—Lyra's POV—
---
The snow had stopped falling two nights ago, but the cold had not relented. It crept into the marrow of the trees and pressed against the walls of my den like a living thing. The air was sharp enough to cut. Each breath smoked from my lips, curling like ghosts around my face before vanishing into silence.
My den—shallow, narrow, but mine—was barely holding together. I'd patched the cracks with moss and layered the floor with dry furs scavenged from carcasses left behind by hungrier predators. I'd hunted them down before they could hunt me.
My hands were blistered. My knuckles cracked and raw from carving and carrying and surviving.
But I was alive.
More than alive—I was transforming.
Something inside me had shifted.
The baby stirred often now. My son. My child. Each kick sharper than the last, as if he were carving his own path out of me. He responded to every tremble in the earth, every howl in the distance, every time I whispered to the night that we would be more than prey.
He was awake.
And so was I.
We weren't just surviving anymore.
We were preparing.
---
I crouched by the fireless pit, sharpening another spear from the splintered limb of a pine tree. The bark still smelled of sap and winter. My tools were crude—an obsidian shard I kept tied to a strip of cloth, and the knife I'd found wedged between two stones days ago, black-bladed and humming with energy too old for words.
A gift. Or a warning.
Maybe both.
I trained every day. Every dawn began with deep, rhythmic breathing—like my mother once taught me when we thought I would heal, not harm. Back when my hands were meant for salves and not steel. When my voice calmed pain, not summoned war.
But life had other plans.
So I moved. I stretched, I coiled, I struck. I learned how to balance my swollen belly. How to center my weight low, how to fall without breaking, how to rise faster than most could blink.
I learned how to kill.
Quietly. Cleanly.
No screams. No hesitation.
Because no one was coming to save me.
So I had to become the kind of woman who didn't need saving.
The kind of woman who could tear her way through fate if it ever tried to bind her again.
---
He returned on the fourth night.
The watcher.
I never saw him. Not with my eyes. But I felt him—like the wind that shifts when a predator is near. Like the breath that stalls in your chest before a storm.
When I woke, my traps were all triggered. Not broken. Just disturbed. As if someone had walked the line of my defenses and wanted me to know it.
Beside one of them lay a hare—gutted and cleaned, the meat fresh, still warm. Placed neatly, like an offering. Or a message.
Next to it: a polished black stone, no larger than a thumb. Etched into its smooth surface was a single rune—the mark for strength.
The Old Tongue.
Few remembered it. Even fewer dared to use it.
But he did.
And now I knew: I wasn't just being watched.
I was being studied.
Or shaped.
---
That morning, with frost clinging to my lashes and the sun still shy behind the pines, I crouched by the edge of the trees and whispered into the stillness.
"I'm not afraid of you."
There was no reply.
Only the whisper of the wind threading through the branches.
But later that night, when I returned, I found a fire waiting.
Not mine.
His.
Already lit. Already burning. Hotter than the one I built with trembling fingers and half-wet kindling.
He wanted me warm.
Or he wanted me ready.
Maybe both.
---
Three days later, two rogues crossed into the edge of my hunting range. They didn't know the woods like I did. They didn't know who waited inside them.
The first died fast. A spear to the throat. His blood spurted in an arc across the snow—red on white, like a warning banner.
The second lunged. I ducked low, felt his claws slice the air above my head, then dragged my blade across his arm from elbow to wrist. Deep. Arterial.
He screamed.
And I let him run.
Not out of mercy.
I wanted him to run.
I wanted word to spread.
Let them whisper about the she-wolf who was cast out. Let them fear the woman who now bled the snow red.
Let them know I was no longer theirs to shame.
I burned the rogue's body beneath a mound of pine needles and dry bark. Watched the flames devour him without producing a thread of smoke.
Just like in my dreams.
Just like the fire inside me that refused to die.
---
—Lucian's POV—
The cold seeped deeper into the walls of Bloodfang Keep, but I knew it wasn't just winter sinking in.
It was the weight of silence. Of eyes I no longer trusted. Of council meetings filled with more accusation than counsel.
Arienne watched me like she expected something to snap.
Maybe she was right.
Something was unraveling.
Since the scout returned from Frostfang Ridge with tales of broken branches and burnt offerings, I hadn't slept the same. I'd dismissed it at first—hallucinations, maybe. Guilt. Echoes of the past that should've died with the bond.
But lately... I felt it again.
Not the bond itself. That had been severed clean.
No.
What I felt was her.
Her will.
Fierce. Relentless. A pressure in the air, like the moment before lightning strikes. A pull that gnawed at the edge of my instincts.
She was alive.
Somehow.
Somewhere.
And she was no longer running.
She was preparing.
---
A raven came to my window this morning.
It didn't caw. Didn't move. Just stood on the sill, wings folded, black eyes locked onto mine like it knew me.
I didn't chase it away.
I watched it. Waited.
It dropped a single feather onto the stone and flew.
I stepped forward and picked it up with fingers that trembled more than I wanted to admit.
On the glossy curve of that feather, something had been written in blood.
"The flame still burns."
My heart lurched.
Lyra.
She was coming back.
And the world—our world—had no idea what it had created by casting her out.