CHAPTER SIX

MIRA

I should not have gone.

My feet were heavy with regret and rain. The vampire had been right, of course. The wound in his chest would have killed him if I had left him to the night. But I had not gone because of duty. I had gone because, for the first time since the pack threw me out, someone had looked at me like I mattered.

"Come with me," he had said, eyes like wet coal. "Help me get back to my pack and I will help you with your revenge."

I told myself I was bargaining. I told myself I could use him, that a vampire's hunger and arrogance were easier to leash than the raw ugliness that had ruined my life. I told myself I would leave the moment he tried to claim more than his word.

I had no idea I was bargaining with a storm.

We traveled through the woods like two ghosts. His pace was fast, but deliberate. He moved like a predator who had grown bored of hunting small prey. I walked behind him, carrying water in a skin, my hands smelling of herbs and iron. When he faltered I poured the water down his throat. When he winced I smoothed the wound with poultices and prayed they would hold.

"Kael," he had finally told me, voice barely more than a rasp the first night. "My name is Kael."

"Mira," I answered, because names anchor things. They make a person real.

He grunted, as if that were enough.

We did not speak much after that. Silence can be a fragile treaty between two people who do not trust themselves. The kind of silence that says we will not ask the hard questions, and will not promise what we cannot keep.

On the third night, under a moon that bled silver through the trees, the world turned to fire.

We had barely crested a ridge when the first bolt of light split the air. Arrows blackened with something sticky hissed past my ear. Kael went down hard, his body folding like a ruined house. I hit the ground and smelled ash and iron.

"Ambush," Kael snarled, voice full of steel. He tried to rise and failed. Blood darkened the front of his shirt again. "They found us."

We were surrounded before I could even curse. Wolves in black leathers moved like shadows between the trunks. Not my pack, not the ones who had kicked me out. These wolves had faces I did not know, but each wore a sigil I did. A twisted version, as if scavenged and broken to resemble ours.

"Vampire," the leader called out, voice bright with triumph. "Hand him over and the rest will die where they stand."

The leader's hair was blond, his eyes vicious and green. I knew him. I had seen him in the palace, once when I'd thought Lucas wore guilt on his shoulders like a second skin. The leader's name was Fred.

All the air left me at once.

Fred had been in Lily's rooms. He had been laughing too loud, leering at her like she was a prize to be won. He had been friendly with men who told poor lies and took cheap vows. He had been—what, exactly? An accessory to Lily's cruelty. The same Fred Lily had called when she wanted witnesses dead.

I should have felt fear. Instead, I felt a hot, ugly thing I did not want to name.

"You," Fred said, sneer stretching his face. "Look at you, Mira. You left the palace like a wounded animal. You smell like smoke and desperation. This will be easy."

"Fred," Kael spat from the ground. His voice was cold now, stripped of the fragile gratitude he'd held for days. "Walk away. This is not your fight."

Fred laughed. "Not my fight? Everything is our fight when the Alpha asks."

They had used my pack's name. My heart pounded hard enough to shatter ribs.

"Lucas didn't send you," I said, the sentence ripping itself out of me before I could choke on the word. Lucas had tossed me like a rag. He had let Lily smile while I stood and bled shame. He had not sent anyone to kill me. He had not needed to.

Fred's smile peeled away. "You really believe that, Mira? After what you did? Lady Vanessa left a wound that will not mend unless someone pays."

I remembered Vanessa's last night. I remembered the candlelight and the way she had clutched at her throat. I had tried to tell them I had nothing to do with it, and they had believed Lily because she could lie prettier.

"Kill them," Fred ordered the men at his side. His hand kissed the hilt of a blade.

I moved without thinking. Maybe it was the wolf in me, maybe it was the desperate fire that had been burning in my chest for five years, but my body obeyed before I had a word for it. I darted between trunks, a shadow chasing another shadow. One of Fred's guards lunged and I caught his wrist, twisted, and used his momentum to fling him into another. The world narrowed to motion, to the clack of leather and the thud of bodies.

Kael rolled to his feet and the world changed. He was not the dazed, fevered man I had tended. He became something else entirely. A predator with a ruined heart.

Blood traced a red path down Kael's jaw. His eyes burned like embers in winter. He moved close to Fred, and the air hummed with the simple promise of violence.

