POV: Talon (Kyran's future Beta)
Talon watched the fire die down long after the others had gone.
The courtyard still smelled like roasted meat and pine smoke, but the embers didn't feel warm anymore. They hissed and spat as the night closed in, echoing the quiet fray building in his gut.
Things were changing. He just couldn't tell if it was the pack... or him.
By the time he crossed into the outer yard, the fires had burned low, casting long shadows across the training stones.
"I'm telling you, something's off." Dax was pacing beside the old weapons rack, half-dressed in sparring leathers and all attitude. His voice was low, clipped, but there was a tightness behind it, real tension, not just theatrics.
Talon adjusted the leather on his forearm. "You mean besides your aim?"
Dax scowled. "Besides that freak show at the feast."
Talon said nothing. He didn't have to.
Everyone had seen it. Everly…lowly, wolfless Everly, had stood taller than any ranked wolf that night. And that voice…not hers, but hers, had cut through the air like a warning no one wanted to hear.
"You ever seen a flame bow like that?" Dax asked, a little too casually. "All the pits. At once."
"No."
"Exactly." Dax threw a blunt practice dagger at a post. "She's hiding something."
Talon caught the second blade before it could clatter to the ground. "She's always been hiding something."
Dax snorted. "And we've been pretending not to notice."
They sparred for a while after that, falling into rhythm parry, block, circle. Talon liked the feel of wood striking wood. It made more sense than the things unraveling inside him.
Everly wasn't supposed to last this long.
She was a throwaway. Found near the border, no parents, no wolf. Ironfang had taken her in out of obligation. The fact that she was still standing after all these years, still breathing after all the punishments, the work, the silence, wasn't just odd. It was unnatural and Kyran… Kyran was acting stranger by the day.
"He's slipping," Dax muttered as they walked the outer wall later, their patrol shift beginning with dull boots and sharper thoughts.
Talon arched a brow. "Kyran?"
"Yeah. Not out loud. But his wolf's off."
"How would you know?"
"Because I watched him train Lyra yesterday," Dax said, voice low. "She put her hands on him, and he flinched. Like her scent turned his stomach."
Talon didn't answer immediately. He had noticed it too. Kyran was more tense around Lyra now than he had been months ago, when the courtship was first announced. She touched him less. Smiled more but it never reached her eyes.
The Alpha was pushing it and so was the Luna.
And Lyra?
Lyra had started playing a new game.
A week ago, Talon had passed through the south barracks and spotted Lyra handing something to a scrawny male in servant robes. She didn't look afraid. She didn't look ashamed. She looked bored.
The boy. barely more than an omega bowed too quickly.
Talon hadn't thought much of it. Until the feast, when that same omega disappeared halfway through the night and Lyra claimed she had "finally rejected her past." Funny how the timing worked out.
Even funnier that she'd said it loud enough for Kyran to hear.
"You think she's playing him?" Dax asked, stretching as they paused at the south watchtower.
"I think she never stopped," Talon said.
"And Everly?"
Talon hesitated. He leaned on the railing and looked down across the training yard. Everly was there, alone, sweeping ashes from the fire pit with steady, quiet motions.
No one was mocking her today.
No one dared, but the silence around her had changed. It wasn't avoidance anymore. It was… watching.
"She's not what they say," Talon muttered.
"You mean not wolfless?"
"I mean not weak."
"That girl's been punished more times than I've trained pups." Dax gave a short laugh. "And she's still standing."
They fell silent.
Then Dax asked, "Why do you think the Alpha hasn't cast her out?"
Talon didn't answer.
Because the truth was… he didn't know.
When they returned to the barracks, Talon passed by the Seer's garden wall. The vines had begun to creep over the broken archway again, curling like fingers around old stone. Something moved inside. A shadow… flickering and gone before he could place it.
He didn't stop walking.
Didn't ask, but his stomach twisted with that same uneasy knot it had since the Red Moon.
Later, he passed a pair of Omegas whispering outside the kitchen.
They fell silent when he walked by, but not in fear.
He glanced back just in time to see one of them leave something beside the hearth stone where Everly usually stood, a single blue flower. Not rare. Not sacred. But intentional.
The other Omega just nodded like it meant something.
Like it mattered.
Talon stopped in the corridor near the inner training rooms and exhaled slowly, pressing a hand to his jaw. He didn't believe in omens. Also, didn't believe in curses or chosen ones or the spirits of old magic, but he did believe in instincts.
And right now, his told him this:
Something was coming.
Something the Alpha wasn't prepared for.
And her name… was Everly.