BOUND by SHADOWS

# THE PLANE #

# Chapter Five



The silence stretched so long that even the torchlight flickering outside the room seemed to have stopped moving. Arias finally set down his cup, and the sound of crystal meeting the table rang out strangely loud amid the quiet. His shoulders were rigid, every line of his body drawn tight, as though he were holding something back by will alone.



"Say that again," he said finally, his voice low, far too controlled.



Damian sighed, irritated and on edge. "You heard me the first time."



"Say it again anyway."



Damian exhaled, a muscle jumping in his jaw from sheer fury, and set his own cup aside. "Akira is seeing Ian—Eric's son. It's been going on for months, according to my eyes there—long enough that the pack considers it settled. Long enough that no one there even remembers he isn't her mate."



Arias's hand closed into a fist around the bedpost, and the old wood groaned faintly under the pressure. For a man who prided himself on his self-control, the sound was as good as a confession. "Months," he repeated the word as though tasting something bitter.



"She doesn't know what she is to us," Damian said, quieter now, his earlier anger curdling into something dark and viciously cold. "She doesn't even know any of us exist. Whatever there is between her and that boy—she's going to pay dearly for it."



Arias's eyes darkened. "That doesn't make this easier."



"No," Damian agreed. "It doesn't."



Arias turned toward the long window, staring out at the dark grounds below, at the torch-lit wall where guards paced in slow, endless circles. Somewhere beyond those walls, beyond leagues of forest and river and old, unfriendly borders, there was a girl who didn't know her blood could end entire kingdoms, living a life that had nothing to do with any of them. The thought tightened around his chest—but no matter. It was only a matter of time before she wouldn't be able to breathe without their permission, and that wretched Ian would pay for laying a hand on what belonged to them—no, on what belonged to the entire pack.



"We move as planned," Arias said at last, his voice regaining its usual edge.



Arias remained standing at the window long after the door closed behind Damian, after the echo of his footsteps had faded into the deeper silence of the castle. The torches along the outer wall trembled in a wind he couldn't feel from here, and the guards continued their slow, mechanical rounds, indifferent to the storm quietly tearing him apart from within.



He'd thought he was prepared for this. He had imagined, over the long years of searching, every possible obstacle standing between them and their mate—distance, danger, enemies who might try to use her against them, even the possibility that she might be afraid of what she was when they finally found her. But not even in his worst dreams had he imagined finding her attached to someone else—someone who wasn't them. He'd never imagined anyone but them touching her, holding her before she was even theirs. She had let a stranger who wasn't her mate touch her. She had let go of them, without ever knowing they existed to let go of. She had loved someone and built a life around him, while they—they had waited for her. They had searched for her and worn themselves thin, and kept going regardless, through years that had cost them more than most people would ever understand.



Fine. So be it. She would pay for this cruelly, and they would take pleasure in making her.



He told himself he was ready for anything. Whatever they found when they finally reached her, he would deal with it. He had dealt with worse. He had buried friends, burned traitors, and wrung a respect laced with fear from every court in the region through wars that would have torn apart any lesser power. A girl with a lover shouldn't mean anything.



And yet the fist in his chest would not loosen.



He poured himself another cup, out of habit more than desire, and didn't drink it. Instead he watched the amber liquid catch the dim light, turning it slowly, as if the answer to some unspoken question were hiding within it. Twenty years, as Damian had said—twenty years she had lived without any of them, growing up in a pack that all of them had been taught since childhood to despise—outcasts, exiled from the central territories generations ago for crimes no one alive remembered clearly anymore. And somewhere in that scorned, forgotten corner of the world, their mate had grown into a beautiful woman ready for them, had fallen in love, had built a life—never knowing that six royal men, with entire kingdoms standing behind them, had spent years searching every corner of the map for her.



