Marrying My Childhood Nightmare

Chapter 2~Moonlit Whispers

Lyra’s POV

The pack house was quiet when I finally dragged myself back from the training grounds. Too quiet. The kind of silence that pressed in after a long day, filling the spaces where noise should be. My boots echoed on the wooden floors as I climbed to my quarters, the scent of pine smoke from the great hall fires soaked into my clothes like it lived there.

I stripped off my training gear, and let it fall where it wanted. The bath called to me, steam rising from the natural pool carved into the rock of the adjoining room. I sank into it with a hiss, the heat finding every tensed muscle and loosening the knots without knowing it.

For a while I just floated, eyes closed, the water lapping softly at my collarbones. The quiet was easier to bear in here. Warmer.

Then my mind went where I'd told it not to go all day.

Don't think about him. I sank lower until the water touched my chin.

But of course, I did. The wooden wolf pendant flashed in my memory, small, roughly carved, warm from his hand the day he gave it to me. I’d worn it for weeks after he disappeared, waiting for him to come back. Then one day, I ripped it off and shoved it into the back of a drawer, buried under old training ribbons and a broken dagger hilt. Out of sight, but never out of mind.

When the water cooled. I climbed out, wrapped myself in a thick towel, and padded into my bedroom. Moonlight lay across the floor in pale strips, silvering the worn wood. I pulled on my sleeping shorts and an oversized shirt, then sat on the edge of the bed and brushed out my hair. Stroke after stroke. The rhythmic pull of it usually settled something in me. Tonight it didn't touch whatever was wound tight beneath my sternum.

The hum was still there.

I pressed my palm flat against my chest, feeling it pulse against my hand, faint and insistent, like a plucked string that hadn't finished vibrating. It had been there since Ryker said the name. Since Crimson Fang landed in my chest like something that already knew where to go.

I told myself it was just stress. The alliance. The announcement coming tomorrow or eleven years of unfinished anger that my body hadn't figured out how to store anymore.

I told myself that, and I almost believed it

I blew out the lantern, crawled under the heavy quilt, and stared at the ceiling beams until the moonlight made shadows of them. Sleep tugged at me, heavy and inevitable.

I let it take me.

~~~~

The forest burned. Trees wider than three men standing shoulder to shoulder, their bark blackened, their canopies roaring with fire that climbed toward a sky choked with smoke and ash. Heat slammed into my face the moment I emerged from the tree line, searing the inside of my lungs with every breath I dragged in.

I was wearing a gown. Long, heavy, rough-spun wool that caught at my ankles. The hem was already smoldering. I beat it out with my hands without slowing. My hands looked wrong, softer than mine, the palms uncallused, the knuckles unmarked. But they moved like mine. Reached like mine.

I ran.

Branches whipped my face. Roots snagged my feet. I didn't stop. Couldn't stop. Because somewhere ahead, through the wall of fire and falling ash, I could feel him.

The pull in my chest was nothing like the faint hum from earlier. This was a drumbeat. A command. Something in my blood that had been waiting a very long time to run toward something and finally had permission.

He was close. So close.

I burst into a clearing ringed by fire.

He stood with his back to me, tall and broad-shouldered, dark hair, a torn tunic hanging from one shoulder. The flames circled him like they were deciding something. He wasn't moving. He was looking down at something on the ground, a figure, crumpled, still. Someone who hadn't made it out.

The grief pouring off him hit me like a physical force, raw and inconsolable, the kind that has no bottom.

I opened my mouth to call out but smoke took the sound before it reached him. My legs buckled and I went down hard, ashes filling my palms, heat pressing into my skin from every direction.

He turned.

I still couldn't see his face. The smoke swirled between us, the flames flared, shadows took his features the moment before I could hold them. But I felt the instant he saw me. Recognition hit him like a blow. Then joy, and then terror, and then something so much larger than either that it had no name, love worn down to its bones, the kind that had survived more than one ending.

He ran towards me. I reached for him.

My fingers were shaking. The fire was everywhere. I needed one more second with him. One more breath in the same air before this took us both.

Our fingertips brushed.

Pain exploded through my chest, not from the heat, not from the smoke, but from somewhere underneath all of it. Something deeper than a body. Something that had been broken before and recognized the feeling.

The world went white.

~~~~

I jolted awake with a gasp, the quilt tangled around my legs, my heart hammering so hard my ribs ached with it. Moonlight still fell through the window, unchanged. No smoke. No fire. Just the quiet lodge and the distant call of an owl somewhere in the pines. My hands shook when I pressed them to my chest.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed, feet hitting cool wood. The dream clung to the inside of my skin, the heat, the reaching, that unbearable sense of loss. I sat with it for a moment, breathing. Then I stood and paced to the window.

The valley lay silver and still below, hot springs steaming in the dark, mist rising in slow curls that the moonlight turned to ghosts. Everything out there was peaceful. Everything out there was safe. Nothing out there had just burned to ash around two people who couldn't reach each other in time.

My skin still tingled where the dream flames had touched it. My chest still vibrated with that pull, not faint now. Insistent. I wrapped my arms around myself, suddenly cold despite the warm room.

“It’s nothing,” I whispered to the empty night. “Just a dream.”

The words came out steadier than I felt. That was something.

I crawled back into bed, pulled the quilt to my chin, and stared at the ceiling beams until my eyes blurred.

Something ancient had stirred tonight.

And it wasn't finished with me yet.