Claimed by the Wolf King

What the Fight Cost

Kade left the surviving riders bound and disarmed at the ruined watchtower, a message for whoever came looking for them, and got back to the den well past midnight with blood on his hands that wasn't entirely his own.

He found Sera exactly where he'd left her, though the calm she'd worn in the garden had given way, over the hours he'd been gone, to something closer to barely contained panic. She was on her feet the moment the door opened, and whatever she'd meant to say died in her throat at the state of him, torn shirt, a shallow gash along one forearm, dried blood at his hairline from a graze he didn't even remember taking.

"You're hurt."

"Looks worse than it is." He said it out of habit more than honesty, and the look she gave him made clear she wasn't buying either version. "There were riders. Twelve of them, crossing the border with orders to find you."

Her face went pale. "Find me and do what?"

He weighed lying to spare her the worst of it, weighed that instinct against the promise he'd made only hours ago in this same garden, that he wouldn't be one more person deciding what truths she got to carry, and told her anyway.

"Bring you back alive if they could manage it quietly. If not, deliver proof you were dead in a way nobody could trace back to whoever hired them." He watched the words land, watched her sit down hard on the garden bench, as if her legs had simply stopped agreeing to hold her up. "They didn't know who paid them. An intermediary, gold with no name attached. But someone at your father's court wants you gone, Sera. Permanently. And wants it to look like an accident of the forest rather than anyone's design."

"Ashby." The name came out flat and certain, though Kade heard what it cost her to say it without her voice breaking.

"You think your betrothed ordered this?"

"I think Corvin Ashby has spent three years making himself indispensable to my father's court, and a marriage to a living princess who might one day actually want a say in how her own kingdom is run is worth a good deal less to him than a martyred fiancée and the sympathy that comes with it." She pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes, and Kade watched her fight, visibly, for the composure she'd built her whole life around never losing in front of anyone. "Or I'm wrong, and it's someone else entirely, some faction at court I've never had reason to suspect, and I've spent nineteen years learning to read people well enough to survive that palace and apparently learned nothing useful at all."

"You're not wrong to suspect him." Kade sat beside her, careful of the space between them even now, even after the garden, even after everything the horn's interruption had left unfinished. "But suspicion isn't proof, and until we have proof, accusing the wrong man could hand whoever's actually responsible exactly the cover they need to try again."

"Then what do we do?"

"Tonight, nothing. Tonight you sleep, under guard doubled from this morning, and I have my pack healer look at whatever bruises you're hiding that you haven't mentioned." He said it firmly enough that she didn't argue, though the look she gave his own untreated wounds suggested she meant to make the same demand of him before the night ended.

The pack healer, an older woman named Ottilie with steady hands and an expression that suggested she'd long since stopped being impressed by anyone's rank, human or wolf, cleaned and stitched Kade's forearm with brisk efficiency while Sera hovered nearby, arms crossed, refusing every suggestion that she return to her own quarters until she'd seen the job finished.

"You've got a decent hand for holding still, for a princess," Ottilie observed, tying off the last stitch. "Most nobles I've patched up over the years scream like they're being murdered over half this much damage."

"I've had considerably more frightening evenings recently," Sera said. "A little needlework barely registers."

Ottilie's mouth twitched, the closest thing to approval Kade had seen the older woman offer a stranger in years, and she gathered her supplies with a final, assessing look between the two of them that made Kade sharply aware of how much of the evening's tension had nothing to do with the ambush at all.

"He'll live," Ottilie said to Sera directly, ignoring Kade with the ease of decades of practice. "Make him rest before he does something else foolish tonight. Alphas are terrible patients."

She left them alone in the small infirmary, lantern light throwing long shadows across the timber walls, and for a moment neither of them spoke, both still absorbing the weight of what the evening had turned up.

"They knew where to look," Sera said finally. "Not randomly searching the whole forest. They had a direction, a trail from the wreck. Someone at court knew I'd survived the fall, knew roughly where, and got men across the border within days of the crash itself."

"Which means whoever ordered this either has better intelligence than your father's own search parties, or orchestrated the ambush in the first place and already knew exactly where you'd end up."

Sera's eyes widened slightly as the full weight of that settled. "The attack on my procession wasn't random banditry at all."

"I don't think it ever was," Kade said quietly. "I think someone wanted you thrown into this forest specifically. Whether they expected you to die in the fall, or expected the Blackwood to finish what the crash didn't, I can't say. But nothing about today reads like coincidence to me anymore."

"Then I'm not just a hostage you're using as leverage." Her voice had gone very quiet. "I'm bait in someone else's trap, and I don't even know whose."

"You're not bait," Kade said, and the certainty in his own voice surprised him. "You're under my protection, in my den, and whoever sent those riders is about to learn exactly how poor an investment that particular contract turned out to be." He reached for her hand without fully deciding to, and she let him take it, her fingers cold despite the infirmary's warmth. "We'll find out who's behind this. But not tonight. Tonight, you rest, and let the rest of the world wait until morning to be terrifying again."

She didn't argue, though the look in her eyes said the fear hadn't left so much as gone quiet, tucked away behind the same composure she'd worn since the day of the crash, and Kade walked her back to her quarters through a den gone silent with sleep, aware with every step of how thoroughly the last four days had rewritten every certainty he'd built his life around.