Winter's Claim

Chapter Six: The Night Frosthaven Bled

The gathering hall was full by the time Bjorn led me to the platform, every wolf in Frosthaven crowded in to witness the formal presentation of the omega princess who would, in three days, become their Luna. I had expected hostility. What I felt instead, moving through the crowd, was something closer to cautious curiosity, and here and there, an actual nod of respect from pack members whose children I had treated in the sick house.

Bjorn stood beside me, close enough that his arm brushed mine, and for the first time since Ashwood I did not feel like a commodity being displayed. I felt, almost, like I belonged somewhere.

Mira stood near the front, her face carefully arranged into something neutral. I noticed her checking the doors more than once, and I told myself it was nothing.

I was wrong.

The attack came from the western entrance, fast enough that half the hall did not understand what was happening until the first scream. Wolves in unfamiliar colors, Grimfrost colors, Ingrid would tell me later, poured through a door that should have been guarded, a door someone had clearly told them would be open.

Bjorn moved before I had fully processed the danger, shoving me behind him, roaring orders that sent his own wolves into formation with the speed of long drilling. I should have stayed where he put me. I would have, except I saw a child, the same fevered girl from the sick house, frozen in the chaos near the platform steps, and I did not think, I simply moved.

I got her clear of the fighting a second before a Grimfrost wolf lunged for the space we'd just vacated. I did not get myself clear in time. Claws caught my side, deep, and the world went white with pain before I hit the ground.

The last thing I heard clearly was Bjorn's voice, no longer giving orders, no longer controlled at all, screaming my name in a way that cracked something open in my chest even through the pain.

I woke to firelight and the smell of herbs, Petra's hands working over the wound at my side, and Bjorn kneeling beside the cot, his face gray, his hands stained with blood that I understood, dimly, was probably mine.

"You should not have run toward the fighting," he said, and his voice shook, actually shook, this man built from ice and silence.

"She was a child," I said. "I wasn't going to leave her."

Something broke loose in his expression then, something he had clearly kept locked down since Viktor died, maybe longer. "I have spent two years telling myself I would never let anyone else matter enough to lose," he said. "I have been very bad at keeping that promise since the day you walked through my doors."

"Bjorn—"

"When Petra told me the wound might have been fatal," he said, "I understood, finally, what I have been too much of a coward to say out loud. This was never only a contract to me. Not since the sick house. Maybe not since Ashwood." He took my hand, careful of the bandages. "I am done pretending otherwise, to my pack or to you."

Before I could answer him, the door burst open, and Ingrid appeared, breathless, with news that changed the shape of everything again.

"We caught one of theirs alive," she said. "He's talking. Mira let them in, Bjorn. She's been feeding Grimfrost information for weeks."

Bjorn's hand tightened around mine, and I watched the last of his careful control give way to something colder and far more dangerous than anything I had seen from him yet, a fury built entirely from having almost lost me and now discovering exactly who had made that possible.

"Bring her to me," he said, his voice a low growl that filled the room like a physical presence. "Now."

I lay there, wounded and shaking, watching the man I had sworn I would never let myself trust again stand up to face a betrayal that had nearly cost me my life, and I understood, with sudden and terrifying clarity, that whatever happened next in that great hall would decide far more than Mira's fate.

It would decide whether the man walking out that door came back to me as my Alpha, or as someone the war had finally hollowed out completely.

The door slammed shut behind him, and I was left alone with the fire, the pain in my side, and the unbearable silence of not knowing which version of Bjorn Kessler would return.