MOONBOUND: The Alpha's Forgotten Crown

Chapter Thirteen — Training Wren

"If you're truly Moonhaven's heir," Kael said, "then whatever comes for you next won't come through a training yard elbow from Priah. It'll come through a challenge, or an assassination attempt, or both, and I refuse to let you face either one as unprepared as this pack has kept you your entire life."

They stood in the private training ring behind the pack house at dawn, mist still clinging to the grass, silvering the blades of it, curling low over the packed earth like something reluctant to leave. Wren was dressed in gear that actually fit her for what felt like the first time in her life instead of the hand-me-down scraps omegas were issued from the bottom of the supply closet, gear that moved when she moved, that didn't bunch at the shoulders or drag at the ankles, that didn't feel like it had been chosen to remind her of her place. Kael circled her slowly, assessing, his gaze methodical in a way that would have once made her skin crawl, made her want to fold in on herself and disappear. She found she didn't mind the scrutiny the way she once would have — not from him, not anymore. There was nothing in it that diminished her. If anything, it felt like being seen for the first time.

"Yvet trained me," she said, rolling her shoulders back, testing the give of the new gear. "Hard, apparently, on your father's orders."

"Yvet trained you to survive omega-tier drills. I need to know what you can actually do against someone trying to kill you." He dropped into a ready stance, unhurried, giving her time to mirror it, patient in a way that surprised her. "Show me your instincts. Don't think about it. Just move."

She moved.

It surprised them both, a little, the speed that came out of her when she stopped consciously restraining herself the way eighteen years of pack hierarchy had trained her to, the sharp economy of her strikes when she wasn't holding back out of fear of what happened to omegas who fought back too well, who forgot themselves in front of the wrong eyes. There was a version of her that had spent a lifetime making herself smaller, quieter, less, and this was not that version. Kael blocked, adjusted, blocked again, his breath catching audibly at the third exchange when she nearly got past his guard entirely, when her fist stopped a hair's width from his jaw and he had to twist hard to avoid it. Something like genuine surprise crossed his face, quickly folding into something else — appraisal, maybe. Respect.

"Corvin knew what he was doing," he said, breathing a little harder than he had a moment ago, reassessing her with new respect, circling again but slower now, more careful. "This isn't omega-tier instinct. This is someone who's been quietly built into a fighter for years without ever being told why."

"Then why did it take a claimed mate bond and a dead man's confession for anyone to notice?"

The question landed harder than she'd meant it to, old anger surfacing faster than she could soften it, rising up out of some buried place she thought she'd learned to keep sealed. Eighteen years of being underestimated, overlooked, told in a hundred small ways that her body and her instincts belonged to everyone but herself, it didn't just evaporate because someone finally looked at her differently. Kael didn't flinch from it the way she half expected him to, didn't retreat into the practiced diplomacy she'd seen him use on pack elders and rival Alphas alike.

"Because this pack failed you," he said simply, holding her gaze, letting the words sit there between them without cushioning. "Long before I did, and in ways I'm only beginning to understand the full shape of. I'm not going to pretend that's a small thing, or something training alone can fix." He exhaled, and for a moment the Alpha posture fell away and there was just a man reckoning with something he couldn't undo. "But I can promise you this, from today forward, every wolf in Blackthorn is going to know exactly what you're capable of, and exactly what happens to anyone who mistakes your rank for weakness ever again."

She held his gaze a beat longer than necessary, searching it for the performance she'd have once assumed was there, the easy words offered because they cost nothing. She didn't find it. Whatever this was, it wasn't that.

They trained through the morning, past mist burning off into clear autumn light that slanted gold across the ring, past the ache building in Wren's shoulders into something that felt less like exhaustion and more like discovery. Kael ran her through drills she'd never been taught, correcting her footwork with a hand at her hip or shoulder, quick and impersonal and somehow still warm, showing her how to read an opponent's weight shift a half-second before they committed to a strike. Every correction landed like a small revision to the story she'd always been told about herself. Every strike, every block, every moment Kael pushed her and she rose to meet it chipped away at eighteen years of a narrative built on her own supposed limitations — omega, fragile, ornamental, better seen than heard, better silent than sharp. None of that survived contact with what she was actually capable of once someone bothered to ask.

By the time Dax arrived at midmorning with news that pulled them both out of the ring, Wren had landed her first clean hit against Blackthorn's Alpha in open sparring, a solid strike to his ribs that staggered him half a step and left her breathless with something fierce and unfamiliar, pride maybe, or the first taste of a self she hadn't known she was allowed to have. Something in the astonished, proud look on Kael's face told her he considered that outcome exactly, precisely correct, as if her landing that hit were less an upset than an overdue correction to the natural order of things.

"Roran needs you both," Dax said, breathless from the run over, his expression tight with something that killed whatever lightness had built between them in the ring. He glanced between them, chest heaving, clearly having sprinted the whole distance from the pack house. "He found the name. The backup recipient on Corvin's emergency channel." He looked between them, grim, hesitating in a way that made the mist-damp morning suddenly feel colder. "You're not going to like it."

Kael's whole body went still, every trace of the training-yard ease vanishing in an instant. "Who."

Dax's eyes flicked to Wren, apologetic, before he answered. "Your mother. Isadora's had access to that channel this entire time."