Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

Serapha is gone

CASPIAN

The bodies are arranged too neatly for it to be an accident.

Three guards, throats torn with the kind of precision that doesn’t happen in a struggle, laid out at the base of the north gate like something left deliberately for me to find.

Blood has spread dark and wide across the cobblestones, black in the torchlight, and the smell of it sits heavy in the cold night air and does something to my wolf that I have to work to keep contained.

An hour.

This happened less than an hour ago, during a shift change that only a handful of people within these walls would have known about, and whoever did it was already gone before the next patrol found them.

They knew exactly when to strike.

Soren is already organizing search parties when I arrive, his voice cutting efficiently through the controlled chaos of men who want to run in every direction at once. Marcus crouches near the bodies with a torch held low, his face doing nothing at all, which is how I know how bad it is before he speaks.

“Same as Viktor,” he says without looking up. “Clean kills. No hesitation, no defensive wounds—they never saw it coming.”

He straightens and looks at me.

“But they didn’t take anything this time. No trophies, no message beyond the obvious one.” He glances at the neat, deliberate arrangement of the bodies and back at me. “They just wanted us to know they could do it.”

They wanted us to know they could walk into the center of my territory, kill three of my people during a window of time that should have been impossible to predict, and walk back out without leaving a trace worth following.

They wanted us to know that our walls mean nothing to them. Our patrols mean nothing. Our locked gates and doubled sentries and all the strategic adjustments I laid out in that courtyard this morning mean nothing.

My wolf howls for blood, hot and immediate and barely manageable. I breathe through it and force my mind to stay focused.

“They’re testing us,” I say. “Not attacking—testing. They want to know how we respond, where we’re thin, whether we chase or hold position.”

I look at the gate, at the clean, practiced evidence of exactly how organized our enemies have become.

“The question is whether this is them doing an observation, before they go on to carry out a full assault, or whether they’re trying to draw us out of the territory entirely.”

Marcus doesn’t answer, because it isn’t a question he can answer yet. Neither of us can.

The older pack member that expressed his concerns earlier, arrives with a group of other senior pack members before I’ve finished the thought, their faces wearing the particular combination of anger and fear that tends to make people say things they’ve been holding back. He stops a few feet away and looks at the bodies and then at me with his jaw set and his eyes careful.

“Fourth attack in two weeks, Alpha,” he says, with the tone of someone being deliberately respectful while making it very clear that the respect is conditional. “Our people are frightened. I’m hearing talk—people questioning whether they’re safe here. Whether the pack is still—”

He pauses.

“Whether our defenses are still sound.”

What he means is whether I am still sound. Whether they can still trust me to be the thing that stands between them and everything outside these walls. The unspoken part of it hangs in the cold air between us and everyone present can feel it, and I let it sit there for a moment before I turn to face them all.

Several of them step back without meaning to. They always do.

“Anyone who wants to leave,” I say quietly, “is free to go. I won’t stop you and I won’t hold it against you.”

I let that settle, and then I let what comes next settle harder.

“But understand this—wherever you run, they will follow. Whoever is behind these attacks doesn’t stop at borders. They want something, and they will chase it into whatever hole you choose to hide in. Running doesn’t save you. It just means you die somewhere without your pack beside you.”

The silence that follows has a different quality than the one before it. Chastened, maybe. Or simply recalibrated.

Then Iris speaks, one of the younger women, her voice carrying the particular hesitance of someone who has been turning something over for hours and finally decided the weight of keeping it in is worse than the risk of saying it.

“What if they want her?” she asks. “The human. What if that’s what this is about, and giving her to them would—”

“The timing isn’t a coincidence, Alpha.” Thane again, his voice smoother now that someone else has opened the door. “The girl arrives, and within days we’re bleeding. It deserves consideration.”

I take one step toward him.

Just one, but the way he goes very still tells me it was enough. My wolf is close enough to the surface that I can feel it in my own eyes, the shift that happens when the line between human restraint and something older gets thin enough to see through, and I watch Thane recalculate whatever he was planning to say next.

“I have already made myself clear,” I say, and my voice comes out low enough that the people at the edges of the group have to hold their breath to hear it. “The human is mine. She stays. Anyone who moves against her, anyone who so much as raises the idea of using her as a bargaining piece, will answer to me personally.”

I let the pause do its work.

“And I promise you, what I do to them will make this look like kindness.”

They leave quickly after that, in the way people leave when they’re frightened but don’t want to appear to be running. Thane last, which is either courage or stubbornness, and probably both. Marcus waits until the last footsteps have faded before he speaks.

“You can’t keep doing this.” His voice is even and without accusation, which makes it worse. “Protecting her in front of the pack, threatening your own people on her behalf. They’re already confused—if they decide you’ve chosen her over them, you’ll lose them. And without the pack—”

“I know.”

“Then act like it.” He looks at me steadily. “Whatever she is to you, whatever history is between you, she cannot be worth your entire pack, Caspian.”

He is right. He is completely and objectively right, and the part of me that has been leading these people for five hundred years knows it with a clarity that requires no argument.

And the thought of handing her over—to anyone, to these unknown enemies, to Thane and his pointed silences, to the tide of pack opinion turning against her—makes my wolf go so feral so immediately that I have to clench my hands at my sides and breathe through my nose until the reaction passes.

“Double the guards on her room,” I say. “Four outside the door at all times, two more at the end of the corridor. If these attackers want her, they come through me first.”

Marcus looks like he has more to say but reads something in my face that convinces him otherwise, and we walk back toward the palace in silence while my mind works through what I haven’t said to him.

Why would they want her?

Not Farah—there is no reason to want Farah, a human woman with no power and no connections and no knowledge of anything she once was.

But Serapha is something else entirely.

Serapha is the key to a curse that has been running for five centuries, the only piece of the puzzle that can end it, and if someone out there knows that—if someone knows what she is and what she carries and what she is capable of once the memories fully return—then this was never about testing my defenses at all.

This was about getting to her before I can use her.

The guard comes running when we’re nearly at the palace entrance, and the color of his face stops me before his words do.

“Alpha—the prisoner—something’s wrong—”

I don’t wait. I’m already moving, taking the stairs the way I take everything when my wolf has decided waiting is no longer an option, and I hear Marcus behind me but he’s three steps back and falling further and I don’t slow down.

The corridor outside her room comes into view and my blood goes cold before I fully understand why—the two guards posted at her door are slumped against the wall, unconscious, heads lolling, utterly still in the way of people who had no warning before the dark took them.

The door is still locked from the outside.

I get the key into the lock with hands that are steadier than they have any right to be and throw the door open and stand there in the doorway, and the cold night air hits me from across the room before I even see why.

The window.

The iron bars have been torn from the wall completely—not bent, not broken, torn, with the kind of force that doesn’t come from a person who doesn’t know what they are—and the black rectangle of the night beyond it is empty and cold and absolute.

The room is empty.

Serapha is gone.