POV: Rena Vale
Blood slicks the floorboards in a dark smear that keeps reminding me how close I came to being a stain.
“Kai—don’t,” I whisper, watching his hands close around the rogue’s forelegs. He drags the dead wolf over the threshold in a hard, efficient pull, shoulder flexing under the torn flannel, jaw cabled tight. Wood complains. Ash from the hearth lifts like gray confetti and settles again.
“We need answers,” he says, breath steadying on control. “Tracks will go soft outside. In here, I can work.”
“Work,” I echo, throat raw. “On a corpse.”
“On a weapon,” he corrects, blunt. “Someone pointed this at you. I want their fingerprints.”
The body lands beside the braided rug with a heavy thud. Moonlight skates across matted fur; a damp, iron smell blooms, copper and rot. Lyria prowls just under my skin, furious and exhausted. Stand tall. We survived. We learn.
“What can a dead thing tell you?” I ask, hugging my elbows so my hands stop shaking.
“Scars. Brands. Cuts that heal wrong,” he says, squatting to study flank, paws, muzzle. “Sometimes a tongue they forgot to cut out.”
I take a step closer because not knowing feels worse than the smell. Up close, the rogue’s fur is grizzled with soot and burrs, ears nicked into pocked moons, teeth ground down in the front—like someone made hunger a job.
“Don’t touch—” Kai starts.
Too late. My fingers brush bare skin where fur thins at the belly, curious and reckless, wanting proof this was once a life and not just a threat.
Light slams into my skull.
Not mine.
A vision breaks open behind my eyes—too bright, too old, too big for this tiny room. Wolves—dozens, hundreds—bow low, noses to gleaming marble that throws stars back at a ceiling painted with night. A figure stands at the far end, radiant in a way that is not fire and not sun—silver woven into skin, eyes like noon on snow, hair braided with light itself. Luna, my mind breathes, not a name, an event. Behind her rises a throne hammered from moon metal—cold, luminous, humming. Etched into its backplate: a crest I don’t recognize—two crescents crossing like blades, a star pinned where they meet, a river of lines beneath, flowing.
Sound layers in—chanting, soft and unanimous, a vow spoken by a nation of throats. Power answers, filling the hall like tide. Wolves lift their heads as one. The Luna raises a hand.
Pain snaps the vision in half.
I yank my hand back like I touched fire. Air returns jagged. Knees wobble.
“Rena.” Kai’s there before language. Hands catch my shoulders; his face blurs, then focuses—storm-gray, alarmed. “What did you see?”
“Not—nothing,” I lie, too loud, then shake my head hard enough to make ash drift. “No. Not nothing. I—gods—” Palms press to my eyes. “Wolves bowing. A hall made of night. A silver throne with a crest—two crescents crossed, a star where they meet, lines like a river. A woman—no, a Luna—she lit the room by breathing.” I lower my hands. My voice goes small. “She felt like… home and warning at the same time.”
His grip tightens. “Describe the crest again.”
“Two moons,” I say, tracing in the air with a trembling finger. “Crossed into an X. Star pinned at the heart. Lines under, like water.”
He exhales, not relief. Something heavier. “I know fragments of that sigil in old edicts. Not the whole.”
“Old edicts,” I repeat, brain catching up slowly. “You’ve seen pieces of… me on paper.”
“I’ve seen what conquerors forgot to burn,” he says. “And what cowards mislabeled.”
“Luminous,” I whisper, the word suddenly too large for my mouth. “She was luminous.”
“You are,” he says, certain as gravity. He eases me backward to the hearth, sits me on the warm lip, then shifts down beside me. Closer than polite. Not close enough to stop the shaking. Eyes go to the dead wolf, then to me, then to the fire. “Tell me everything. No metaphors. No mercy.”
I pour it out in fits—marble under paws, light woven into hair, the taste of vow in the air, how the crest felt like a door I don’t remember entering but recognize anyway. He listens like a blade listens, still and intent, questions only to clarify details, never to doubt.
“Why did touching him do that?” I ask at last, breath snagging. “He wasn’t… holy.”
“Memory clings to blood,” he says. “To bone. To what was taught and what was taken. Sometimes the last thing a body did is the only thing it knows how to pass on.” He scrubs a hand over his jaw. “You’re a better receiver than anyone left alive.”
“Anyone left alive,” I repeat, and nausea lifts, sour, quick. “Meaning…?”
He stares into the flames for a beat, expression turning troubled enough to make my stomach fold. “Rena… Luminous wolves didn’t die out. They were slaughtered.”
Breath stops. Room tilts. Heat goes cold.
“Say it again,” I whisper, not because I didn’t hear—because I need the syllables to make scars, not ghosts.
“Slaughtered.” His voice doesn’t waver. His hand—close enough to touch mine if either of us blinks wrong—does. “Hunted for the power in their bones. Sold for what their blood could do. Married off, then erased. Records burned. Names salted. Histories cut into pieces and called myths so no one would ask why their alleys still smelled like moonmetal smoke.”
“I’m going to be sick.” The sentence breaks like glass in my throat.
He shifts, fast but gentle, one arm around my shoulders in the exact second before I fall apart. The blanket we forgot on the chair appears around me because he’s always moving three beats before disaster lands. Heat wraps my back. Palm anchors at my upper arm, heavy and steady. “Breathe,” he murmurs. “In. Hold. Out.”
“People did this,” I say, not breathing, breathing, hating both. “People with last names and houses and—”
“And titles,” he says. “And medals. And portraits.”
“Why.”
“Because power scares men who cannot earn it,” he answers without blinking. “Because anything rare becomes currency. Because kings breed dogs and call it strategy.”
Lyria hurls herself at the bars of my ribs. Run. Fight. Burn. My body can’t do any of those, so it shakes instead. Tears come hot and fast; I hate them and they don’t care. “If they slaughtered them—if they slaughtered us—why am I here?”
“Because someone failed,” he says, a terrible kind of mercy in the word. “Or someone succeeded at hiding. Or both.”
The fire pops, flinging a spark that dies halfway to the rug. “Both,” I echo, pressing my fist to my mouth. “So my grandmother, or her grandmother, or someone had to—” I can’t say smuggle a bloodline. I can only think it and drown in it.
He nods, only once. “Your bloodline may be the last one.”
Air thins to a wire. “Don’t—” I choke out. “Don’t say last like a number you can count to zero.”
“I won’t if you breathe.”
“I’m breathing,” I lie, steel tasting like pennies under my tongue.
He pulls me fully into his arms when the tremor turns violent, no hesitation, no checking with the part of him that lives on rules. My face finds his throat on instinct; his heartbeat hammers against my cheek, wild and caged. Fingers slide into my hair, cradle my skull like it’s fragile and forbidden and his favorite thing he’s never been allowed to hold.
“Stay,” he says into my hair. “Shake. I’ll keep time.”
“This cabin is too small for grief,” I mumble, which is nonsense and exactly correct.
“Then I’ll stand outside and make the night larger,” he answers, fierce and ridiculous and perfect.
“I’m going to ask a question,” I warn, voice tiny. “I don’t know if I want the answer.”
“Ask.” He sounds like a promise wearing skin. “I’ll carry it if you can’t.”
“What does this make me,” I whisper, eyes burning, palm flattening over his chest to prove he’s real and not another vision I’ll wake up from. “If that hall was mine once, if that crest is mine now—does that mean I’m supposed to lead?”
He goes very still. Only his breathing moves.
Silence pools, deep and black.
When he speaks, the truth arrives with a tremor I’ve never heard in his voice.
“It means you’re hunted.”