Once Betrayed, Twice Shy

He came

FARAH

The first thing I’m aware of is the cold.

It seeps up through the stone beneath me, working its way into my bones until even breathing feels like an effort. I try to open my eyes and immediately regret it — the darkness spins, my stomach lurches, and I press my cheek back against the floor and stay perfectly still until the nausea passes.

The air smells like mold and something older underneath it. Something copper and metallic that takes me too long to name.

Blood. Soaked so deep into the stone that nothing will ever fully pull it out.

When I finally manage to push myself upright, the effort costs me more than it should. My head pounds with every heartbeat, the edges of my vision pulsing in and out until I blink them steady. Iron bars. Torchlight bleeding in from somewhere down the corridor. Stone walls slick with damp.

A cell.

I press my fingers to my temple and feel the ghost of those hands there still — cold, precise, indifferent — and the memory of what came before crashes back in pieces. The hooded figure. The chalk circle. The chanting that moved through the air like something alive.

And then the pain.

I squeeze my eyes shut, but the images are already there, clinging to the inside of my skull. A grand hall with columns of white stone. Sunlight through windows set too high to see from. Something that wears my face standing in the center of it, holding itself straighter and colder than I ever have, without a trace of fear.

And a voice, warm and beautiful and utterly without mercy.

You are my warrior. My instrument of justice.

Then hands — my hands, or Serapha’s, and I don’t know yet how to separate us — soaked in blood, dark and still-warm. And no horror attached to the image. Only quiet, satisfied certainty. A task completed.

I press the back of my hand to my mouth and force it away.

I’m Farah. I grew up in a city apartment with too many plants and not enough square footage. I studied literature because I loved the way words could build entire worlds out of nothing.

That is who I am.

Not whatever the witch is trying to drag out of me.

***

Footsteps echo down the corridor before I finish convincing myself of that.

I straighten instinctively, pulling away from the wall, because whatever is coming I will not meet it crumpled on the floor. My body protests, but I hold the position through it.

Declan steps into the torchlight, that same smile already in place — the kind that belongs to someone who has never once doubted they’d get what they wanted. He looks at me the way someone looks at a chess piece moved into exactly the right square.

“How are you feeling, Serapha?” he asks, crouching to my eye level. “That first session is always the hardest.”

“My name is Farah,” I say, keeping my voice flat. “And when Caspian finds me, he’s going to kill every single one of you.”

Declan’s smile only widens. “Caspian. Yes.” He says the name like someone who has been waiting a long time to use it. “I’m counting on him coming. In fact, I’m rather looking forward to it.” He tilts his head. “Do you know who I am?”

“Should I?”

“My name is Declan.” A pause, deliberate. “Your precious king murdered my father twenty years ago.”

I study his face — the pleasantness on the surface, and underneath it, something far older. Grief that has had twenty years to rot into something else entirely.

“Then why take me?” I ask, because understanding what I’m facing has always been the only way I know how to manage fear. “If you want revenge on Caspian, why not just go after him yourself?”

Something shifts in his expression, some private satisfaction. “Because death is too kind for Caspian Thorne,” he says, quieter now, the way a person speaks when they’ve rehearsed something so many times it’s become scripture. “I want him to suffer first. I want him to watch as the mate he’s so desperately trying to save becomes the weapon that destroys him.” He pauses. “Just like she did before.”

The words land somewhere cold in my chest.

“I don’t understand any of this,” I say, and my voice betrays me at the edges, cracking in a way I don’t intend. “I’m not Serapha. I was just a college student. I didn’t ask for any of this — I didn’t choose it.”

Something moves across his face then. Brief, and quickly smoothed away. Almost pity.

“No,” he says, after a moment. “I don’t suppose you did. But the Moon Goddess doesn’t ask permission when she weaves her designs.” He stands, and whatever softness had flickered there disappears completely. “You were born for a purpose, Farah. And soon enough, you’ll remember what it is.”

