HIS BLOOD, THEIR DOWNFALL

Losing on purpose takes practice. Kade knew that better than anyone in this yard — how hard to let a fist land, how long to stay down so nobody started asking the wrong questions. Three months at Duskbane had taught him the real rule: be nobody, or don't survive at all. The training yard smelled like it always did this time of morning — churned dirt, sweat, the faint copper tang of blood that never quite washed out of the packed earth no matter how many seasons passed over it. Somewhere past the fence line, the kennels were already stirring, dogs and half-grown pups scrabbling at their pens, oblivious to the fact that the boy who fed them every morning was the son of the Alpha their masters had murdered. "Again." Draven was circling him now, grinning like a boy who'd never had to earn a single thing in his life. "Try not to fall over this time." Somebody laughed. Kade let them. He rolled his shoulder, spat blood where his cheek had split open on the dirt, and waited. Draven always gave it away — some little twitch in his jaw a half-second before he swung. He probably didn't even know he did it. Three months of watching this boy fight had taught Kade more about him than Draven would ever know about Kade. Kade let the punch land anyway. Stumbled back into the fence right on schedule. Let Draven have his moment. Nobody here needed to know he could've ended this fight in four seconds flat — could've had Draven on his back in the dirt with a knee against his throat before the boy even registered he'd lost. That wasn't the fight Kade had come here for. Not yet. A few of the other trainees whooped, clapping Draven on the back like he'd done something worth remembering. Kade pushed himself off the fence and let his shoulders drop, let his face go slack and stupid, the way it needed to look. He'd practiced this expression in stolen mirrors more than he cared to admit. "Enough." The word cut through the noise, and every wolf in the yard went stiff — which told Kade who'd just walked in before he even turned to look. Wren didn't raise her voice much. She'd learned a while back she didn't need to. She crossed the yard with her satchel over one shoulder, hair pinned back, wearing the exact expression of someone who'd seen this scene play out one too many times and stopped pretending it was training. Her eyes went straight to the split on his cheek, cataloging it the way healers did — quick, clinical, already deciding how bad it was before she'd even reached him. "You're bleeding on my clean dirt." She was already crouching. Already tilting his chin toward the light like she had every right to. "Didn't realize the dirt belonged to someone." "Everything here belongs to somebody." Her thumb pressed under the cut, testing it, cool and steady against his jaw. "You, apparently, belong to whoever keeps letting people hit you." He should've pulled away. Fifteen years of hiding had taught him exactly that — don't let anyone get this close, don't let them look too long, because up close, in decent light, some things are a lot harder to explain than a bruise. Her fingers smelled faintly of crushed herbs and something sharper underneath, some tincture she must have been mixing before the bell called her out here. He didn't move. Her fingers stopped. Half a second, maybe less, and her focus wasn't on the cut anymore — it had slid up to his eyes, and something shifted in her face. Not quite confusion. Closer to trying to place something she swore she'd seen before, somewhere, in some life that wasn't this one. "Your eyes," she said, quiet, like she hadn't really meant to say it out loud. "What about them." "They're not brown." A blink, and whatever she'd almost caught folded itself right back behind professional distance. "Trick of the light." It wasn't. He knew exactly what she'd nearly seen — his eyes going pale gold, almost silver, the second his temper slipped even slightly. His mother had drilled that into him since before he was old enough to really understand it, sitting him down every year on the anniversary of his father's death and saying the same words like a prayer. Keep it leashed. Keep your eyes down. They're hunting for that color, and they will kill you the moment they find it. He hadn't slipped once in three months. Not once, through every insult, every humiliation, every fist he let land without fighting back. Just did now, for maybe four seconds, in front of the one person on this entire pack's land who shouldn't have noticed anything about him at all. "You're new." Wren stood, pressed a strip of gauze into his palm instead of finishing the job herself — putting the distance back between them on purpose. He clocked it a beat too late, the way she angled her body slightly away, like she'd caught herself doing something she hadn't meant to do. "Since spring." "I'd still remember." One more look, longer than it needed to be, satchel already swinging back over her shoulder as she turned to go. "Press that to the cut. And stop losing on purpose, kennel boy. Whoever actually taught you to fight would be insulted." Gone before he could ask how she'd known that part too. He stood there a moment, gauze forgotten in his hand, watching the space where she'd been like it might still hold an answer if he looked hard enough. Draven had stopped laughing somewhere in the middle of all that. He was watching Kade differently now — the kind of watching that noticed the Beta's ward didn't talk to just anyone the way she'd just talked to him. Didn't touch just anyone's face like that either, not with that particular kind of careful attention that meant something even if she'd never admit it. "Careful." Draven's voice dropped, meant only for him, the earlier smugness gone out of it entirely. "Wren doesn't play favorites. If she's curious about you, that's not luck. That's a problem." "I'm nobody's problem." "Everybody's somebody's problem around here." There was something sharper in his face now, something calculating that hadn't been there a minute ago — Kade watched it settle into place like a mask he'd seen Draven's father wear a hundred times. "Three months of you losing fights you shouldn't lose, and eyes that just made the Alpha's niece forget what she was saying mid-sentence. I'm going to find out which one of those is the lie." Kade didn't answer. There wasn't a safe answer to give, and every second he stood here trying to think of one was a second too long. Then the tower bell rang. Three slow tolls — not the training signal — and the whole yard went still at once, twenty pairs of eyes lifting toward the stone spire at the same moment like they'd rehearsed it. The summons bell. It only rang when both Alphas needed eyes on something they couldn't handle quietly. Draven's grin came back slower this time, and meaner, like he'd already decided this was somehow going to work in his favor. "We'll finish this later, kennel boy." Kade watched him walk off toward the tower with the rest of the yard falling into step behind him, gauze still balled up forgotten in his fist, and told himself the bell had nothing to do with him. He didn't believe that for a second. Not with his pulse still climbing from I'd still remember — and not with the growing, sinking certainty that after three months of hiding in the one place he swore nobody would ever find him, somebody finally had.