The Alpha Who Broke Our Bond

Chapter 14 – Young Wolves, Old Secrets

The training yard smelled like sweat, dust, and bruised pride.

Morning sun slanted over the packed earth, catching on flying fists, bare forearms, the flash of teeth in grins and grimaces. Young wolves moved in pairs and trios—sparring, grappling, learning how to fall and how not to.

I stood on the edge of the yard with a satchel over my shoulder, trying very hard not to look like I was hovering.

“You’re staring,” Ivara muttered beside me.

“I’m evaluating,” I said. “Big difference.”

“Mm.” She shielded her eyes with a hand. “You’re twitching your fingers in the shape of a bandage. That one—” she nodded toward a lanky boy who’d just misjudged a sweep and gone down hard “—is about to take a nose to the knee. Three, two—”

The crack made my teeth ache.

I winced. “Ow.”

“Called it,” she said, smug. “Go on, healer. Pretend you just happened to walk by.”

“I am not,” I said, “pretending.”

I walked.

The boy with the nose incident sat up, blood pouring between his fingers. Two others hovered, more fascinated than concerned.

“You’re supposed to dodge, Derrin,” one of them said helpfully.

“Thank you, expert commentary,” Derrin mumbled, clearly trying not to swear. “I’ll be sure to grow a second set of eyes next time.”

“Or,” I said, crouching beside him, “you could try not leading with your face.”

All three snapped to attention.

“Luna,” the uninjured one blurted, then turned red. “I mean—not-luna, I mean—sorry—”

“Lysa is fine,” I said. “And you—tip your head back. Not all the way, you’ll choke.”

Derrin peered at me over his blood-slicked fingers. Close up, he was all sharp angles and coiled spring—cheekbones still soft with youth, shoulders already carrying more than they should. His eyes were a pale, stormy grey that didn’t quite match either pack’s usual shades.

“You don’t have to—” he began.

“Yes, I do,” I said. “Hold still.”

I pressed my thumb gently along the bridge of his nose, feeling for fractures. The bone was intact; the cartilage complained. I let a trickle of power seep into the tissue, coaxing swelling down, knitting fine veins.

He inhaled sharply as the sting shifted to dull warmth.

“You’ve done that before,” he said.

“Set broken noses?” I asked. “You have no idea.”

“No,” he said, voice softer. “This. The… way it feels. Like… like your hand is standing between me and something worse.”

The words landed oddly.

Behind him, Neri Ashpaw hovered, arms folded tight around herself, eyes huge. She looked like a fawn that had learned to bare teeth—still small, still too thin, but with a new fierceness in the line of her jaw.

“Hi, Neri,” I said.

She startled. “Hi. Sorry. I didn’t mean to stare. I just—” She swallowed. “Ren’s mam said you fixed him. That you pulled the bad magic out.”

“Ren’s mam is giving me too much credit,” I said. “Mostly I bullied his lung into behaving. The rest was stubbornness on his part.”

Derrin snorted, then winced as the movement tugged at tender cartilage.

“How’s your head?” I asked him. “Any dizziness?”

“Fine,” he said too quickly.

“Try again,” I said.

He met my eyes. For a moment, something hard and wary looked back at me—a look I’d seen in too many faces in too many makeshift infirmaries.

“Little dizzy,” he admitted. “Not worse than usual.”

“Usual?” My brows rose.

He opened his mouth, then shut it. Neri shot him a look that said don’t, then flicked her gaze to me, guilt swimming under the surface.

I eased back, letting the healing settle, watching their body language as much as their aura.

Up close, the air around them crackled with familiar scars—not on their skin, but in the way their energy flowed. Little knots and glitches. Places where something had once wrapped tight and then been torn free.

Like mine.

“How are your dreams?” I asked Neri quietly.

She flinched. “Fine,” she lied.

“Liar,” Derrin muttered.

“You’re one to talk,” she hissed.

