Claimed by the Enemy's Heir

Wren did not stop running when her lungs gave out. She stopped thinking somewhere around the river and let her body do the work her mind no longer had the strength for. The Wrens body was tired. She kept moving. Behind her Hollowmoon was still burning. The Wren did not look back to check. She had already seen enough. The front gate caving in the scream that had been her mothers name in her mouth her father going down under three wolves at once and not getting back up the moment the whole sky over the packhouse turned the color of a wound. That was fire to carry for one lifetime. The Wren did not need to watch it Smoke had gotten into everything. Her hair, her throat the fabric of her shirt where it stuck to the cut along her ribs. Every breath tasted like ash. The Wren kept moving because the alternative was lying down in the dirt and letting the Voss wolves finish what their Alpha had started and some stubborn ugly part of her was not ready to give them that. A howl rose somewhere behind her, low and confident the kind of sound a wolf makes when it already knows it is going to win. Not Hollowmoon. The Wren knew her packs voices the way she knew her own heartbeat and this was not one of them. This was Voss. The Wrens own wolf was screaming at her to shift, to fight, to do something than stagger through the dark on two human legs that had stopped fully obeying her an hour ago. The Wren did not. A bad shift now exhausted and bleeding would just give them an easier kill. The Wren did not see the ravine until the ground disappeared under her. The fall was not long. It did not need to be. The Wren hit the slope wrong felt something give in her ankle with a flare of pain and rolled the rest of the way down into packed dirt and dead leaves and lay there afterward not entirely sure she could move again even if she wanted to. Footsteps. Not paws. Crunched to a stop above her. The Wren turned her head slow every part of her aching. Found a shape standing at the edge of the ravine looking down like he had known exactly where to find her. It took the Wren a second to understand what she was looking at. It took longer than that to believe it. "Kieran." His name came out rough stripped of anything but disbelief. Six years had reshaped him. Wider through the shoulders harder in the jaw nothing left of the boy who used to correct her footwork in the training yard with patience than her own father ever managed.. The eyes were the same. Gray, flat watching her like she was a problem he had not decided how to solve He did not answer away. When he finally spoke his voice had not changed all and that was somehow worse than if it had. "You should be dead." The Wren was trying to process what was happening. The Wren tried to push herself and the world swam, dark at the edges. The Wren heard a sound leave her that she did not recognize as her own. Kieran was beside her before she had finished falling down. Fast too fast the kind of speed that came from a wolf who had spent six years getting stronger while she had spent them grieving. Close Kieran smelled like smoke and pine and something underneath that the Wren did not have a name for, not yet and the Wren hated that some traitor part of her noticed it at all. The Wren did not feel anything snap into place. No lightning, no certainty. Just a low unwelcome pull low in her chest like a hook sinking into something she had not known was soft. The Wren shoved it down hard. "Don't " the Wren said, when Kierans hand came near her shoulder. "Don't touch me." Kieran stopped. His jaw. For a moment he looked less like the boy the Wren remembered and more like a man holding something back by force. "Your ankles broken " Kieran said instead flat, professional, like this was an assessment and nothing more. "You won't make it another mile on it." The Wren was angry. "I made it this far without you." Kierans expression was calm. "You made it this far because no one was actually trying yet." Kierans eyes flicked toward the treeline behind her scanning, the way he used to scan a sparring ring before he let her make a mistake on purpose just to teach her something. "They are now." The Wren wanted to hate Kieran. The Wren had had six years of practice at it since the morning she woke up and Kieran was simply gone, no note, no goodbye, eleven days before tonight. Before the night that had taken everyone she loved in a single hour. The Wren had built her hatred carefully in the years brick by brick and it had been the only thing solid enough to stand on some nights. It did not feel as solid now with Kieran crouched in front of her in the dark looking at her like leaving had cost him something too. The Wren asked, "Why are you here Kieran." The Wrens voice cracked on Kierans name and the Wren despised herself for it. "Why is it you out of every wolf your father could've sent who finds me bleeding in a ditch on Voss land?" Something moved behind Kierans expression unreadable gone before the Wren could name it. "My father doesn't know you're alive " Kieran said. "He doesn't know I'm here at all." The Wren was not satisfied with Kierans answer. "That's not an answer." Kieran agreed quietly. "No it isn't." The silence after that stretched enough that the Wren could hear the forest again. Wind through dead leaves water somewhere distant the small sounds of a world that hadn't noticed her parents had died that night. The Wren watched Kierans face for the lie she expected. It did not come. What came instead was something to a man refusing to look directly at his own hands. Kieran said, "I don't know why I left " and it cost him something to say it. The Wren could hear that much. "I've spent six years not letting myself ask." It was not an apology. It was not even close to enough. But it was the true thing Kieran had said to her since she was sixteen years old and against every instinct she had left some small exhausted part of the Wren believed him. The Wren told Kieran "That's not good enough." Kieran knew. "I know." The Wren should have told Kieran to leave her. Voss land or not broken ankle or not some animal part of her still trusted her legs more than she trusted Kieran. But the howls were getting closer and the smoke behind her was the proof she had that her parents were really gone and the only person standing between her and whatever came next was the one boy whose absence might have started all of it. The Wren said, "Then you'd better start figuring it out " before she decided it did not matter whether Kieran meant to. Kieran did not smile. Kieran did not reach for her again either though the Wren could see it cost him not to. Kieran asked, "Can you walk if I help you?" The Wren was honest. "No." Kieran said, "Then I'm carrying you and you're allowed to hate me for it." The Wren let Kieran because the alternative was dying out of spite and now even after everything, that felt like a worse trade than this. Being lifted by the one person who might have signed her parents death warrant smoke still thick in the air behind them the moon indifferent overhead watching two wolves who weren't supposed to want anything, from each other start walking anyway.