A strange sense of injustice lodged in his throat. He wasn't sure if he was angry at fate, or at the Dark Moon pack, or at the boy—Ian, wasn't that his name—or at himself, for not searching harder, or faster, or sooner. He thought of all the nights he'd spent poring over maps by candlelight while she, somewhere, had been sitting across a table from someone else entirely, laughing at some joke that had nothing to do with him. The thought should have felt distant, abstract, the way most of his anger did when it came to matters of strategy and territory. Instead it sat in his chest like a stone, sharp-edged and immovable.



A knock at the door pulled him from his thoughts.



"Come in," he said, without turning.



It was Azarius. Of course it was. Azarius had always had an uncanny sense for knowing exactly when he was needed, as if he could feel the tension moving through the castle walls like heat rising from a furnace. He entered quietly, closed the door behind him with the same precision he did everything, and stopped at a respectful distance, hands clasped behind his back.



"So Damian told you," Azarius said, his tone dark. It wasn't a question.



"You knew?"



"I suspected." Azarius's voice was dark, calm—the calm that comes before a storm. "The way Damian's been these past few weeks—quieter than usual, sharper and angrier whenever the Dark Moon pack came up. It wasn't hard to guess he'd found something he didn't want to say in front of the others."



Arias finally turned from the window. "And you didn't think to tell me?"



"Would it have changed anything?" Azarius asked, harshly. "You would have gone to the Dark Moon pack regardless. And you would have found out regardless. The only difference is whether you had a week to prepare yourself, or a single hour."



There was no good answer to that, and Arias didn't try to find one. He set the untouched cup on the table beside the bed and dragged a hand over his face, feeling the fury and the darkness swallow him whole, wanting—wanting to see her suffer for what she'd done.



"She won't know us," he said, anger barely restrained. "She won't feel any of this. Whatever pull we feel toward her—she won't feel it. Not yet. Not until she understands the full weight of what she's done."



Azarius was silent for a moment, weighing his words carefully before speaking, as he always did. "That's true. She needs to know who we are and what we're capable of."



"Yes," Arias echoed, an edge creeping into his voice, stripped of any humor. "While she builds a life with someone else."



Azarius clenched his jaw in anger, the first real crack in his composure since he'd walked through the door.



Arias studied his brother for a long moment—the calm in his stance despite the fury simmering beneath it, in stark contrast to the storm raging in his own chest. Azarius had always been like this: steady where the others slid into overheating or ice, the still point around which the whole family's chaos revolved. It was, Arias thought, no small part of why the others deferred to him so easily when strategy was needed, even when none of them would ever say so aloud.



"You make it sound simple," Arias said.



"It won't be simple," Azarius admitted. "Nothing involving Rowan, Auras, and Luciano in one room is ever simple. But it isn't impossible either. And within a week, none of this will be just an idea anymore. It'll be real. We'll be standing in front of her, not in front of maps and reports." He paused. "How you conduct yourself when that happens will matter more than anything you decide tonight."



Arias let the words settle, turning them over the way he'd turned the cup a moment before. There was a part of him—the part that had led armies, crushed uprisings before they could take root, the part that had wrung fear and grudging respect from every court in the region—that wanted to simply march into Dark Moon territory and take what belonged to him, whatever the cost. That would have been easy. And it was exactly the kind of solution his enemies expected of him, the kind of solution that had made his name feared across three kingdoms long before he'd ever taken the throne his father left behind.



But she wasn't an enemy. She wasn't an uprising to be crushed, or land to be seized. By every instinct running in his blood, she was his—theirs.



"I want you to do something for me," Arias said at last.



Azarius raised an eyebrow, waiting.



"Find out everything you can about this Ian. Not just his name and his father's title. Everything. What kind of man he is. Whether he treats her well. Whether this is real or just convenient." Arias's jaw tightened. "I want to know exactly what we're walking into before we arrive."



"And if it's real?" Azarius asked carefully. "If he does treat her well? If it isn't convenience at all?"



