Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

Not losing her again

CASPIAN

There is no strategy. No calculation, no careful reading of terrain, no tactical assessment of numbers or positioning. There is only the bond, pulled taut as a wire and screaming, and the wolf that has taken everything I am and reduced it to a single, consuming purpose.

The first sentry doesn’t even have time to open his mouth before my jaws close around his throat. The second turns to run and makes it three steps. Only three.

Behind me, I can hear my warriors pouring through the tree line, Marcus barking orders, the sounds of engagement breaking out across the camp’s perimeter. I don’t wait for them. I’m already moving, already deep into enemy territory, a black blur cutting through the firelight and the chaos, and anyone who steps into my path meets the same end as the sentries at the gate. Wolves shift to meet me and I go through them, claws raking across my shoulder hard enough to tear muscle — I don’t feel it, the pain arriving somewhere distant and irrelevant, belonging to a version of me that has the luxury of self-preservation. Teeth sink into my left leg and I rip free without breaking stride, not knowing and not caring what I leave behind.

She is here. I can feel her through the bond like a hook behind my sternum, and her terror has been bleeding into me for hours, a cold relentless current under my skin. But it’s the pain underneath the terror that has dissolved my human mind, pushed it somewhere far and quiet where it can watch but not intervene. The wolf doesn’t think in language or strategy or consequence. He thinks in a single sequence, repeated on a loop with the simplicity of something that has never needed to be more complicated.

Find mate. Protect mate. Kill anyone who hurt mate.

I let him have it. There’s nothing left of me that wants to argue.

A massive grey wolf materializes out of the darkness between two burning structures, and I know immediately from the way he moves, from the way the others fall back to give him room, that he’s one of their best. He’s large and built low and broad, and he comes at me without hesitation, without the fear that slows the others. We collide with a force that would shatter bone in a lesser fight, rolling in a tangle of fangs and claws, and he is skilled — experienced in a way that tells me he has survived things he shouldn’t have. But he has not been waiting centuries for his mate. He has not had the bond screaming her pain into his blood for hours without being able to reach her, and he fights with experience and discipline while I fight with all of that and the specific unhinged desperation of something that simply cannot lose this. I go for his throat. He goes limp. I don’t stop to confirm the kill.

The bond pulls me toward the center of the camp, toward the largest tent, and the air thickens as I get closer, pressing against my senses with something that makes my hackles rise even as I keep moving. Dark magic, corrupt and layered, the kind that has been building for hours and soaked into everything it’s touched. Seven wolves form a line in front of the tent, shifted and braced, close enough together that there’s no clean path between them. I don’t look for one. I drop lower, gather everything I have, and crash into their line like a battering ram, scattering them through pure force and momentum, the defensive formation dissolving into chaos in the span of a second. One recovers fast and gets a strike across my ribs — I feel that one, a line of fire that burns white and deep and would drop a lesser wolf on any other night — and I turn and crush his skull between my jaws before the pain has finished registering, then keep moving.

The tent fabric tears like paper under my claws. I shift as I cross the threshold, the change moving through me in a brutal instantaneous wave, and I come up in human form covered in blood — some mine, most not. My eyes are still burning blue, the wolf so close beneath my skin that the line between us is nearly theoretical, and I take in the tent in a single sweep. Farah, collapsed inside a chalk circle, blood running dark from her nose, her body folded in on itself in a way that tears something in my chest cleanly open. The witch, hooded and motionless, watching me with a stillness that feels ancient. And Declan, positioned between me and both of them, sword already drawn, his expression arranged into something trying very hard to be composed and not quite managing it around the eyes.

“The great Caspian Thorne,” he says, the mockery in his voice a thin coat of paint over something considerably less confident. “Right on time. Did you enjoy charging in here alone, abandoning all tactical sense? That’s what the mate bond does — makes even kings into fools.”

“Step away from her.” The words come out as barely recognizable speech, more growl than language. I take one step forward and the wolf takes it with me.

Something flickers in Declan’s expression and gets suppressed. “Or what?” Old, rotted feeling bleeds through the performance now — the kind that has been sitting in the dark for two decades becoming something else entirely. “You’ll kill me like you killed my father? Like you’ve killed everyone who ever had the nerve to oppose you?” He spits on the ground between us. “You’re a monster, Thorne. And she—” he gestures toward Farah without looking away from me, “—she’s the one who’s going to end you. Just like the Moon Goddess intended.”

The witch moves, and I don’t think. I lunge. Declan’s sword comes up fast and meets me in the space between us, and I catch the blade with my hand — it cuts deep and clean, slicing through flesh down to something that scrapes bone, blood pouring immediately in a sheet down my wrist — and I use the grip to push the sword wide and bring my other hand up to close around his throat. The impact drives him back a step before his feet leave the ground entirely, and the sword clatters somewhere to my left. He claws at my grip with both hands, face reddening, and I watch him with nothing that resembles mercy and nothing that resembles the cold professionalism I usually bring to killing. There is nothing clean about this.

“You touched what’s mine.” My voice belongs to the wolf more than the man. “You took her. Hurt her.” My fingers tighten one final, deliberate degree. “For that, you die.”

The witch’s chant reaches its peak before I can finish it. The dark energy explodes outward from the circle with no warning, a concussive wave that hits me like a wall moving at speed and picks me up and throws me backward through the tent supports, the entire structure collapsing inward with a sound like a held breath releasing. I hit the ground hard enough to knock the air from my lungs and lie there measured in the ringing of my ears rather than any reliable sense of time, the night sky visible through the wreckage above me, stars swinging lazily in my vision.

***

I get to my feet because there is no version of reality in which I don’t.

The camp around me is chaos — wolves fighting in every direction, the rogues’ formation broken and dissolving under the sustained pressure of my warriors pushing in from every side. Marcus is somewhere to my left, his voice carrying the particular edge of someone who has been fighting hard and knows it isn’t finished. The fires have spread and the light is orange and violent, throwing everything into sharp jumping relief.

I find Farah through the smoke. Two rogues dragging her through the ruins at the edge of the collapsed tent, her feet barely finding the ground, her head hanging, barely conscious but alive — I know she’s alive because the bond is still there, still pulling, though it’s thin and frayed in a way that tightens every muscle I have. The witch is simply gone, as though the explosion that scattered the rest of us was a door she walked through and closed behind her. Declan is on his feet clutching his throat, screaming orders at anyone still coherent enough to follow — fall back, retreat, into the mountains — and the rogues who can still move are doing exactly that, the defense collapsing in real time around him.

“Alpha.” Marcus appears at my side, his hand closing on my arm with a steadiness that tells me I’m less stable than I think I am. His eyes move over me with rapid efficiency. “Alpha, you’re bleeding—”

But Farah disappears into the tree line between the two wolves holding her, and every thought I have goes with her. I look at the place where she was and feel the bond stretch, feel the distance beginning to open, and something in me that has been holding on by its fingernails simply lets go.

I’m not losing her again.

The shift takes me before I finish the thought, the wolf surging up and through me with a ferocity that bypasses pain entirely, and I’m running before my paws have fully found the ground, crashing into the tree line at full speed, following the bond like a compass finding north. Behind me, Marcus is shouting my name. I don’t stop. I don’t look back. There is only the darkness ahead and the thin fraying thread of her presence at the end of it, and I will follow it until it leads me to her or until there is nothing left of me that can follow anything at all.