CLAIMED BY MY SWORN ENEMY ALPHA

Chapter 10: The News

The messenger reached Silverwood two days after the ambush, and I knew something was wrong before he even dismounted, because Garrick's second never rode that hard for good news.

"Where is Garrick," I said, already crossing the courtyard toward him, my boots sliding slightly on the frost still clinging to the stones.

"Wounded, not badly. He sent me ahead." The messenger's face told me the rest before his words caught up, a grey, hollowed-out look I had seen before only after the worst kind of losses. "The unit was ambushed on the eastern road. We lost the fight before it started. Blackthorn guards came out of the trees like they knew exactly where we would be."

"And Aria?"

He hesitated, which was worse than any answer he could have given, and in that hesitation I felt the ground shift beneath everything I had believed true that morning.

"Taken," he said finally. "Marked, by their alpha himself. We saw it happen. There was nothing we could do."

The world went strange and distant for a moment, sound narrowing to a thin ringing in my ears while my body kept standing there as though nothing had changed at all. Marked. Taken. Two words that rearranged everything I had believed about my own future in the space of a single sentence. I had spent years telling myself that someday, when she was ready, when the timing was right, she would look at me the way I had always looked at her. That future had just been taken out of my hands by something older and crueler than either of us had any say over.

"Take me to the Alpha," I said, when I could trust my voice again. "Now."

The walk to the main hall felt longer than it had any right to be, every familiar stone of the courtyard suddenly strange under my feet, as though grief had rearranged the shape of the place I had grown up in. I found Magnus already standing at the head of the war table when I arrived, the messenger's report having clearly reached him moments before I did, his face carrying the particular stillness that meant he was holding something enormous behind a wall of careful control.

Rosalind did not have his composure. I watched her hand press flat against her chest as though she could hold her own heart together by force, and something in that gesture broke whatever careful control I had been holding onto since the courtyard.

"Blackthorn's alpha," Magnus said, voice flat, each word deliberate. "Damian Blackthorn. He marked my daughter in the middle of a border skirmish."

"That is what the reports say," the messenger confirmed, standing stiff and miserable near the door.

"Fated mates." Rosalind's voice came out barely above a whisper, disbelief and horror tangled together. "After all this time, after everything our families have done to each other, fate chooses now, chooses him, of all the wolves in this territory."

"Fate does not choose sides in a war," Magnus said, though he did not sound entirely convinced by his own words, and I saw his hand tighten against the edge of the table until his knuckles paled. "This changes nothing about what Blackthorn has done to us over the years. If anything, it gives them more reason to want us weak. A mate bond does not erase a hundred years of raids and stolen territory."

"It gives us leverage too," I said, before I could stop myself, the words arriving faster than I had thought them through.

Both of them turned to look at me, and I felt the weight of my own words settle heavier than I expected once they were out loud in the room, Magnus's sharp attention pinning me in place like a physical thing.

"Explain," Magnus said.

"If she is truly his mate, he will not want to lose her. That means he has something to lose now, something Silverwood can use. A trade. A negotiation. Something that gets her home without a war neither pack can afford to fight." I said it steadily, though everything underneath the words was raw and unsteady, grief and fury tangled together into something that felt, in that moment, almost like purpose. "We do not need to storm Blackthorn territory. We need leverage, and for the first time in a hundred years, we actually have some."

Magnus studied me for a long moment, weighing something I could not read behind his eyes, the silence stretching long enough that I heard the fire crackling in the hearth behind him. "You want to go after her yourself."

"I want to bring her home."

"That is not the same thing, Kellan, and you know it." His voice carried no cruelty, only the flat honesty of a man who had spent decades learning to separate duty from feeling, even when the two tangled together as badly as they did now.

He was right, and I did not have an answer that would make the difference between those two things disappear, so I said nothing at all, and let my silence speak for itself.

Rosalind crossed the room and took both my hands in hers, her eyes bright with unshed tears she was too proud to let fall in front of her husband. Her grip was fierce, steadier than her voice had sounded a moment before.

"You loved her before any of this happened. I know that. I think Magnus knows it too, whatever he says out loud." She glanced toward her husband, some old, complicated understanding passing between them, years of marriage compressed into a single look.

"Bring her home if you can. But Kellan, if the bond is real, truly real, you may be bringing home a woman who does not want to leave. Prepare yourself for that possibility before you ride, because I will not watch you break yourself twice over this."

I did not want to hear it. I did not let myself believe it either, not that night, standing in a room full of grief and fury and the ashes of a future I had spent years quietly hoping for without ever quite saying so aloud.

"I will bring her home," I said. "Whatever it takes."

Magnus nodded slowly, some decision settling into place behind his eyes, the Alpha reasserting himself over the father. "Then we will need a plan worthy of the risk. Gather what you need. We ride within the week, with an offer Blackthorn cannot easily refuse, and a delegation that will not embarrass this pack in the process."

I left the hall that night with a resolve settling cold and hard in my chest, the kind that does not waver no matter how much reason tries to argue with it. Whatever Aria felt now, whatever fate had done to her against her will, I intended to remind her of a home, and a life, and a love that had existed long before any bond had the chance to interfere with it. I stood alone in the courtyard afterward for a long while, looking north toward territory I had spent my whole life being taught to fear, and made myself a private promise that had nothing to do with pack politics or leverage or trade agreements at all.

I did not yet understand how much of a fool's errand that resolve would turn out to be.

Garrick returned two days later, leaning heavily on a crutch and looking older than I had ever seen him, though his eyes were sharp as ever when he found me in the training yard going through forms I did not need to practice, just to keep my hands busy while my mind refused to settle.

"You are going to wear a groove into the dirt," he said, easing himself down onto the fence rail. "That will not bring her home any faster."

"Then tell me what will."

"Patience, mostly. And a plan that does not get you killed the moment you cross into Blackthorn territory." He studied me for a long moment, the same assessing look he had given recruits for thirty years. "I saw what happened in that valley, Kellan. I saw the alpha's face when he came out of the trees. Whatever that was, it was not something a trade offer is going to undo easily."

"You think I should give up."

"I think you should walk into this with your eyes open, instead of your heart leading the way and your judgment three steps behind it." His voice softened slightly, an old man's patience worn thin by the day's events but not by unkindness. "I have known you since you were a boy following her around the training yard, trying to keep up. I am not telling you not to go. I am telling you to be honest with yourself about what you are actually walking into, because Aria deserves better than a rescue built on denial."

I did not have an answer for that, not one I was ready to say out loud, so I only nodded and let the silence stretch between us, the cold morning air settling over the training yard the way it had every morning of my life, except that this one felt different, heavier, weighted with a future I no longer had any certainty about at all.

"We ride within the week," I said finally. "Whatever I find when we get there, I intend to give her the choice no one else has given her since that valley. That much, at least, I can promise her."

Garrick nodded slowly, something that might have been approval settling into the lines of his weathered face. "That, I think, is the only promise worth making right now."