He turns, lifting one hand, and guards materialize from the dark on either side of my cell.

“Bring her to the ritual tent,” he says. “The witch is ready for the second session.”

Terror moves through me like cold water.

“No — please—” I scramble back, but the guards are already unlocking the door, already reaching in, and their grip is iron. I fight anyway, twisting and clawing until one of them tightens his hold hard enough to make me gasp, and I keep pulling even then, because stopping feels like dying.

***

The encampment is larger than I registered before.

Fires burn low between structures arranged with a logic that tells me someone here understands defensive positioning. Dozens of wolves watch as the guards drag me through — some curious, some hostile, all of them utterly unmoved. I search every face for a crack in their loyalty, anything wide enough to slip through.

I find nothing.

The ritual tent is easy to identify. It’s the largest structure in the camp, draped in dark fabric that seems to consume the firelight rather than reflect it. As we get closer, that wrongness from before begins pressing against my skin again, subtle and pervasive, and every instinct I have screams at me to run. But the hands on my arms are iron, and the only direction available is forward.

Inside, candles burn green — not the pale accidental green of a flame near copper, but something deep and deliberate, throwing shadows in the wrong directions. The chalk circle on the ground looks larger than I remember, the symbols more intricate, and at the center of it stands the witch, hood in place, hands folded, waiting with the patience of someone for whom urgency has long since become irrelevant.

The guards force me to my knees at the edge of the circle. Declan takes his position outside it, arms folded, expression attentive.

“Please.” I look at him directly. “Whatever Caspian did to your father — I had nothing to do with it. I’m innocent.”

Something real moves through his eyes for just a moment.

“Innocent?” he says quietly. “You’ve killed him in seven different lifetimes, Serapha. Your hands have more blood on them than mine ever will.”

I don’t have an answer for that.

The chanting begins without warning, the witch’s voice rising and falling in a rhythm that bypasses language entirely and moves straight into the body, into something that responds before the mind can refuse. The green light intensifies. The air becomes pressure, becomes weight, becomes a hand pushing my face underwater.

When the pale fingers find my temples, I flinch back hard — it doesn’t matter. The contact is immediate, and the pain arrives before I can brace for it, white and blinding, claws driving deep and dragging.

I hear myself scream from somewhere far away.

But the images come regardless. Clearer this time. Sharper than vision — they feel like memory.

I see myself moving through a training yard with a sword I handle like a mother tongue, every motion precise and devastating. I see Caspian, younger, something unguarded still visible in his face, something open that he clearly hasn’t yet learned to protect. I see Serapha smile at him. I feel the warmth of it, natural and easy, and underneath it, cold and patient and immovable as bedrock — the purpose she has never once deviated from.

He is a threat to our realm. He must be eliminated.

The hardness I’d always read as cruelty. The walls. The distance. I understand with a sudden, awful clarity that she put all of it there, and I — Serapha — am the wound underneath every piece of armor he wears.

When the hands finally withdraw, I don’t fall so much as cease to hold myself upright. The ground meets me. I lie on it, shaking in waves I can’t control, blood running warm from my nose into the chalk dust beneath my face. Every thought dissolves before I can close my hand around it.

Then, distantly — shouting. The clash of steel. Running feet.

Declan’s voice, stripped of its composure for the first time: “He’s here already? That’s impossible — we’re miles from his territory—”

Another voice, ragged with panic: “Alpha! The king is attacking the camp — he’s gone feral — he’s tearing through our lines—”

I try to lift my head. I manage an inch before my body refuses.

Through the fabric of the tent, a shadow moves — enormous, low, fast. Something that has shed all pretense of restraint and become only the thing underneath. The wolf. The fury. The purpose driving it forward without hesitation.

Then a roar so deep it moves through the ground and into my bones, scattering the green flames, shaking the tent poles.

I know that growl.

Caspian.

He came.