POV: Auren Blackthorn
Concrete doesn’t feel pain. My knuckles do.
First hit—skin splits. Second—bone hums. Third—blood slicks the stone, and still it isn’t enough to drown the noise in my head: Rena shaking over Kai, whispering please like it was his name and her prayer. I slam the wall again, harder. Pain lances clean and bright up my forearm. I welcome it. Earn it. Deserve it.
“Enough,” a voice says behind me, dry as winter bark. “Unless you’re trying to cripple your hand before a war.”
I press my forehead to cold stone and breathe. “Go away, Rowan.”
Bootsteps close in anyway. My Beta—broad-shouldered, scar down one brow, patience that has carried me through every mistake I keep making. He stops at my shoulder, takes in the damage: wall smeared red, my knuckles chewed up, pulse jumping in my throat like a trapped bird. He blows out a long breath.
“Punching a palace won’t make her choose you,” he says.
“Didn’t ask for coaching.”
“You never do,” he says, and that’s his whole point.
I peel my hand from the wall. Skin sticks. Fresh blood beads. Rowan catches my wrist without asking and turns it palm-up, inspecting the mess with battlefield economy. “Split across second and third knuckle,” he mutters. “Idiot-level force. Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” I growl.
He pulls a strip of cloth from his pocket and wraps my hand with the efficiency of a man who’s done this too many times for me. His touch is impersonal, competent. His sigh is not. “You’re spiraling.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re lying.”
“Rowan.” My voice scrapes. “Please.”
He ties the cloth off tight and lets my wrist go. “No,” he says, calm as a verdict. “Say it.”
I stare at my hand, at the fibers already going pink. Fingers tremble. Anger sits in my mouth like a blade I can’t spit out because then I’ll have to admit what’s underneath.
His tone softens. “Auren.”
Words break loose before I can barricade them. “I’m losing her.” It comes out small, raw, like I’m twenty again and breaking behind a locker while the world doesn’t notice. “I’m watching it happen in front of me and I can’t… stop it.”
Rowan leans back against the opposite wall, crossing his arms. “Because you’re trying to stop the wrong thing.”
“I’m supposed to stop a king?” I snap.
“You’re supposed to stop yourself,” he says, not unkind. “From turning love into a competition no one asked you to win.”
I bark a laugh that doesn’t have humor in it. “He’s the Alpha King. He breathes and rooms bow. He looks at her and… she looks back.”
“And when you look at her?” he asks.
“She looks away,” I say. The truth tastes like iron. “Or she looks through me to the past where I humiliated her. I did that. I keep paying.”
Rowan tilts his head. “Good. Keep paying. But pay in actions that mean something to her, not punches that mean nothing to walls.”
“I’m there,” I mutter. “I protect. I run when she runs. I hold when she shakes.”
“You also stare at Kai like your jaw can fight his position,” Rowan says, dry. “Newsflash—it can’t.”
“I can take him,” I say, reflexive and stupid.
He lets that float between us until even I hear how dumb it sounds. “Fight for Rena,” he says quietly, “not against him.”
“And how do I do that?” My voice cracks. “He gives her certainty. I give her apologies.”
“Then change the offering.” Rowan pushes off the wall. He steps closer, drops his voice. “Be the one who believes in her, not her crown. Kai will be the king to her queen—fine. You be the friend who remembers she hated cafeteria coffee and loved rainy Tuesdays. You be the wolf who sees the girl, not the prophecy. She has a thousand people kneeling. Be the one who stands beside her without asking for a throne.”
I look at him, chest hurting in ways fists can’t fix. “She loves him,” I say, and it feels like a knife I’m finally willing to pull out of my own ribs. “You saw it.”
“I saw her choose him to protect her,” he says. “I saw her shake in his jacket. I saw you show up anyway. That last part is where your fight lives.”
I close my eyes. Rena’s face bruises the inside of my lids—glow under skin, mouth whispering my name even when it was his she needed. Pain swells, then spreads, then settles like a tide deciding not to drown the shore today. I open my eyes. The hall is still too bright.
Rowan claps my uninjured shoulder. “You go to her room now. Not to fight. To promise. Quietly.”
