Chapter 5:winds of betrayal
477 Words
Rosari’e’s POV
The fortress gates groaned as they shut behind us, sealing out the frozen battlefield. Smoke still clung to my hair, the stink of blood and burning corpses woven into my clothes. My pack moved silently around me, weary but unbroken.
Victory was ours, again. But victories like these always tasted like ash.
“Alpha Rosari’e!” a voice rang out, sharp with alarm.
I turned, eyes narrowing. Two guards sprinted toward me, dragging something between them. No… someone.
The body sagged heavily in their arms, half-buried in snow and blood. A man. A wolf. His skin was raw with claw marks, his chest carved with wounds that should have ended him hours ago. His breath was shallow, fogging faintly in the cold.
A male at our gates.
Impossible.
The soldiers dropped him roughly at my feet. His head lolled to the side, exposing a jaw bruised purple, lips cracked with frost. Even half-dead, he was striking in a way that made me grit my teeth. Too sharp. Too dangerous.
“We found him at the border,” one of my guards panted. “Collapsed. Barely alive.”
Iris stepped forward instantly, bristling. “A spy. Or worse. Leave him to freeze. We have no use for men here.”
The rest of the pack muttered their agreement. No man had crossed into our kingdom in years—not alive, not willingly. And certainly not one broken and bleeding at our doorstep.
But I didn’t move. My gaze lingered on him, searching. There was something… wrong. The wounds were brutal, but there was a different kind of mark etched into him. Shame. Exile. A story not told but carved into his skin.
He shouldn’t be breathing. And yet he was.
“Alpha,” Iris pressed, impatience sharp in her tone. “Give the command. We end him now.”
I crouched slowly, my shadow falling across his battered form. His lashes fluttered as if he sensed me, as if his wolf stirred even in this near-death silence.
No ordinary wolf survived wounds like this. No ordinary wolf collapsed at my gates by chance.
Fate did not play games.
I straightened, my voice cold but final. “No. He comes inside.”
Gasps rippled through the pack.
“Inside?” Iris hissed. “Are you out of your mind? He’s a male. He doesn’t belong here.”
“Then let him die under our watch,” I said evenly. “But no one touches him until I say so.”
The soldiers hesitated, but none dared disobey.
As they lifted him again, blood dripping onto the snow in uneven trails, I caught his face once more in the pale light. His expression, even unconscious, was carved in pain—and something deeper.
Something I recognized.
The look of a wolf the world had tried to bury… and
- Writer