Arias didn't answer right away. The question sat between them, heavier than either of them wanted to admit, and the room held nothing but the old castle's distant creaking as it settled around them, the way old buildings do in the deep hours of the night.



"Then we'll deal with it as we must," Arias said finally.



Azarius studied him a moment longer, something like quiet approval flickering behind his usually unreadable expression. "That's more restraint than I expected from you tonight."



"Don't get used to it," Arias muttered sharply.



Azarius allowed himself the ghost of a smile before it faded back into his usual calm. "I'll bring you what you asked for before we leave. Get some rest, Arias. Next week will be long, and you'll need to be steady when we arrive—not just for her sake. For Rowan, Auras, and Luciano's as well. If you walk in there carrying this weight the way you're carrying it now, they'll feel it, and they'll make it worse."



"They usually do."



"They usually do," Azarius agreed, and with that he inclined his head and left, leaving Arias alone again with the window, the dark lands beyond it, and the slow, steady ache beneath his ribs that no amount of golden liquor would drown tonight.



---



He stood there a long time after the door closed, listening to the wind move through the old stone, thinking of a girl he had never met but who was already, by everything his blood meant, his responsibility. Twenty years she had lived without them. One more week, he told himself, wouldn't erase that. But it would be the last week she spent without knowing they existed at all—and whatever came after, whatever storm broke over the Dark Moon pack when they arrived, he was resolved to make her understand, in the end, that she had never belonged to anyone but them. That she had been made for them, and them alone.



Eventually he moved away from the window and sat on the edge of the vast bed, elbows braced on his knees, the weight of the night finally beginning to catch up with him. He thought of Damian's face when he'd delivered the news—the anger there, yes, but something underneath it too, something closer to hurt than fury, though Damian would never have named it that way himself. He thought of Azarius's careful questions, the way he always seemed to see three steps further down any road than the rest of them combined. And beneath all of it, quietly, insistently, he thought of a name he had only just learned that night. Akira. He said it once, aloud, to the empty room, testing the shape of it in his mouth, and found that he didn't hate the sound of it nearly as much as he wanted to.



Sleep, when it finally came, was thin and restless, filled with half-formed images of a woman he had never seen—honey hair, green eyes, a laugh he couldn't quite hear clearly enough to remember once he woke.



---



Down the corridor, in a chamber considerably less orderly than Arias's, Rowan and Auras were still arguing, though the fire in it had cooled considerably since the meeting had ended, settling into the low, familiar rhythm of two brothers who had disagreed about nearly everything since the day they were both old enough to talk.



"I still say we should have started with the Silver Moon herd," Rowan muttered, sprawled sideways across a low couch with one arm thrown over his eyes.



"And I still say you're an i***t," Auras replied without much heat, seated across from him with a map of his own spread over his knees, though he wasn't really looking at it anymore. "None of that matters now. She's in the Dark Moon pack. Whatever we planned before, it's irrelevant."



Rowan lowered his arm just enough to look at his brother properly. "You don't seem particularly thrilled about it."



"I'm not thrilled or unthrilled. I'm thinking." Auras set the map aside, finally admitting to himself that he'd stopped reading it several minutes ago. "Twenty years, Rowan. She grew up entirely outside anything we could reach. And now we find out she's already—" He stopped, unwilling to finish the thought the same way Damian had.



"Attached," Rowan supplied flatly. "You can say it. We're all thinking it."



Auras exhaled slowly. "Attached. Fine. Attached to a wolf boy who's going to be very unhappy in about a week's time."



"Do you feel bad for him?" Rowan asked, genuinely curious, tilting his head.



Auras considered the question seriously, the way he considered most things. "No," he said finally. "I feel bad for what's about to happen to whatever peace he thinks he has. But I don't feel bad for him existing. He had no way of knowing what he was standing in the way of."



"That's generous of you."



"It's practical," Auras corrected. "There's a difference."



