Mykel’s POV The east corridor door opened before the assigned supervisor reached the circle, and Mykel said, “I’ll take it,” in no hurry at all.
Everyone turned toward the sound of it.
Seren turned last.
He’d spent longer than he wanted to admit deciding how he’d handle the first look.
In the end there was no handling it.
Her eyes found his across the width of the form circle and something in him lunged toward the ten feet of packed earth between them, every instinct he owned straining toward her as the only thing in the clearing worth watching.
He held it behind his teeth.
Across the circle, her spine went a fraction straighter, her breath caught and released on a count too even to be accidental, and he understood that whatever had just moved through her, she’d already turned away from it rather than look at it directly.
Good.
That made two of them.
He’d met a version of her before, in a life this body didn’t talk about out loud anymore.
That Seren had wanted Knox Eldridge the way some people wanted air, nothing more calculated than that, and never reached for the throne itself.
The crown had only ever come as part of him, a piece of the man rather than the point of wanting him.
She’d gone after Knox with both hands and gotten him, long before Mykel worked out what he was looking at across all those careful, distant rooms.
By the time he understood, she already wore another man’s ring, and there had been nothing left to spend the knowledge on.
It had taken him years to stop wondering what would have happened if he’d moved faster.
Years to stop replaying the moment he’d seen her across that room and decided to wait, to be sure, to let the timing arrange itself.
He’d been too careful.
Too patient.
And patience had cost him everything.
He still woke some mornings with the hollow of it in his chest, the place where she should have been.
He’d learned to live around it, the way a wolf learned to run on three legs.
But he’d never forgotten what it cost to let her go.
This one hadn’t gone anywhere near Knox except to put his favorite project on the ground.
She looked at the man like he was an obstacle already handled, not a prize she’d decided to win back then.
Nothing about her tracked with the woman he remembered—not the fight, not the patience, not the particular way she’d rather bleed in silence than perform for a crowd that wanted her to.
He had nothing to weigh this Seren against.
He was starting from nothing, the way he hadn’t gotten to start with anyone in more years than he wanted to count.
Somewhere in the length of that realization, watching her plant her paws and refuse to give Dorian anything, he stopped thinking of her by the name the crown had used and started thinking of her as something smaller and entirely his own.
His little moon rabbit, sharp enough to draw blood and too proud to ever admit when she’d taken any.
“Grey,” Knox said.
“Eldridge.” Mykel let the name sit a beat before he gave Knox the rest of it—a fair match required two neutral supervisors, unless Knox meant to count himself as one.
Something behind Knox’s face recalculated.
It’s a student matter, he said.
Then supervise it like one, Mykel told him, and turned back to the circle before the exchange could spend any more of his attention than it had already cost him.
He took the north marker and didn’t move from it again.
Dorian went wolf first, dark and broad-shouldered and certain of how this ended before the first exchange, and Mykel watched Seren’s shoulders instead of the boy’s teeth.
She was tracking Dorian’s forepaws with a patience most wolves her age couldn’t manage, and for the first two lunges she gave the crowd exactly what it wanted to see, a smaller wolf staying alive by not being where the bigger one aimed.
Mykel knew better within thirty seconds.
She wasn’t running.
She was building him, piece by piece, out of every mistake he didn’t know he was making.
His frustration burned low and steady.
He wanted to tell her to finish it.
Wanted to step into the circle and show her exactly where Dorian’s guard would break.
He held himself motionless and watched her work, and every second of it cost him something.
Then Dorian’s shoulder caught her flank on the third lunge, and she went up and sideways and down hard enough that the sound of the landing carried to the north marker.
Every controlled thing in Mykel’s body wanted to move.
His wolf came up against the wall he kept it behind so fast the pressure of it made his vision narrow at the edges, some old animal certainty insisting that ten feet was too far to stand from an injury that raw.
His hands wanted to close around something.
His teeth wanted to set.
He made himself breathe through it, made himself stay planted at the north marker, and the effort of it left a taste like copper in his throat.
She hit the ground.
Her ribs stuttered through one breath.
Copper darkened along her jaw.
And he made himself take in the damage the same way he’d trained himself to take in anything that mattered too much to let show.
“Point to Cass,” Knox said, even and unbothered, and Mykel hated him for it in a way that had nothing to do with any of the older reasons he already had.
He hated the flatness of his voice.
The way he’d said it like she was already beaten.
The way he’d watched her fall without the flicker of a reaction.
Mykel’s wolf pressed forward, not to fight, but to watch and remember, to hold onto every detail of Knox’s control for a day when it might matter.
Seren’s wolf pushed upright on trembling legs and looked at him before she looked at anyone else in that circle.
His chest tightened.
He gave her nothing the room could use, a tightened jaw, a fraction of a chin-tilt toward center, and meant by it exactly what he couldn’t say out loud.
He’d seen what she’d built out of Dorian’s mistakes, and he expected her to finish it.
He also saw the tremor in her forelegs, the way she held herself too carefully around the ribs, and that cost him more than the waiting had.
She turned back to the fight without acknowledging she’d understood him at all, which was how he knew she had.
The second fall went to her, fast and precise, a strike under Dorian’s jaw that put him into the earth with a sound that ended the crowd’s noise entirely.
Mykel’s breath stopped.
Then started again.
Then he called it, low, and the tightness behind his ribs let go in a rush that left him light-headed.
He didn’t examine what that meant.
He couldn’t afford to.
The third fall wasn’t close.
Dorian threw himself forward on rage where strategy should have been, and Seren used the same tell she’d been tracking since the opening exchange to put him down for good.
Mykel watched her stand over him, chest heaving, ribs screaming, and something moved through him that wasn’t pride, wasn’t relief, wasn’t any of the clean emotions he’d trained himself to allow.
Rawer than that.
Possessive and terrified in equal measure.
Knox delivered his verdict the way he delivered everything, flat and final, edged with something he probably didn’t recognize in himself as jealousy.
You fight like your father.
The words landed, and she absorbed them without giving the circle anything to work with.
The heat surged behind her ribs.
He knew what that meant.
He’d watched her burn like that before, in the life this body didn’t talk about.
She’d had nowhere to put it then.
He was watching her hold it now, and that was its own kind of victory.
He crossed to her when Knox stepped back, aware of exactly how many eyes were on him and unbothered by all of them.
Up close, the damage was worse than it had looked from the marker.
Her ribs weren’t sitting right when she breathed.
The cut on her forearm had already stopped bleeding, which meant it had been open long enough that it should have hurt more than she was letting on.
She held herself like none of it existed, and would keep holding herself that way until the last person capable of noticing had looked away.
He wanted to say something.
He didn’t know what.
The words he had were too raw, too close to the bone.
He didn’t trust them.
She gave him the smallest chin dip, an acknowledgment with nothing in it for the room, and he returned it the same way, matching her restraint stroke for stroke.
Then she turned and started toward the healer’s tent at the circle’s edge, spine straight, ribs burning, giving the watching crowd nothing they could use against her.
Some private part of him, the part he fed least and trusted most, watched her go.
There she is again, pretending the world can’t touch her.
His little moon rabbit, walking toward a healer’s tent like it was beneath her to need one.
The fear was still there.
The fear that she’d walk into that tent and collapse and no one would catch her.
The fear that he’d just watched her do something impossible and she’d pay for it with something he couldn’t see.
No one heard it.
He made certain of that, the same way he made certain of everything else that mattered.
He stayed at the north marker and watched her the whole way, until the tent flap dropped shut behind her.