Caius POV
Three in the morning and I am running.
Not because I want to. Because if I stay in that office for one more hour staring at the same report I have read fourteen times without absorbing a single word, I will put my fist through the wall, and I have enough cracks in this estate without adding more.
The forest at the edge of the territory is cold and dark and the ground is hard under my feet. I push faster. Flint surges forward the way he always does when I run grateful for the movement, for the night air, for anything that is not the four walls of that office. For about thirty seconds it works. For thirty seconds there is just the run and the dark and the cold and my lungs working and nothing else.
Then Flint circles back to her and the thirty seconds ends.
Stop, I tell him.
He does not stop. He has not stopped once in seven days. He circles and paces and pushes and I push back and we have been doing this every night since the auction and I am losing. I have not slept more than three hours straight since she arrived. I have run every night until my legs burn and it does not quiet him. I have worked until two in the morning and it does not quiet him. I have reminded him approximately four hundred times of exactly what she is and why she is here and none of it works because Flint does not care about facts.
Flint cares about one thing.
I stop running. I put my hands on my knees and breathe and the forest is completely silent except for me and the sound of my own wolf howling inside my chest like something caged.
I have led this pack for nine years. I have won three territorial wars. I lost my mate and my daughter's trust in the same month and I kept functioning because the pack needed me to and because falling apart was a luxury I could not afford. I have never not once lost control of Flint. Not even in the worst of it. Not even the night Lyra died and the grief was so large I could not find my own edges inside it.
Now a nineteen-year-old wolfless girl has been in my estate for a week and my wolf is acting like an unmated juvenile and I cannot sleep and I drew her a map.
I drew her a map.
I stand up straight in the cold forest and stare at nothing.
I assigned her the library. I told myself it was strategic keeping her in a controlled space where I could monitor what she was learning about pack law, because a girl reading about territorial rights is a girl thinking about how to fight back, and I prefer knowing what my problems are doing. That is what I told myself.
Flint laughed at me. He actually laughed, which wolves almost never do.
I pull out my phone and call Sable.
She answers on the second ring, which she always does. It does not matter what time it is Sable always answers. She has been the most constant thing in my life since Lyra died, patient and present and careful with my grief in a way that asks nothing from me except that I let her help. I am aware that Maren does not like her. I am aware that Maren's reasons are ones she has not fully explained yet. I file that under things I will deal with later.
"You're not sleeping again," Sable says. Her voice is warm. Careful.
"Tell me again," I say. "About the raid."
A short pause. Then she does. She has told me this story four times now and she tells it the same way each time steady, detailed, specific. Wren standing in the south corridor with a clear path to Lyra. The fire not yet close enough to block her. Thirty seconds, maybe more, where she could have moved and did not. Lyra's voice calling for help and Wren's face, according to Sable, showing nothing. Just watching.
And the memory crystal confirms it. I watched it five times. It is clear.
I listen to Sable's voice and feel the guilt settle back down over the bond instinct like a heavy blanket and Flint goes quieter not quiet, but quieter and I breathe and for a few minutes I feel like myself again. Certain. Purposeful. Doing what grief requires.
I know what she is. I know why she is here. The pull is just biology and biology does not get to override what I know.
I end the call.
I stand in the dark forest for a moment longer. Then I walk back.
The estate is quiet. I come in through the west entrance and walk the interior check I always do at night a habit from the years when enemies were more likely to come through the walls than knock on the door. Everything still. Everything in its place.
I do not walk to the east wing.
I go back to my office and sit down and pour two fingers from the bottle on my desk. Simple. Routine. The kind of small ordinary thing that confirms the night is ending and nothing has broken.
I pick up the glass.
Flint stops pacing.
Total stillness. Not the circling quiet of before something different. Something focused.
He shows me an image. Clean and sharp, the way wolf-memories always are.
Her face. The auction stage. The exact moment the gavel came down and she knew she was sold.
I have been remembering her face wrong, I realize. I have been remembering fear because that is what I expected, because fear would have made her easier to hold onto as what she is. But looking at the image Flint shows me, that is not fear.
It is devastation. A specific kind the kind that lives in people who expected to be let down and got let down and are somehow still surprised anyway. The kind that comes from hope, not weakness. You cannot be devastated unless you were still hoping for something different at the last second.
I set the glass down without drinking.
Guilty people do not hope at the last second, Flint says, without words, just the feeling of it.
Guilty people are relieved when it ends.
I sit very still.
My hands, I notice, are not entirely steady.
I stare at them like they belong to someone else. Nine years of leading this pack. Three wars. A betrayal that split me down the middle. Hands that have always, always been steady.
Not tonight.
My phone lights up on the desk. A message from Sable.
I forgot to mention I ran into Dax today. He was asking strange questions about the raid. I think he might be remembering things incorrectly. You should know.
I read it twice.
Dax. One of my senior trackers. One of the three witnesses who confirmed Sable's account.
Remembering things incorrectly.
The back of my neck goes cold.
What exactly, I think, staring at her words, is he remembering incorrectly?