distance between us because it’s the only thing I know how to do with something I haven’t figured out how to control yet.
Leo is waiting near the cave mouth with Melva a few steps behind him.
“Escort her back to camp once she’s finished,” I say.
“Don’t leave her unattended.”
Leo nods once.
“Understood, Alpha King.”
I walk.
‘Running again.’
Logan, my wolf, speaks from somewhere beneath my ribs, low and amused in the way that means he already knows he’s right.
I’m not running.
‘You just walked away from your mate standing half-naked in water because you couldn’t stay in the same room as her a moment longer.
If that’s not running, tell me what you’d call it.’
I don’t answer him.
There’s no answer that wins.
‘She’s ours,’ he says.
‘You know it.
I know it.
The only one still pretending otherwise is you.’
I keep walking.
The truth is, I don’t recognize myself anymore.
Not since the forest.
For fifteen years, I’ve taken women when I wanted them and given nothing back that mattered—no attention beyond what was necessary, no thought once the door closed behind them.
It was clean.
It cost nothing.
I built my life on the fact that it cost nothing.
With Lillian, I can’t manage the same distance.
I find myself thinking about her when she isn’t in front of me.
I find myself measuring the day by whether I’ve seen her yet.
It happened before I decided to allow it, and I don’t know how to undo something I never agreed to in the first place.
‘You don’t want to undo it,’ Logan says.
‘That’s the part you can’t stand.’
I press two fingers against my temple, irritated by how thoroughly she resists every attempt I make to understand her.
Even marked, even claimed, parts of her remain closed to me in a way no one else ever has.
‘She isn’t like the others,’ Logan says, quieter now, more serious than his usual needling.
‘You feel that.
You’ve felt it since the forest.
Whatever she is, she isn’t just a girl with bad blood and a dead mother.’
I know.
I’ve known since the forest, from the moment my wolf recognized her and nothing about her fit what I expected.
By the time I reach camp, the fires are lit and the evening has gone the color of ash.
I find Simon near the supply carts and don’t waste time on preamble.
“Lillian’s mother,” I say.
“I want everything.
Not what Frederick claims—the truth.
Where she came from, who she really was, what Frederick has hidden about her.
Someone somewhere knows more than he has ever admitted.”
Simon’s expression doesn’t change, but I see him recalibrate.
“You believe there’s more to find.”
“I believe Frederick has never told the truth about anything in his life.
Find out what he’s been hiding under this one.”
“I’ll begin tonight,” he says, and leaves without another word.
It’s why I keep him.
Darkness settles fully over the camp.
I’m reviewing border correspondence by lamplight when one of the runners ducks into my tent, breathless.
“Alpha King.
Word from the capital—the Queen Mother’s household has confirmed the arrangements you requested.”
“Good.” I wave him off.
That leaves the other matter.
I sit with it longer than I should have to.
A separate tent.
A simple thing, the kind of order I give a hundred times a day without a second thought—and yet I turn it over twice before I finally call for it.
“Prepare a private tent,” I tell the guard outside.
“For myself and Lillian.
Tonight.”
‘There he is.’ Logan’s satisfaction is insufferable.
‘Took you long enough to say it out loud.’
I haven’t said anything.
I gave an order.
‘You gave yourself permission,’ he says.
‘Different thing.
Don’t insult me by pretending it isn’t.’
I don’t dignify that.
But he’s not wrong, and the two of us both know it.
The Council will not see it that way.
I already know what they’ll say the moment word reaches them—a wolfless half-blood, no pack of any standing behind her, no wolf to speak of.
They will demand the mark removed the way they’d demand a stain scrubbed from a coat.
‘Let them demand it,’ Logan says, and something in his voice goes flat and dangerous in a way I recognize.
‘If anyone forces that mark from her, I go with it.
Permanently.
You’ll never wear fur again as long as you live.
Test me and find out.’
I’m aware of the cost.
‘Then stop pretending there’s still a decision to make.’
I lean back and press my palm flat against the table, irritated at how thoroughly one girl has managed to disassemble fifteen years of careful order in the space of a week.
I want to be angry at her for it.
I can’t manage it.
Whatever this disruption is, it isn’t hers.
It’s mine.
I let it happen the moment I stepped into that forest and found her on the ground.
And then it hits me—not through the ordinary senses, but through the mark, sudden and sharp, a current running straight down the bond between us.
Fear.
Hers.
Raw and immediate.
I’m on my feet before I’ve decided to stand.