I held up a hand. “Let me guess,” I said. “Forests you don’t quite recognize. Stone walls that smell wrong. Children you don’t remember playing with, but you wake up missing anyway.”

Their silence was answer enough.

Around us, the clack of practice sticks and the thud of bodies on dirt filled the air, a rough percussion. No one was close enough to hear if we kept our voices down.

“They told us it was nothing,” Neri whispered. “That it was just… bad dreams.”

“‘They’ being?” I asked.

She bit her lip. “Some of the elders. One of the old patrol captains. My… foster parents.” The word snagged on her tongue.

Derrin shifted, jaw tightening. “Same,” he said. “Different names, same message: ‘You’re here now. Don’t look back.’”

“And does not-looking-back work?” I asked.

His laugh was short and humorless. “About as well as you’d expect.”

The thin silver threads of their auras tugged at something inside me, answering and answered. The same oily residue I’d tasted in the cache clung to them, but weaker, dulled by time. Hook scars.

“How much do you remember?” I asked softly.

Neri’s fingers twisted in the hem of her tunic. “Flashes,” she said. “A song. A circle of stones. Someone’s hand in my hair. A voice that said… that said they’d come back.” Her eyes flicked to mine. “I thought it was just… wishful thinking.”

My stomach knotted.

“I saw you,” Derrin blurted, then looked like he wanted to bite his own tongue off. “In… in one of the dreams. Or memories. I don’t know. You were younger. Less… scary.”

“Charming,” I said faintly. “What was I doing?”

“Bleeding,” he said. “And yelling at someone I couldn’t see.”

Behind my ribs, something turned over—half-remembered fury, the echo of my own voice shouting in a ring of ancient stone.

I rose, the yard tilting for half a heartbeat before settling.

“Walk with me,” I said. “Both of you. Slowly,” I added, before Derrin could protest. “If you faint, I’ll drag you by the ankle and tell everyone you tripped over your own arrogance.”

Neri’s mouth twitched. “Yes, Lysa.”

We moved away from the clatter of training toward the shade of the fence. Up close, the patterns of their scars were clearer—edges of magic that matched my own like puzzle pieces from the same box.

“You’re not crazy,” I said. “Those aren’t just dreams. They’re… fractures. From someone trying very hard to make you forget something they didn’t want you to know.”

“And you know what that is,” Derrin said. Not a question.

“I know pieces,” I admitted. “More than I did last week. Less than I hate.”

Neri’s voice shook. “Are we… like Mirael now? Are they going to come for us too?”

“Probably,” I said, because they deserved the truth. “But they’d be idiots not to expect we’ll be waiting.”

“Comforting,” Derrin muttered.

“It should be,” I said. “Because this time, when they pull on those hooks, they’re not just tugging on kids in the dark.”

I touched my chest, where the half-healed bond to Aren ached faintly, like a bruise.

“They’re tugging,” I said, “on wolves who remember how to bite back.”

Neri’s eyes darkened, something fierce kindling there that hadn’t been when I’d first met her.

“What do you want us to do?” she asked.

“First?” I said. “Start writing down everything. Every scrap of dream, every stray detail. Names, smells, songs. Bring it to me. We’re done letting the past live only in our nightmares.”

Derrin exhaled slowly. “And after that?”

I smiled, sharp and small.

“After that,” I said, “we go hunting in the dark. Not as victims. As witnesses.”

Across the yard, a horn sounded—a short, sharp note from the watchtower.

Ivara straightened on the fence, eyes narrowing. “Message from the border,” she said. “That’s Orlen’s pattern.”

A pulse of unease went through the training wolves.

Derrin and Neri both looked at me.

“Go cool down,” I said. “Don’t talk about this yet. Not to anyone who tells you ‘it’s just dreams’.”

They nodded, reluctant but obedient.

I turned toward the gate, my satchel suddenly heavy with more than salves and bandages.

If Orlen was blowing that horn, something had shifted at the edge of our world again.

And this time, I wasn’t the only one whose ghosts were waking.