For hours after he left, the mate-mark scar on my shoulder throbbed, phantom pain radiating outward like aftershocks from a wound that refused to remember it had healed. I pressed my fingers to the skin, feeling only the faint ridges of what used to glow silver with Kael’s claim.
He was gone.
And somehow, the world had not ended.
“You’re shaking.”
Nicero’s voice came from behind me, low, carrying none of the command tone he used with his warriors. Just concern — raw and unfiltered.
I didn’t turn. “It’s residual,” I said. “The mark reacting to proximity. It will fade.”
“Eventually,” he agreed. He draped his cloak over my shoulders anyway, the heavy Blackfang fabric settling around me like armor. “But scars are loyal things.”
I exhaled slowly, my breath fogging in the night air. “He knelt, Nicero.”
“Good.”
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t good. It was… hollow. I thought I wanted that moment more than anything. I thought it would make everything feel justified.”
He stepped beside me, leaning against the cold stone railing. “And?”
“It didn’t,” I admitted. “I didn’t feel powerful. I felt like I was staring at the ruin of something I once loved.”
Nicero’s gaze remained fixed on the forest below. “Love doesn’t excuse what he did.”
“No,” I agreed quietly. “But it explains why it still hurts.”
For a long moment, neither of us spoke.
Then the Moon-root pulsed — stronger this time — sending a vibration through my bones that made my wolf stir uneasily.
“It’s beginning,” Nicero murmured.
“What is?”
“Blackfang doesn’t bind wolves,” he said. “It reshapes them.”
---
Training began at dawn.
They did not give me a ceremonial weapon or a private instructor. They threw me into the sparring pit with warriors twice my size and told me to survive.
The first blow shattered my balance.
The second knocked the breath from my lungs.
I tasted blood before I could draw magic to shield myself.
“Again,” barked the ash-gray sentinel who had challenged me at the border.
I forced myself upright, shaking, my wolf snarling in humiliation beneath my skin.
This wasn’t punishment.
This was recalibration.
In Silvermoon, I had been protected by status. By reverence. By the unspoken law that Luna did not bleed in public.
Blackfang had no such law.
By the fourth round, my muscles burned and my magic faltered, silver-black threads flickering weakly around my hands. The warrior lunged again — and this time, I didn’t retreat.