Dear, God! NO!

The Debt

I woke to the sound of scissors.

Not the sharp, decisive snip of a tailor's shears but the slow, deliberate crunch of a hunting knife through fabric. I opened my eyes to gray dawn filtering through the keep's broken ceiling and found Mariae sitting cross-legged on the floor three feet from me, surrounded by scraps of hide, rough-spun linen, and pieces of what had once been my wedding gown.

She had been at it all night. I could see it in the heaviness beneath her amber eyes, the way her broad shoulders curved inward with fatigue she refused to acknowledge. Beside her lay two garments, finished and folded. Not dresses, exactly. Functional things. A sleeveless tunic-dress in undyed linen with a leather cinch at the waist, and a longer piece for Laoise made from the ivory silk she had salvaged, cut down and resewn with rough but competent stitches into something that would not snag on every branch between here and the river.

"You didn't sleep," I said.

Mariae bit through a thread. "You can't run through the forest in a cathedral train. And the river woman can't walk into a village wrapped in a wedding cloak without drawing every eye in the county."

She held up the linen dress. It was plain, almost severe, but the seams were tight and the cut allowed for movement. She had even fashioned a pocket on the inside of the bodice, large enough for coin or a folded letter.

"It's not court fashion," she said, with a dryness that told me she had once known what court fashion looked like.

"Court fashion got me killed." I took the dress from her hands and our fingers brushed. Hers were calloused and warm. "Thank you, Mariae."

Something shifted in her expression. Not softness, she didn't seem built for softness, but a loosening. An acknowledgment that I had seen the gift for what it was: not just cloth and stitching but a choice to spend the night serving a woman she did not yet trust.

"Don't thank me. Survive. That's payment enough."

I changed behind the remnant of an interior wall, peeling away the last of the wedding silk like shedding a dead skin. The linen settled against my body, rough and honest, and when I cinched the leather belt, I felt something I had not felt since waking at the altar. I felt dressed. Not costumed. Not displayed. Dressed for the work ahead.

Laoise was already awake when I brought her the second garment. She sat at the edge of the keep's entrance, watching the forest with that quiet, assessing gaze, and when I handed her the refashioned silk, she ran her fingers along the seams with a kind of reverence.

"Someone stayed up all night for us," she said.

"Mariae."

Laoise glanced toward the copper-haired woman, who was already walking away toward the fire pit, knife sheathed. "I will remember that."

She dressed without modesty, the iridescence of her skin catching the early light for just a moment before the silk covered it. The dress fit well enough, falling to her calves, the neckline high enough to hide the faint shimmer at her collarbones. With her dark hair drying into waves and her green eyes muted in the morning gray, she could pass for human. A traveling woman. A messenger.

Which was exactly what I needed her to be.

I pulled her aside, away from the fire where Tomas was heating water and Rorik was grumbling about the damp.

"There is a man named Sterling Elgard," I said quietly. "He lives in the lower quarter of Dunmore, above a chandler's shop with a green door. In my first life, he was a clerk in the magistrate's office. He copied documents for my father's legal affairs for years, and when Carlin moved against me, Aldric was the only one who tried to get word to my family. He was dismissed for it. Transferred to a nothing post in the outer parishes."

"And in this life?"

"In this life, he's still a clerk. Still loyal to my father's name. Still in a position to copy things that powerful men would rather keep private."

Laoise tilted her head. "What do you want me to tell him?"

"Tell him the Nightwillow daughter sends her regards and asks if he still keeps his copies. Tell him to begin gathering everything he can on Carlin Ellotris' land acquisitions in the last two years, particularly anything involving the eastern holdings. And tell him..." I paused, choosing the words carefully. "Tell him the ledger behind Lord Merethorne's mantel is real. If he can get someone to verify it, he'll have proof of what I'm claiming."

Laoise's green eyes sharpened. "You gave that secret to the river last night."

"And now I'm spending it. That's the point. Secrets are currency. They're worthless if you hoard them."

She studied me for a long moment, and I saw something move behind her expression, a kind of professional respect. "I can reach Dunmore by midday through the tributary. It feeds into the canal system at the town's edge. I'll walk the last mile on foot."

"Be careful. Carlin's people will be watching for anything unusual."

"I have walked among humans for longer than your kingdom has had a name, Lila. I know how to be unremarkable." She said it without arrogance, simply as fact, the way one might say the river flows downhill.

I pressed a handful of coin from my father's purse into her palm. "For the chandler's shop. Buy something. Look like a customer. And Laoise, if Sterling seems frightened or unwilling, don't push. We need willing allies, not hostages."