Rowan let out a short, humorless laugh and sat up properly, dragging a hand through his hair. "Do you think she'll fight it? When we get there?"



Auras was quiet for a moment. "I think," he said slowly, "that any woman raised outside everything we grew up with is going to look at six strange men showing up at her door and calling her their mate, and she's going to think we've lost our minds. I think it's going to take more than the bond to make her believe any of this. And I think Arias is not going to handle that patience well."



"No," Rowan agreed grimly. "He is not."



They fell into a silence that wasn't quite comfortable but wasn't hostile either—the particular silence of two brothers who had spent centuries learning to tolerate each other's worst qualities because the alternative was worse. Outside, the same wind that stirred the torches along the outer wall pressed faintly against the shutters, and somewhere beneath both of their thoughts, unspoken but present, ran the same quiet pull that had gathered every one of them into that hall earlier that night—steady, patient, and entirely indifferent to how ready any of them felt.



---



In his own chambers, Luciano lay stretched across his bed with his phone held above his face, though he hadn't actually looked at the screen in several minutes. The news sat strangely in his chest, heavier than he wanted to admit even to himself. He had built something of a reputation among his brothers as the one who didn't take much seriously—the one who joked when the room grew too tense, who lounged through meetings that made everyone else grind their teeth. It was easier that way. It always had been.



But even he couldn't quite laugh this one off.



Twenty years of searching, and their mate had been living an entire life without them—a life with laughter in it, apparently, and mornings and evenings that belonged to someone else. He tried to imagine what she looked like, beyond the bare description Damian had given, and found the image sat unexpectedly close to something like longing, which annoyed him more than he cared to examine.



"Well," he said aloud to the empty room, setting his phone face-down on his chest with a small, humorless smile. "This is going to be interesting."



He didn't sleep much either that night, though he never would have admitted that to any of his brothers.



---



Far to the north, in a modest room above a quiet house at the edge of the Dark Moon territory, Akira slept peacefully, curled beneath her blankets with a small stuffed rabbit tucked against her chest, entirely unaware that six men in a distant court had just spent the whole night rearranging their lives, their plans, and their understanding of the future around the mere fact of her existence.



She dreamed, faintly, of the valley she loved, of golden afternoon light and the sound of a familiar laugh beside her—Ian's laugh, warm and easy, the only voice she knew to associate with the particular, uncomplicated happiness of that day. She had no way of knowing that somewhere beyond the borders her family had lived within for generations, a different kind of attention had just turned toward her, ancient and inevitable, moving now with the quiet, unstoppable patience of something that had been waiting a very long time and had finally, finally found what it was looking for.



Outside her window, the same moon that hung over Arias's castle far to the south climbed slowly through the night sky, indifferent to distance, indifferent to borders, casting its pale light equally over a girl who dreamed of one man's laughter and a court full of men who had not yet earned the right to disturb her sleep—but who fully intended, within the week, to change that.



---



Morning came to the castle slowly, gray light easing over the eastern towers long before the sun itself cleared the horizon. Arias woke before dawn, as he always did, the restless sleep of the night before leaving him more tired than rested, though he would never have admitted that to anyone who asked. He dressed in silence, pulling on the dark, unadorned clothes he preferred for mornings when there was work to be done rather than court to be held, and made his way down to the lower hall, where he found Azarius already awake, several papers spread across the table before him, a pot of dark tea steaming untouched at his elbow.



"You didn't sleep," Azarius observed, not looking up from the page in front of him.



"Neither did you, apparently," Arias said, gesturing at the papers.



"I don't need as much sleep as the rest of you. It's one of the few advantages of being the quiet one." Azarius finally glanced up, sliding one of the papers across the table toward his brother. "I sent word ahead last night, to a contact I still keep near the border of Dark Moon territory. This is what came back before sunrise."



