The Mate He Threw Away

Training in Secret

Iris didn't believe in starting slowly.

I found out at dawn the next morning when she appeared at my cottage door before I'd finished my first cup of tea, wearing traveling clothes and carrying nothing but the leather satchel and an expression that said we were already running behind schedule.

"Leave the tea," she said. "You can sleep when you're dead. Which, incidentally, is what will happen if we don't get your power under control before Cassia figures out you exist."

I left the tea.

She took me deep, deeper than I'd gone even during my blackout two nights ago, past the point where the trees changed character and the forest floor went soft and strange underfoot. No pack patrol came this far. The air tasted different here, older somehow, like the woods themselves remembered things the pack had long since forgotten.

Iris stopped in a clearing I was certain hadn't existed before she walked into it. The trees formed a perfect circle, their canopies interlocked overhead like laced fingers, filtering the early light into something silver and diffuse.

The ground was bare earth, dark and soft, unmarked by any animal or human print.

"How did you find this place?" I asked.

"I didn't." She set her satchel down at the clearing's edge and turned to face me. "Your grandmother did, sixty years ago. She trained here for three years before she had enough control to be around other wolves without accidentally unmaking their wards." A pause. "The clearing remembers her.

It'll remember you too, eventually."

I looked down at my hands. In the silver-filtered light they looked almost luminous, though the glow was still dormant, waiting. "What exactly are we trying to do here?"

"First, understand what you're carrying." Iris crossed the clearing and stood directly in front of me, close enough that I could see the faint silver threads woven through her dark eyes, something I hadn't noticed in the cottage's dim light. "The Second Fire isn't a weapon you aim. It's not a tool you pick up and put down. It lives in you the way your wolf does; it has instincts, preferences, and things it moves toward naturally. Your job isn't to control it like a machine. Your job is to understand it well enough that it trusts you to lead."

"It trusts me," I repeated flatly. "The power. Trusts me."

"You burned a handprint into your floor in your sleep because it was frightening," Iris said, completely serious. "Wild things lash out when they're frightened. Does that sound familiar?"

It did. Uncomfortably so.

"Fine," I said. "How do we start?"

"Close your eyes."

I closed them. The forest went quiet around me the way it always did near Iris, that particular held-breath silence, like the trees were paying attention.

"Find the pulse," Iris said. "Not your heartbeat. The other one. The one that started the night of the rejection."

I breathed. Slow, deliberate, the way I'd learned to breathe during the worst nights alone in the cottage, counting in, counting out, keeping myself tethered to something steady when everything else felt like it was coming apart. Underneath that rhythm, faint and patient as always, the second pulse answered. Thump. Thump. Thump. Slower than my heart. Heavier.

"I feel it," I said.

"Good. Don't reach for it. Don't push it.

Just let it know you're there."

That sounded insane. I did it anyway. I turned my attention toward that second pulse the way you'd turn toward a sound in another room, not moving, just orienting. Just making myself present to it.

The silver light came immediately, flooding up both arms to the shoulder in one warm, rushing wave. I flinched.

"Don't flinch," Iris said sharply. "You flinch, it reads that as rejection, and it surges to compensate. Stay with it."

I held still. The light held too, steady and waiting, neither growing nor fading. My arms were glowing like moonlight made solid, and it should have been terrifying, but instead, with my eyes closed and Iris's voice anchoring me, it felt almost familiar.

Like remembering something I'd known before I had words for knowing things.

"There," Iris said quietly. "That's the baseline. That's what control feels like, not absence, not suppression.

Presence. You, and the fire, in the same space at the same time without either of you panicking."

I let out a breath I'd been holding since the rejection ceremony. The light dimmed slightly as I relaxed, settling into something softer, less urgent.

We worked like that for two hours. Iris pushing, holding me. Iris pulling back, I learned where the edges were. She taught me to feel the difference between a controlled flow and a surge; the surge had a particular quality to it, a pressurized tightening just below the sternum that I now recognized as the warning sign I'd been missing every time the power got away from me.

"Again," she kept saying. "Again. You're learning a language. Fluency takes repetition."

By the third hour, I was exhausted in a way I'd never been from physical training, a deep, cellular tiredness, like every part of me had been working at full capacity simultaneously. The light had stopped startling me. I could bring it up and let it settle back down almost at will now, as long as I stayed calm and didn't think too hard about what I was doing.

"That's enough for today," Iris said finally, studying me with an expression I was starting to read as her version of satisfied, not warm, exactly, but settled. Approved. "You're faster than your mother was at the start. Probably because you don't have the luxury of being slow."

"High praise," I said, and sank onto the clearing floor without ceremony, legs giving out underneath me. The dark earth was cool against my palms. The second pulse hummed steady and quiet in my chest, no longer frantic, no longer foreign.

Mine. It was starting to feel like mine.

"Same time tomorrow," Iris said, moving to collect her satchel.

That's when I heard it. A branch, snapping clean and sharp, from the treeline on the eastern edge of the clearing.

Iris went still at the same moment I did. My eyes cut to the sound and found nothing, just shadow between the trees, and the particular quality of silence that meant something had just stopped moving.

"Show yourself," I said, voice flat and steady despite the sudden cold spike of fear along my spine. The silver light came back immediately, both arms flooding bright, the fire answering the threat before I'd consciously asked it to.

A long pause. Then a figure stepped out of the shadow of the trees, hands raised, expression somewhere between guilt and awe.

Marcus.

He looked at my glowing arms, then at Iris, then back at me. His jaw was tight in a way that meant he was working very hard to keep his reaction off his face and only partially succeeding.

"How long have you been standing there?" I demanded.

"Long enough," he said quietly. His eyes hadn't left my arms. "Long enough to understand why the bond didn't break the way it was supposed to." He lowered his hands slowly, something resolving in his expression, a decision being made in real time, visible on his face. "Long enough to know that Kade has no idea what he's actually dealing with."

The light in my arms pulsed once, sharp and bright, like punctuation.

"No," I said. "He doesn't."

And for the first time since the rejection ceremony, standing in a clearing my grandmother had claimed sixty years before I was born, glowing silver in the filtered morning light with my mother's oldest friend at my back and my fated mate's Beta staring at me like he was seeing me for

The very first time ~

For the first time, that felt like an advantage instead of a wound.