She closed her fingers around the coin, inclined her head, and walked toward the forest without looking back. Within minutes, the trees had swallowed her, and the only sign she had been there at all was the faint scent of river water hanging in the air.

I stood at the edge of the camp and watched the space where she had disappeared.

One message sent. One thread cast into the water. Now we wait.

Victor found me there. He moved so quietly for his size that I did not hear him until his shadow fell across me, long and dark in the morning light. He held two tin cups of something hot, brewed from pine needles and some bitter root that Rorik kept in a pouch. He offered one without speaking.

We drank in silence for a while. The forest breathed around us, wind through high branches, the distant knock of a woodpecker, the soft crunch of Tomas gathering kindling.

"I need to understand what we're walking into," I said at last. "Not just Carlin. The whole structure. Why did you help me?"

Victor's hand tightened around the tin cup. His claws left thin grooves in the metal.

"I need to hear it from you, Victor. All of it."

He was silent for so long that I thought he would refuse. Then he sat on the ground, his back against the keep wall, and I sat across from him. The cup rested on his knee. His amber eyes fixed on the middle distance, not seeing the forest but something older and darker.

"My father was Head Alpha," he began, and his voice had that rough, reluctant quality, words dredged from a place he had sealed shut years ago. "Not a king in the way the courts use the word. Alphas don't rule with paper and seals. They rule because the pack trusts them. Because they stand at the front when the danger comes."

He paused. I waited.

"My mother never understood that. Or she understood it and hated it. She wanted the court's kind of power, the kind you can hoard and trade and pass to the people you choose. My father's power died with him. That was the law. The pack would choose a new Alpha by challenge and blood. She couldn't control that."

His thumb traced a scar on his forearm, a long pale line that ran from wrist to elbow.

"She had a brother. My uncle Levi. He was clever the way a trap is clever. Patient. He knew the old ways well enough to twist them. They planned it together, my mother and Levi. A hunting party in the deep pines. My father went with six of his guard. Only Levi came back."

Victor's voice did not waver, but something in his stillness told me how much it cost him to say this plainly.

"He said it was spirits. Shadow-beasts from the deep forest. He brought back my father's cloak, torn and bloodied. My mother wept beautifully. The whole court believed it."

"But you didn't."

"I was fourteen. I could smell my uncle's lie on him like rot. But I was fourteen, and when I accused him publicly, my mother used it against me. She told the council I was feral. Unstable. That the old blood had gone wrong in me, that I was more beast than boy. She had healers testify. She had witnesses describe my rages, my size, the way my eyes never shifted fully human."

He looked at me then, and those amber eyes with their slit pupils held something I recognized intimately. The cold clarity of someone who has been betrayed by the person who was supposed to protect them.

"She put my cousin Ren on the seat. Ren, who couldn't hold a blade without shaking. Who signed whatever Levi put in front of him. And me..." He turned the cup in his hands. "They sent the Wolf-Hunters. Levi led them himself. Twelve men with silver-tipped spears and wolfsbane chains. I was sixteen by then."

"You fought them."

"I killed four. The rest I outran." He said it without pride, without shame, the way one might describe weather. "I have been in this forest since. Eleven years. The others found me, or I found them. Wolves and half-wolves that the court threw away. We are what remains of my father's people."

I hesitated, then asked softly, “So…what are you?”

He looked up, eyes darkening with a quiet intensity. “Half-human. Half-wolf. That’s what I am.” His gaze drifted back to the cup in his hands, as if weighing the words. “Born into both worlds, cursed to never fully belong to either. The humans see me as a monster. The wolves accept me, but only because I’m one of them now.”

The silence that followed was heavy with everything he had not said. The years of sleeping in the dirt. The loss of language, of touch, of anything resembling a human life. The slow reduction of a boy into a predator because that was the only shape that survived.

"Your mother," I said carefully. "She's still alive?"

His jaw tightened. "She sits at Ren's right hand. She and Levi control every appointment, every law. Carlin is one of their favorites. I'm sure they just want the eastern corridor secured. It's all connected, your cage and mine were built by the same hands."

I set my cup down on the stone. The pieces were fitting together now, my first life's misery clicking into place within a larger architecture of corruption. Carlin had not chosen me out of desire or even ambition alone. He had been directed. I was a strategic acquisition for a regime built on a murdered Alpha's bones.

"Then when we bring Carlin down," I said, "we don't stop there."

Victor looked at me. The morning light caught his eyes and turned them to molten gold.

"We take back everything they stole. Your father's seat. Your birthright. All of it."

He did not smile. But something shifted in the way he held himself, a tension releasing, as though for the first time in eleven years, someone had spoken the thing he had not allowed himself to want.

"You are a dangerous woman, Lila Nightwillow."

"That's rather the point."