Arias picked up the page and scanned it quickly, his expression unreadable. It was sparse—little more than a handful of details, the sort of surface information anyone might gather about a prominent family in a border pack. Ian, son of Eric, Beta of the Dark Moon pack, twenty-two years old, groomed since childhood to take his father's position. No history of cruelty, no reputation for scandal, nothing that marked him as anything other than exactly what he appeared to be—an ordinary young man, well-liked by those around him, currently and apparently quite sincerely in love with the Alpha's daughter.



Arias set the page down without comment, though something in his jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.



"Not the villain you were hoping for," Azarius said, and there was something faintly amused in his voice, cold and without warmth, the amusement of a man who found other people's disappointments mildly entertaining.



"I wasn't hoping for anything," Arias said, too quickly.



"Of course not." Azarius took a slow sip of his tea, his pale, mismatched eyes unreadable over the rim of the cup. "Though it hardly matters what kind of man he is. Villain or saint, cruel or kind—none of it changes what he's done. He's had his hands on something that was never his to touch, for months, while the rest of us searched. That's the only fact that matters."



Arias didn't answer, because there was no good answer to give. He had spent the entire night constructing, without quite realizing he was doing it, a version of Ian he could resent without complication—careless, undeserving, someone whose claim on Akira could be dismissed as easily as it had been made. The sparse, unremarkable truth sitting on the table in front of him offered no such comfort.



"It changes nothing," Arias said finally, pushing the page aside. "The bond doesn't ask whether the obstacle in its way is a good man or a bad one."



"Good," Azarius said simply, setting his cup down with a small, precise click. "Then we won't waste time pretending otherwise, or wasting sympathy on a boy who was never going to keep her regardless of how well he treated her."



رفع آرياس نظره، إذ لفت انتباهه شيءٌ ما في نبرة أخيه لأول مرة ذلك الصباح. كان هناك سكونٌ يلفّ أزاريوس، لطالما أزعج الآخرين، بل وحتى آرياس نفسه أحيانًا - ليس غيابًا للمشاعر، بل شعورًا بأن كل ما يشعر به أزاريوس قد حُفظ في مكان بارد ودقيق، جاهزًا للاستخدام بدلًا من مجرد تحمّله. هذا الصباح، تحوّل ذلك السكون إلى ما يشبه النصل الحاد.



قال آرياس: "لديك اقتراح". لم يكن سؤالاً.



قال أزاريوس: "لديّ حقيقة. إنها لنا. ليس باختيارنا، ولا بمغازلة، ولا بأي شيء فعلناه لنستحقها، بل بالدم والرابطة، وهي أقدم وأقوى من أي وعد قطعته لذلك الفتى دون أن تعرف ثمنه. يمكننا أن نقضي أسبوعًا نتعامل معها بلطف. يمكننا أن نرسل لها رسائل. يمكننا أن نطلب إذن والدها كالمتضرعين على بابه، ونمنح تلك الجماعة كل فرصة لإخفائها أكثر، أو لتحريضها ضدنا قبل أن ننطق بكلمة واحدة." لم يرتفع صوته، ولم يشتدّ غضبًا كما كان صوت آرياس الليلة الماضية؛ بل أصبح هادئًا، باردًا وحاسمًا. "أو يمكننا أن نذهب ونأخذ ما هو لنا، وندعها تكرهنا إن أرادت، ما دامت على قيد الحياة وتحت حمايتنا لتكرهنا."



ساد الصمت التام في الغرفة.



قال آرياس ببطء، وهو يراقب وجه أخيه بحثاً عن أي إشارة تدل على أنه يبالغ، أو يختبره، أو يستفزه كما يفعل لوتشيانو أحياناً: "أنت تقترح أن نأخذها بالقوة". لكنه لم يجد شيئاً.



