Two Alphas, One Luna

Chapter 15 – The Hollow

The quarry swallows sound.

Even with a dozen wolves breathing around me, the air feels muffled, as if the stone itself is listening and doesn’t want competition. Our footsteps echo too loudly on the old access path cut into the slope.

The circle waits at the bottom like an exposed heart.

Up close, it’s smaller than the one from Maelith’s stories, no wider than a modest living room. But every stone is carved, every groove intentional. Old lines—curving, knotting, spiraling—are cut deep into the rock. Newer ones score across them: sharper, cleaner, unfinished.

It looks exactly like the pages on Maelith’s desk. Like my nightmares.

“Stay on the edge,” Maelith says, voice flat. “No one steps inside the ring until we know what hair‑trigger surprises your father left us.”

I stop at the invisible line where smooth rock gives way to the first etched groove. My wolf presses against my skin, hackles raised, not entirely in fear.

“Smell that?” Talla whispers at my shoulder.

I do. Under stone and dust: a ghost of smoke and pine, worn thin by wind and time, but still there. It punches straight through my ribcage.

“Yeah,” I say, voice rough. “I do.”

Ysara crouches, fingers hovering over one of the newer cuts. “This is the same hand as on the river,” she murmurs. “But older. Practiced.”

“Practiced,” Corren repeats, jaw tight. “As in, how many times has he done this without us knowing?”

“Enough to get good,” Maelith says grimly. “Bad news for us. Good news if we can steal his notes.”

Vaelor steps down onto the next tier of stone, not entering the circle but circling it, slow and watchful. His eyes track the lines like he’s following a hunt trail.

“He wasn’t working alone,” he says. “Too many hands here.” He nods at small variations in depth, angle. “Different tools. Different weights.”

“Assistants?” Jarek suggests. “Or prisoners.”

The chill that skates down my spine isn’t from the wind.

My gaze catches on a mark near the outer edge, half hidden under a drift of dead leaves. I kneel without thinking, fingers brushing them aside.

Not a rune. A name. Scratched messy and fast, like the hand holding the knife shook.

FEN—

I jerk my hand back as if burned.

“Fenrik,” I whisper.

Talla is there in a breath, eyes wide. “No. He was just—”

“On the river,” Jarek finishes, face hardening. “He bled into that symbol.”

Ysara leans in, nostrils flaring. “His scent is here,” she confirms softly. “Dried, faint. But here.”

Talla’s teeth bare in a soundless snarl. “So someone brought a pup from our pack into this hole and carved his name into the floor of a half‑finished death spell.”

“Or he carved it himself,” Maelith says. “Which I’m not sure I like better.”

My stomach twists. I remember Fenrik’s cocky grin, the way he joked even with a bandage on his shoulder. The way his blood made the river symbol flare.

“He’s not dead,” I say, too fast. “I’d know. I’d feel—”

My voice stumbles. Because would I? In this mess of bonds and half‑built circles, with magic crawling over everything like ivy, would I really know one thread snapping until I pulled on it and found it gone?

“Easy,” Vaelor says quietly. I don’t realize I’m shaking until his nearness makes it stop. He doesn’t touch me—smart—but his presence is a warm wall at my back. “We don’t know what this means yet.”

“Whatever it means,” Talla says, “I’m going to rearrange someone’s organs.”

“You can add your name to the list,” Maelith mutters. “Right after mine.”

Corren’s gaze sweeps the circle again, sharper now, connecting patterns. “If they’re using Fenrik—if he’s being forced into this—then whoever is running this show has access to our patrol routes. Our people.”

“Inside informant?” Rhun asks.

“Or elder oversight,” Jarek says grimly. “They signed off on a lot of ‘joint patrols’ lately.”

The stone under my feet hums, faint but insistent, as if responding to our voices. My wolf ears flatten.

“Everyone shut up,” I say. “Listen.”

At first there’s nothing. Then—faint, under the echo of our breathing—a murmur, like wind through a crack. Words without sound. Emotion without voice.

Fear. Confusion. A stubborn thread of defiance that tastes a little like Fenrik’s cockiness and a lot like my father’s note in the margins: This is not for them.

I step closer to the circle without meaning to. The hum rises.

“Seryn.” Corren’s warning snaps across the space. “Stay back.”

“I hear something,” I say. “I can’t from there.”

“Too bad,” he bites out. “You’re not putting your feet in that thing.”

“Not alone,” Vaelor says.

For a heartbeat I think I misheard. Then I see his expression—grim, resolved.

He looks at Corren. “You know as well as I do, if she tries to touch this from the outside, it’ll grab her on its own terms. If we go in, we go in with her. Both of us. Or we stay out and walk away and hope it doesn’t swallow someone else instead.”

Everything in Corren’s rigid posture screams no. His eyes say I know you’re right and I hate it.

My heart beats loud enough to shake dust from the ceiling.

“I’m not asking you to like it,” Vaelor adds, softer. “Just to not let her walk in alone.”

The circle thrums underfoot, impatient. My wolf stands at the edge of my skin, eyes glowing with reflected patterns.

Corren exhales, long and harsh. “This is a terrible idea.”

“Probably,” I say. “But it’s ours.”

He meets my gaze, and for a moment there’s no alpha, no history, no almost‑bond. Just a man who once chose safety over me, being offered a second chance to stand at my side.

“Fine,” he says, voice rough. “We do this together. One step. Then out, if it starts to go sideways.”

I nod, throat too tight for words.

We move as one.

Two alphas, one wolf too many for any sane ritual, stepping over the carved line and into the hollow where my father once tried to rewrite the world.