The Beta's Fire

Chapter 4

Nobody let me out of their sight after that night. I told myself I hated it, and some part of me did, the part that had spent a lifetime learning to need no one. But another part of me, quieter, newer, felt something dangerously close to relief every time I looked up and found Rhys at my left shoulder, Cassian scanning the tree line ahead, Tobin close enough that his hand could find mine without either of us reaching very far.

We doubled the border patrols. Lyra worked around the clock trying to identify whatever poison or spell had been used on my father, who was still too weak to leave his bed. Cassian spent hours poring over old Emberfall records, searching for any pattern that matched what had happened to his birth pack, to Ashfall, to Greymont.

It was Cassian who found me three days later, alone in the archive room long after everyone else had gone to bed, my father's letter spread open beside a dozen older texts about goddess-marked wolves I'd pulled from the pack's oldest shelves.

"You should be resting," he said, echoing Rhys's words from days before, though his voice carried something rougher underneath it, something almost raw.

"I can't. Every time I close my eyes I see that message carved in the dirt." I rubbed my hands over my face. "They know about me, Cassian. Whoever did that to Ashfall, whoever did that to your pack, they already know what I am, and I don't even know what I am yet."

He crossed the room and sat down across the table from me, close enough that I could see the tension coiled through every line of his body, the wariness that never fully left him.

"I do," he said quietly.

I looked up. "What?"

"I know what you are. I've suspected since the day I arrived and caught your scent for the first time. It's why I volunteered to come to Stonemane, Wren, not because Emberfall sent me as a favor to your Alpha. I asked to be sent. I've spent eight years hunting the thing that destroyed my pack, and every trail I ever followed led toward rumors of a goddess-marked wolf hidden somewhere on this coast." His amber eyes held mine, steady, unflinching, the most open I had ever seen him. "I came here looking for a weapon to use against Thorne. I did not expect to find someone I would rather die than let him touch."

My heart was pounding so hard I was sure he could hear it. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I have watched what happens to people who get close to me," he said, and for the first time since I'd met him, real pain cracked through that careful, guarded voice. "My pack burned because of what I was born connected to. I told myself I would never let that happen again, that I would keep everyone at arm's length so nobody else would have to pay for what follows me. And then I met you, and you fought me in that ring like you weren't afraid of anything, and I have been failing to keep my distance ever since."

I reached across the table and took his hand, the one marked with tracking tattoos down to his wrist, each one a territory he'd crossed searching for answers, searching, I now understood, for me before he even knew my name.

"I'm not afraid of what follows you," I said. "I'm terrified of what's inside me. That's different. Don't push me away to protect me from something I haven't even agreed to be scared of yet."

Something in his face broke open, gentle and unguarded, and he came around the table in one motion, pulling me up out of my chair and into him. He kissed me like he'd been holding his breath for eight years, slow and deep and almost desperate at the edges, one hand sliding into my hair, the other flat against my lower back, holding me against him like he was afraid I might vanish if he let go. I felt the low hum of his restraint straining, felt how carefully he was holding himself back even as his mouth moved against mine with a hunger he'd clearly been burying for a long time.

When we finally pulled apart, both of us breathing hard, he pressed his forehead to mine, exactly the way Tobin had.

"I will burn every stone in this world down before I let Thorne take you," he said against my lips.

I believed him completely. That belief lasted exactly as long as it took for the alarm bell in the courtyard below to start ringing, three short tolls, the signal that meant intruder inside the wall.

We ran. We found the front gate standing open, two guards unconscious on the ground, and my father's infirmary room empty, the window shattered outward, a single black feather resting on the sill where his pillow should have been.