قال أزاريوس: "أقترح أن نتوقف عن التظاهر بأن هذا تفاوض. إنها رفيقتنا. هذه الحقيقة وحدها تفوق أي عاطفة قد تظن أنها تكنّها لفتى لن يكون قادرًا على الاحتفاظ بها بمجرد وصولنا. إذا انتظرنا موافقتها، وتفهمها، وتوافقها مع ما يجب أن تشعر به في أعماقها، فقد ننتظر سنوات، وكل يوم من هذا الانتظار هو يوم قد يصل إليه شخص آخر قبلنا - ساحر، أو بلاط منافس، أو أي شخص يفهم تمامًا قيمة قلبها المنتزع من صدرها. اللطف ترف للرجال الذين لا يُطاردون. نحن مُطاردون يا آرياس، جميعنا، لما تحمله في عروقها، وهي كذلك، سواء أدركت ذلك أم لا."



انقبض فك آرياس، ممزقًا بين جزء منه ينفر من برودتها وجزء آخر يدرك، بانزعاج، صورة أسوأ أفكاره تنعكس عليه، دون أي تردد. "وماذا لو حاربتنا؟ ماذا لو لم تسامحنا أبدًا؟"



لم يتغير تعبير أزاريوس. "ثم تحاربنا، وفي النهاية تتوقف، لأن الرابط لا ينفكّ لمجرد رغبتها في ذلك. من الأفضل لها أن تثور علينا بأمان داخل أسوارنا بدلًا من أن تحزن على صبي من العالم الآخر، في قبر حفره لها ساحر لأننا أضعنا وقتًا طويلًا في مراعاة مشاعرها." نهض من على الطاولة بهدوء، وأعاد الأوراق إلى كومة مرتبة بنفس الدقة التي كان يحرص عليها في كل شيء. "سألتني الليلة الماضية كيف يجب أن تتصرف عندما نصل. أقول لك الآن. تصرف كرجل يستعيد ما هو حقه، لا كمن يعتذر عن رغبته فيه."



صمت آرياس لبرهة طويلة، محدقًا في الطاولة الخشبية البسيطة بينهما، في كومة الأوراق الصغيرة التي تمثل كل ما يعرفانه حاليًا عن الحياة التي كانا على وشك خوضها وإنهائها. في مكان ما فوقهما، كان يسمع القلعة تبدأ بالتحرك بشكل طبيعي الآن – الخدم يتحركون في القاعات، وأصوات المطابخ البعيدة تعود للحياة، والإيقاع المعتاد لصباح شعر، ولأول مرة منذ زمن طويل، أنه غير كافٍ تمامًا لحجم ما هو قادم.



قال آرياس أخيراً: "هذه خطة أكثر قسوة مما كنت أتوقع منك".



قال أزاريوس: "إنها الخطة الوحيدة التي تضمن لها البقاء على قيد الحياة لفترة كافية لتكرهنا بسبب ما فعلناه". لم يكن في صوته أي قسوة حين قالها، بل يقينٌ رهيبٌ راسخ، كما لو أنه قد تصالح مع كل ما كلف الأمر. "أما أنتم الباقون، فبإمكانكم أن تتمنوا مسامحتها. أفضل أن أراها حيةً غاضبةً على أن أراها وديعةً ميتةً في دائرة ساحر لأننا انتظرنا دعوةً لن تأتي أبدًا".



أمال رأسه حينها، بنفس الإيماءة الدقيقة والهادئة التي اعتاد أن ينهي بها حديثه، وجمع آخر الأوراق تحت إبطه. "فكروا في الأمر. سنرحل خلال أسبوع على أي حال. سواء وصلنا كخاطبين أو كشخص أقل صبراً، فهذا هو القرار الحقيقي الوحيد المتبقي."



غادر دون انتظار رد، وكانت خطواته هادئة ومتزنة في الممر، وجلس آرياس وحيداً على الطاولة لفترة طويلة بعد ذلك، وقد نسي الشاي البارد بين يديه، وهو يقلب كلمات أخيه مراراً وتكراراً، ليجد، في شعوره بعدم الارتياح الهادئ، أنه لا يستطيع أن يعارضه تماماً.