"You're mine," Kael said, voice soft as a blade. He slapped Fred away so hard the man tasted stone.

Fred spat at him. "You little runt. You think you can barge into our affairs and take what you like? This pack answers to me. And Lily—"

"Lily?" Kael's laugh was a snapped wire. "Lily is a liar."

The name jagged like knife. I had never heard proof of Lily's deceit beyond the sharp edges of betrayal. Now the ground seemed to tilt.

"Vincent ordered Mira framed," Kael said, eyes on me. "He wanted her out of the way because she knows things. He wanted her gone because she stood in the way of a plan that is older than any of you."

My chest cracked open. Vincent. The name I had only heard in whispers, the vampire Kael had feared, had teeth like empire. Vincent had been blamed earlier for power moves among the vampires. He had been the shadow that cut across Kael's throat.

"Why would Vincent do that?" I asked, voice so small I barely recognized it.

Kael did not answer me. He answered Fred.

"You think the Alpha is the one who decided Mira's fate?" Kael said. "You thought a simple wolf's hunger could order such a chain of blood and knives? Vincent needed a pawn. He needed to set the wolves against each other so that his hand could move unseen. Lily was paid. Fred was bought. The guards were promised coin and secrets."

Fred's eyes widened, then twisted into fury. "You lie," he screamed, voice breaking. "You are trying to turn us. You are a traitor."

"I am trying to survive," Kael said. "And Mira is not the enemy."

The clash shredded the night. Men fell. Wolves howled. I fought like the only thing that kept me alive was the knowledge that I would not give them the satisfaction of dying tame. I was not clean. I was not polished. I was raw and hungry and wronged, and I made other people bleed for it.

At some point, the fight ended. Bodies lay like rag dolls. The air tasted metallic and sweet. Fred crawled away, clutching a broken bone, his face a map of hubris.

Kael stood over him. Up close, his face was a canyon. His eyes were full of war. He looked at me as if he were weighing whether I could be trusted with the last of his blood.

"You should not have come with me," he said finally, voice low. "But you did."

"Why?" I asked. The word was a blade and I held it out like an accusation.

Kael smiled then, and I wanted to throw up and beg at the same time. "Because I want you."

It should have sent me running. It should have frozen every muscle and made me throw up all the anger I had swallowed. Instead, a strange, traitorous relief settled over me. The world had been barren and cold for five years. Kael's declaration was an ember, and embers could start fires.

"That is not a promise," I said, soft but steady. "You said you would help me. I will not be what you think I am."

"Everything is a promise," he said, leaning so close I could smell him, the scent of nights I had never lived. "Everything is a war. I will help you: find the ones who lied, unravel the money, the whispers, the poison. I will get you back into that hall and make them kneel in the dirt."

"And in return?" I asked. There was always a return. Nothing in this world came free.

"In return," Kael said, smile folding into something cruel and beautiful, "you will not run when I claim you."

His words landed like a hand on my spine. My wolf bristled. My heart tilted in a way that scared me.

"I do not belong to anyone," I told him.

"You belong to yourself, for now," Kael said. "And then, maybe you will belong to something else."

We made camp in a hollowed birch. He slept like a war god, one arm over his face and one hand curled around a scabbard. I kept watch. The night pressed in and out and in again.

When the moon dropped low, dead behind the trees, I watched Kael breathe. He seemed softer in sleep. Dangerous soft. As if his devotion were a blade that could both save and maim.

I thought about Lucas and Lily and Vanessa. About the guards who had tried to push me from a cliff. About Fred and the lies sewn through the pack like rotten threads. About the stranger who had bit me and then asked me for a debt I had not yet agreed to pay.

I thought about revenge and how I had imagined it like a jewel I could clutch in my palm once I returned. Up close, revenge was messy and stinking, with teeth marks in it and blood on the edges.

Beyond the trees, something moved. Not wolves. Not the pack. Something that slithered like silk and smelled like cold metal.

I held my breath. Kael's hand tightened on my ankle. I looked at him.

He opened one eye. "They are coming," he said. Calm as ever.

"Who?" I whispered.

He did not answer. He rose with the silence of a shadow. The air smelled of coming rain and old promises.

"Stay close," he said.

I stayed close. My life had not been mine for a long time. The night ahead would decide whether I could take it back.

And I could not tell if I was ready to lose it to him.