Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

I want their head on a spike

CASPIAN

My wolf claws at me with every step I put between myself and her.

Mine, it snarls, low and insistent and relentless beneath the surface of everything I am trying to hold together.

Go back.

Protect.

Claim.

I grit my teeth against it and keep walking, my stride hard and deliberate, because if I slow down even slightly the pull of the bond will have room to breathe and I cannot afford that. Not here, not now, not with Viktor’s blood still drying on my shirt and a courtyard full of grieving, suspicious pack members waiting to see which direction their Alpha fractures.

I make it to my study and slam the door behind me hard enough that the portraits on the wall shudder.

The silence that follows is not peaceful. It is the silence of a held breath, of something straining against its own restraint, and I cross to the cabinet in the corner and pour a drink with a hand that is not entirely steady. Not from fear. From the sheer sustained effort of keeping my wolf compressed into something manageable when every instinct it has is oriented toward the woman I just locked in a room two corridors away.

Claiming her publicly was a mistake—I understood that the moment the word left my mouth, felt the bond respond to it like a key turning in a lock, the acknowledgment feeding it power it didn’t have an hour ago. But Thane had stepped forward with that particular look in his eye, and the crowd had been moving with him, and she would have been dead before I could have stopped it through any other means.

I need her alive.

That’s the beginning and the end of it.

I lift the glass and drain it and pour another and stand there with my eyes closed, breathing through the pull of the bond until it settles into something dull and persistent instead of sharp and demanding. It doesn’t disappear. It won’t disappear. But I have been managing impossible things for longer than most people have been alive, and I can manage this too.

***

Marcus enters without knocking, which is a liberty I have long since stopped bothering to deny him. He looks at the glass in my hand and then at my face and his expression does the thing it always does, that careful arrangement of someone choosing their words with more precision than they’re letting on.

“That was unexpected,” he says.

“Was it.”

“The pack is confused.” He comes further into the room, stopping near the desk. “Some of them think you’ve gone soft. Others think you’re playing a longer game with her.” A pause. “Are you?”

“I need her alive,” I say. “That’s all they need to understand.”

Marcus is quiet for a moment in the way that means he has more to say and is deciding how to say it. Then he pulls out the chair across from the desk and sits in it uninvited, which is the other liberty I’ve never managed to fully discourage, and folds his hands on his knee with the patience of someone prepared to wait as long as necessary.

“Is she really Serapha?” he asks. “After all this time?”

I don’t answer immediately. I drain the second glass, set it down, consider the bottle, and then pour a third because this particular conversation requires it. The name sits in the air between us with all the weight of five hundred years attached to it, and I let it sit there while I think about dark eyes and the specific quality of a scent I have spent centuries trying to forget.

“She has her face,” I say finally. “Her scent, underneath everything else. And the bond—”

I stop, because there are no words for what the bond is doing that I am willing to say out loud to another person.

“It’s her.”

“But she doesn’t remember.” Marcus leans forward slightly, his elbows on his knees. “What good is she to breaking the curse if she doesn’t even know what she did?”

The glass hits the desk harder than I intend.

“That’s what I need to figure out. The curse binds us together—she’s the one who can end it, that’s what the witch told me, that’s what every piece of knowledge I’ve gathered in five hundred years points to. I just need to understand how before she remembers enough to make another attempt on my life.”

Marcus is quiet for a beat.

“You think she’ll try.”

“She did it before.” I look at him evenly. “She’ll do it again once the memories return. That’s who she is. That’s who she has always been.”

“And yet you claimed her in front of the entire pack.”

“I told you why.”

He holds my gaze and says nothing, and the nothing he says is eloquent enough that I look away first, which is not something I do often.

He sits back in the chair, and when he speaks again his voice is quieter, more careful.

“Then why not kill her? End the cycle before it starts, same as the others. Whatever she is now—whoever she thinks she is—she’ll become Serapha again eventually. You said so yourself.” He pauses. “Wouldn’t it be cleaner?”

The words hang in the air of the study. My wolf’s reaction to them is immediate and violent, a rejection so complete it moves through me like something physical, and I spend a long, controlled moment pressing it back down into silence before I trust my voice to be level.

“Because I’ve tried that,” I say. “Every incarnation I’ve found, every lifetime she’s been reborn into, I have killed her. And the curse remains. I spent three centuries believing death was the answer and it changed nothing except giving the Moon Goddess reason to be creative about how she brings her back.”

The bitterness in my own voice is familiar enough to be unremarkable.

“Only Serapha herself can break what she helped create. That’s the condition. It has always been the condition. I have to keep her alive long enough to find out how to make her do it.”

Marcus absorbs this. He’s one of the few people alive who knows the full breadth of what I’m carrying, and even he is sometimes surprised by the dimensions of it.

Before he can respond, there’s a knock at the study door, two sharp raps, and it opens to admit Soren, whose expression is the specific kind of grim that means what he’s about to say won’t improve my evening.

“We finished examining the site,” he says, coming to stand before the desk. “Where Viktor was taken. There are tracks leading north, toward the Shadowveil border. Multiple wolves—coordinated, deliberate. They flanked him.” His jaw tightens. “The scent markers don’t match any rogue pack we have on record in this territory.”

I am still and focused in the way that happens when strategy overrides everything else.

“A new pack moving in? Or one that’s been hiding?”

“We don’t know yet.” Soren shakes his head slowly. “But they knew, Caspian. They knew Viktor was alone, knew where our patrols ended and where the gaps were. This wasn’t opportunistic. Someone planned it.”

The study goes quiet. I look at Soren, then at Marcus, and I watch the same realization move across Marcus’ face that has already finished moving across mine.

“You think we have a spy.” Marcus’ voice has lost its careful quality entirely. “Someone inside who’s been feeding them our schedules.”

“Find out,” I say, and my voice comes out very quiet, which is how it gets when I am past the point of temperature. I look between them both, letting the weight of it settle. “Because if someone in this pack is handing our people to our enemies, I want their head on a spike by sunrise.”