CURSE BREAKER

**LYRA** They tell you the mark doesn't hurt. They lie. It started as a whisper of heat along my collarbone the night I turned eighteen, and by the time the healer finally peeled back my collar to look, the skin there had blackened into the shape of a broken crescent moon — the same mark carved into the stone at the center of the pack's oldest, ugliest legend. The Curse-Breaker's mark. The mark that meant I would either save the Ashveil pack or be the reason it burned to the ground, and no one — not the elders, not the healer, not my own trembling mother — could tell me which. "It chooses," the healer said, like that was supposed to comfort me. "The mark doesn't explain itself, girl. It just chooses, and then it waits to see what you'll do with it." I was born human. Raised on the edges of a world that was never supposed to be mine, adopted into the Ashveil pack as an infant after my birth parents were killed in a border raid I don't remember and no one likes to talk about. I grew up half-belonging — never quite pack enough to be trusted, never quite outsider enough to be ignored. And now, apparently, I was cursed enough to be either their salvation or their execution, depending on which way the wind blew. "You'll be watched," the healer said. "Constantly. Starting tonight." I didn't ask by whom. I already knew. --- **KAI** I'd been alpha for two years and I already understood that the title came with far more grief than power, but nothing had prepared me for the particular grief of standing in the healer's doorway watching a girl I'd known my whole life get told, calmly, that she might have to die for the good of everyone she loved. Lyra didn't cry. She never cried, not where anyone could see it, and something about the rigid set of her spine as she absorbed the healer's verdict made my chest ache in a way I didn't have a name for and didn't want one. "I'll assign a guard," I said, once the healer had gone and it was just the two of us in the dim candlelight. "I don't need a babysitter, Kai." "You need someone who can end this quickly if the mark decides wrong," I said, and hated myself for the bluntness of it, hated the flinch that crossed her face before she buried it. "I'm not saying that to be cruel. I'm saying it because it's the truth, and you deserve the truth more than you deserve comfort right now." "How generous of you." "Lyra." "I know what I am, Kai." Her voice cracked on my name, just slightly, just enough that I felt it in my teeth. "I've known what I might become since I was old enough to understand what that mark on the old stone meant. You don't have to spell it out for me like I haven't already imagined every version of my own death." I crossed the room before I'd fully decided to, and took her face in both hands — too familiar a gesture for an alpha and a marked girl who was, as of tonight, potentially a threat to everything I was sworn to protect, but I couldn't stop myself. Her skin was fever-hot where the mark had burned itself into her collarbone hours earlier. "I'm not going to let it be your death," I said, low and certain, more certain than I had any right to be about something ancient and cursed and utterly outside my control. "Whatever this thing is. Whatever it wants from you. I will find a way to break it before I let it break you." Something in her eyes went soft and wrecked all at once. "You can't promise that." "Watch me," I said, and meant it with every furious, terrified part of myself. --- **LYRA** He didn't let go of my face for a long moment, and I let him hold it, let myself lean into the terrifying comfort of being touched like I was something worth saving instead of something to be watched for signs of catastrophe. I'd loved Kai since I was young enough that the feeling had grown up alongside me, quiet and constant and entirely unspoken, because what was the point of naming something that could never be simple between an alpha and the human girl he was sworn to protect — and now, apparently, the human girl he might one day have to kill. "They'll want you to distance yourself from me," I said. "The elders. Once word spreads." "Let them want it." "Kai—" "I said let them want it." His thumb traced along my jaw, slow and deliberate, and something in the touch felt less like comfort now and more like a claim, dark and possessive in a way that made my breath catch. "I've spent two years being careful about you, Lyra. Careful about what I let myself feel, careful about what I let myself say. I'm done being careful. If this mark is going to try to take you from me, it's going to have to fight for it." The candlelight flickered low between us, and for one dangerous, breathless moment, I thought he might kiss me — and some starved, reckless part of me wanted him to, curse and consequence and elders' disapproval be damned. He didn't. He pressed his forehead to mine instead, breathing me in like he was trying to memorize something he was afraid of losing, and murmured, rough and low: "Whatever happens. Whatever that mark decides you are. You are not alone in this. Not for one single night of it." I believed him. God help me, I believed him completely, even knowing — even already knowing — that belief was exactly the kind of thing this curse was designed to punish.