HIS BLOOD, THEIR DOWNFALL

Chapter 2: The Summons

The walk to the tower felt longer than it should have.

Kade fell into step behind the others, close enough not to look like he was hanging back, far enough that nobody would notice his jaw was clenched tight. Three months of discipline, and his hands still wanted to shake. He kept them loose at his sides instead, forced his shoulders into the same bored slouch every other trainee wore on their way to a summons nobody wanted.

Whatever it is, it's not about you, he told himself. It can't be. Nobody rings the summons bell for a kennel boy.

He almost believed it.

The tower rose out of the mist ahead of them, gray stone gone darker with the morning's damp, ravens picking at something along the parapet that Kade decided not to look at too closely. He'd been inside twice before — once to deliver a message nobody else wanted to carry, once to scrub blood out of the audience hall floor after a punishment he hadn't been told the reason for. Both times, he'd kept his eyes down and his mouth shut and gotten out as fast as he could.

Today he didn't have that option. Whatever this was, everyone was being herded in together, no exceptions.

Draven fell into step beside him without being invited, which was somehow worse than if he'd stayed away entirely.

"You look sick," Draven said, quiet enough that only Kade could hear it.

"I look like everyone else."

"You don't, actually." Draven's eyes cut sideways, studying him with that same new attention from the training yard — sharper now, less lazy. "Everyone else is annoyed about losing their morning. You look like you're walking into your own funeral."

Kade didn't answer. There wasn't a version of the truth he could give that wouldn't make things worse, and Draven was watching too closely now for a lie to land clean.

The doors to the audience hall stood open, and the smell hit him before anything else did — old stone, tallow smoke, and underneath it, faint but unmistakable, fear. Not his own. Someone else's, thick enough to taste.

The hall was already half full by the time he stepped inside. Betas along the walls, a scatter of senior pack members near the front, all of them arranged in careful order around the dais where the two Alphas sat exactly as they always did — Malric on the left, broad and still, and Fenros on the right, leaning forward with the look of a man doing arithmetic in his head.

Kade found a place near the back, shoulder to shoulder with wolves who didn't know his name, and made himself breathe slow.

Then he saw her.

A woman knelt on the stone floor between the dais and the gathered pack, cloaked, hood drawn low, hands bound in front of her. She wasn't struggling. She'd gone past that, the way people did when they understood struggling wouldn't change anything. Her shoulders were shaking — not from cold, Kade realized. From something closer to grief held so tightly it had nowhere left to go but out through her whole body.

He didn't know why his pulse spiked before his mind caught up to the reason.

Then she lifted her head, just slightly, and he knew.

Fifteen years hadn't changed the shape of her face as much as he'd have expected. There was more gray in the hair that had slipped loose from her hood, deeper lines at the corners of her eyes, but it was her. It was his mother, kneeling on the floor of the pack that murdered his father, bound like something dangerous.

He didn't move. Didn't let his breath catch, didn't let anything cross his face — fifteen years of training folding over him like a second skin, even as every instinct he had screamed at him to cross the hall and put himself between her and every wolf in this room.

Malric rose first.

"Three months ago," he said, and his voice carried easily across the hall without him needing to raise it, "our border patrols found a woman living under a false name in the eastern territories. Alone. No pack mark, no mate, no explanation anyone believed." He gestured at the kneeling woman without looking at her, like she was a piece of evidence rather than a person. "She has refused to explain herself. We believe she has information relevant to a matter that concerns every wolf in this hall."

A murmur ran through the crowd. Beside Kade, Draven had gone very still, watching the dais with real attention now instead of the bored half-interest he'd worn on the walk over.

Fenros stood next, and the hall quieted faster for him than it had for his brother — something in the careful, measured way he moved that made people pay closer attention, Kade had noticed, even in three months of watching from the edges.

"There is a binding our late brother sealed the night he died," Fenros said. "Most of you were too young, or not yet born, to understand what it cost him. That binding is failing. If it is not renewed before the next moon, this territory will not survive what comes through."

The hall had gone dead silent now. Kade kept his eyes forward, kept his face arranged into the same mild confusion everyone around him wore, and felt his heart slamming against his ribs hard enough that he was half-certain the wolf beside him could hear it.

"The binding requires blood," Fenros continued. "Not just any blood. His bloodline, and his alone." A pause, deliberate, letting the weight of it settle over the room. "A bloodline we were told ended the night he did."

His mother's head had lifted fully now. She wasn't looking at the Alphas.

She was looking straight at Kade.

Just for a second — less than a second, a flicker so brief that anyone not watching for it would have missed it entirely — her eyes found his across the crowded hall, and something passed between them that had no safe translation into words. Don't. Or maybe run. Or maybe just fifteen years of I'm sorry compressed into a single desperate look before she made herself drop her gaze back to the floor.

Malric's voice cut through the silence like it had been waiting for exactly this moment.

"This woman knows where that bloodline went," he said. "And she is going to tell us. One way or another."

He nodded once toward the guards flanking her.

And Kade watched, frozen in a hall full of wolves who had no idea what they were about to do to his mother — or how close the answer they wanted was standing among them, close enough to reach, close enough to lose everything in the next four seconds if he moved even slightly wrong.