“I don’t know how to be quiet.”
He smiles, lopsided. “Try.”
I start walking before I can undo my own decision. Rowan falls in step for three paces, then peels off down a side corridor without ceremony. Before he turns, he says, “Auren.”
I stop.
“You don’t have to win,” he says. “You just have to be true.”
The words slot into something inside me like a missing gear. I nod once and keep moving.
Palace corridors blur—a run of glass and shadow, guards I ignore, ward-hum that threads into my nerves until I can’t tell where it ends and I begin. My wrapped hand throbs in time with my pulse. I deserve it. I speed up.
Her door is guarded. They step aside. I nod, barely. The latch whispers under my palm. The room is low-lit, lamps wearing shades of honey and dusk. A couch near the balcony. A bed like an invitation to sleep that didn’t come.
She’s there.
Curled on top of the coverlet, shoes kicked off, hair spilled like ink over my jacket—no, his jacket. Kai’s. Black leather swallowing her small body, sleeves bunched near her cheek. And still she somehow looks like the one doing the claiming, not the one being kept warm.
I stop at the foot of the bed and just… look. Beauty hurts when you love it. It also heals. Her breath ghosts slow and even. The line of her shoulder rises, falls. My lungs learn the rhythm by imitation.
Don’t wake her, I tell myself. Don’t make this about you.
I sink into the chair beside the bed anyway, because staying standing would feel like I’m a guard and not a person. The chair complains under my weight. I lean forward, forearms on my knees, then wince when my wrapped hand reminds me it exists.
“Idiot,” I whisper to myself.
She doesn’t stir.
Kai’s jacket smells like cedar and something colder, like the hour before dawn. Under it, Rena smells like rain on hot pavement, like sugar burned just a little, like the edge of a storm that decided to love the city it was about to break. I close my eyes, breathe it in once, let it go because I can’t keep anything I’m not offered.
Rowan’s words circle back: be the one who believes in her, not her crown.
“Okay,” I say under my breath. “Okay.”
I reach for the blanket folded at the foot of the bed and pull it up, careful not to jostle her. She murmurs something that isn’t words and tucks her face deeper into the collar of that jacket. Jealousy nicks, then dulls. She’s warm. That’s what matters.
My hand hovers over her hair. Don’t touch, I order myself. Be better. Be true.
A strand has fallen across her mouth, light as a spider-silk line. It would tickle if she turned her head. It would wake her. I justify the decision I’m already making.
“Just this,” I whisper.
Two fingers—my good hand—brush the strand back, smooth and fast, without lingering. My heart spikes anyway when her lips part on a soft sigh. The world narrows to that half-second: the softness of her hair against my skin, the way her breath warms my knuckle, the scream in my chest that somehow manages to stay a whisper.
“Auren,” she says, not awake, not fully, my name falling out like it took a wrong turn in a dream. I freeze. Don’t move. Don’t breathe.
Her lashes flutter and settle again. Relief floods so hard my eyes sting.
I should go. Right now. Leave with one good thing done and no new mistakes.
Instead I lean in, elbows on my knees again, and let words spill into the space between us because keeping them caged is killing me. “I’m not giving up on you,” I whisper, and it isn’t a threat, not a plea. A vow. Mine. “No matter how much you love him. No matter how many thrones try to borrow your name. I’m still here. I’ll be here when court lights go out and when they come back and when they decide to burn. I’ll be the idiot with bandages and bad jokes and a car that runs when you need it to.”
Silence. Her breathing. The ward-hum. My pulse in my throat.
“I’m sorry,” I add, because apologies are the only currency that matters when you’ve spent someone’s trust. “For the ceremony. For breaking you before I understood what it meant to hold anything. For thinking my fear belonged on your shoulders. I’m learning slow. I’m learning.”
She shifts. My breath stops.
Lashes lift.
Blue—no, silver threaded through blue—cuts the dim like a blade. She blinks once, twice, confusion turning into focus that lands on my face and doesn’t flinch. Then her gaze drops to where my hand still rests against her cheek.
Rena wakes—and sees Auren’s hand on her cheek