HE REJECTED HIS WOLFLESS MATE, NOW SHE RULES THE PACK THAT COULD DESTROY HIM

CHAPTER 6 SOREN'S LAW

Training with Soren was not gentle, and Wren came to understand within a week that gentleness wasn’t a currency the Remnants dealt in. He worked her until her arms shook holding a blade, then made her hold it longer.

“Pain teaches faster than kindness,” he told her, the third time she collapsed in the dirt of the training circle, his sword resting easy at his side like the exercise had cost him nothing at all. “Frost Hollow taught you to be ashamed of what you couldn’t do. I’m going to teach you what you can.”

“By beating it out of me?”

“By making you too tired to keep lying to yourself.” He extended a hand, pulled her up without softness, without unnecessary tenderness, but without cruelty either, which was its own kind of unfamiliar. “You flinch every time I raise this blade. Not because you’re afraid of the steel. Because somewhere in that head of yours, you’ve decided you deserve to be hit.”

Wren said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wouldn’t have given away how exactly, precisely correct he was.

“Three years in an Alpha’s house and you still flinch like a kicked dog,” Soren said, not unkindly, which somehow made it worse.

“Whoever did that to you, little wolf, they didn’t break something that was already broken. They built that flinch on purpose. People don’t break things by accident that fit together that perfectly.”

“You don’t know anything about it.”

“I know enough.” He raised the blade again, slower this time, watching her hands instead of her face. “Block it.”

She blocked it. Badly, late, her arm screaming with the impact, but she blocked it, and something in her chest that had been clenched since the night of the ceremony loosened by one single, fractional degree.

“Again,” Soren said.

They trained until the light went gold and then gray, and by the time he finally called the session finished, Wren’s whole body ached in a way that felt, for the first time in longer than she could remember, like something she had earned rather than something that had been done to her.

“Tomorrow,” Soren said, sheathing his blade, “we do it again. And the day after that. And the day after that, until you stop flinching, or until I’m satisfied you never will and I cut my losses. Which one happens is entirely up to you.”

“Why do you care which one happens?”

The following days brought more of the same, Soren’s blade rising and falling with a patience that felt, at times, indistinguishable from cruelty, except for the fact that he never once raised his voice, never once let contempt slip into his corrections the way every voice in Frost Hollow’s council chamber had carried contempt as a matter of course.

“You’re improving,” he said, on the fifth day, when her block finally landed clean and fast enough that his own stance shifted slightly in surprised acknowledgment. “Don’t let it go to your head. Improving isn’t the same as arriving.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Good. The wolves who think they’ve arrived are the ones who stop improving.” He lowered his blade, studying her with the particular attention that had come to feel, strangely, like the first real attention anyone had paid her in years. “Tell me something. When you flinch, what do you see? Not what you feel. What do you actually see, in the half-second before the flinch takes over.”

Wren considered the question seriously, surprised by how much effort it took to answer honestly. “His face. Not angry. Just decided already, like whatever was about to happen wasn’t something I had any say in.”

Something shifted behind Soren’s gray eyes, a flicker of understanding that went deeper than simple training strategy. “That’s the flinch we’re actually fighting, then. Not the blade. The certainty that you never got a vote in what happened to your own body. We’ll keep working until that certainty stops being true.”

The following morning, Soren changed the exercise entirely, no longer simply raising his blade and waiting for her block, but circling her, unpredictable, forcing her to track him by instinct rather than memorized rhythm.

“This is harder,” she said, after the third time he’d caught her flat-footed.

“It’s supposed to be. The wolves who hurt you weren’t kind enough to attack in a predictable rhythm. Neither will anyone who comes for you here.” He circled again, slower this time, watching her adjust her stance to track him properly. “Better. You’re starting to trust your own reflexes instead of waiting for permission to use them.”

“I don’t know if I trust anything yet.”

“You don’t have to trust everything all at once. Trust the next block. Just the next one.” He struck, and this time she met it cleanly, her body answering before her mind had fully caught up to the threat. “There. That’s the only trust that actually matters, little wolf. Not some grand faith in the universe. Just enough trust in yourself to meet whatever’s coming next, one moment at a time.”

Wren nodded, saying nothing further, but she carried his words with her long after the session ended, turning them over while she washed the day’s dirt from her hands at the edge of camp. Trust, one moment at a time. It sounded so much smaller than the trust she’d once tried to build with Kade, the desperate, all-or-nothing trust of a girl waiting to be fully claimed. This felt more survivable. Smaller stakes, smaller victories, but victories she could actually keep.

The following morning arrived cold and gray, and Wren found herself waking before Soren’s usual summons, already reaching for the practice blade propped against her shelter wall, some new readiness stirring in her she hadn’t given herself permission to feel until now.

Soren studied her for a long moment, the scar on his face catching the last of the light. “Because I’ve seen what’s underneath that flinch, even if you haven’t yet. Get some rest. Tomorrow’s worse.”