Flynn crumpled against the wall, his choked sob echoing off the stone. Lorraine bent over her daughter's body, her shoulders shaking silently. The knife slipped from her hand, landing point-first in the dirt.
I stood frozen, the world narrowing to the blood pooling beneath Kisa's cot—too dark, too thick. Not human. Not anymore My fingers brushed the hare still tucked in my satchel. Grease and salt.
Above us, the ceiling groaned.
Lorraine's head snapped up, her tear-streaked face sharpening into something feral. She snatched her bow from the wall, nocking an arrow with mechanical precision. "They'll come for the body. They always do."
Flynn lurched to his feet. "We can't just—leave her here!"
"We won't." Lorraine yanked a bottle of lamp oil from the shelf, her voice hollow. "Help me."
He paused. "You're not serious—"
"Help me."
I stepped between them, my hand closing over Flynn's wrist. His pulse rabbited under my touch. "It's what she'd want," I lied again.
Kisa would've wanted to live. To marry Flynn in the spring. To carve her own wolf pendant for her children and husband. But the dead don't get wants.
We doused the cot. Lorraine struck the flint.
The flames devoured Kisa quickly, as if even fire pitied her. Flynn stared into the pyre, his jaw working soundlessly. Lorraine didn't blink.
When the last ember died, she scooped the ashes into a tin. "We'll bury her proper. After."
"After what?" Flynn's voice was raw.
Lorraine didn't respond, just took in a deep breath and opened the cellar door.
The horns' wail faded, leaving a silence thicker than smoke. We stepped into streets choked with carnage, bodies slumped against walls, faces frozen in final snarls or slack with vacant terror. The air reeked of charred flesh and the metallic tang of fresh blood. A child's doll lay trampled in the mud, its button eye glinting. My boot sank into something soft; I didn't look down.
That's when I saw it—the volanema wolf. It loomed at the square's edge, muscle rippling beneath a pelt the color of storm-soaked earth. Its rider, armored in shadowed leather, scanned the ruins with a dispassion that made my fists clench. The wolf's jaws hung slightly open, saliva glistening on dagger-length fangs, as if the scent of death were a delicacy. More emerged from alleys, their riders' gazes skimming over survivors like we were stray embers to be stamped out.
Where were you? The question seared my throat. Had anyone of them been here....I tasted bile. Kisa's ashes still clung to my clothes.
Flynn edged forward, his breath quickening. Moonlight caught the fevered gleam in his eyes—not fear, but hunger. The kind that gnawed through reason. I grabbed his sleeve, but he shook me off, transfixed as a wolf passed close enough to stir his hair. Its rider didn't glance down.
They moved with lethal grace, sniffing corpses, pausing at those still twitching. A blade flashed and a whimper was cut off.
Flynn's jaw tightened. I knew that look—the same he'd worn when Kisa first held his hand, like he'd found religion.
My nails bit into my palms. Not him. The bond's trials were whispered about in tavern corners, aspirants chained in pitch-black crypts, fed only their own fear, others returned hollow-eyed, babbling about voices in the walls or mostly dead. Lorraine's brother had volunteered a decade ago. They'd sent back his boot, still laced.
The lead wolf halted, nostrils flaring as it drank in the stench of Sundra's ruin. Its rider turned slowly, helm tilting toward the survivors huddled like wounded animals. The wolf beneath him was a monstrous shadow—It's pure white, like frost pelt streaked with gore, dagger-length fangs still dripping inky sucker blood. It loomed larger than any natural beast, muscles coiled like serpents beneath its hide, golden eyes gleaming with predatory disdain. His wolf was by far the biggest and perhaps the strongest too. It's rider continued assessing the people and finally turned toward us.
The rider removed his helm.
Gods.
He was beautiful the way a wildfire was beautiful, sharp edges and that dangerous allure. Raven-black hair fell in unkempt waves around a face carved with brutal precision: a blade-straight nose, cheekbones like fractured ice, and a jawline that could cut stone. His lips, faintly cruel, curved as if privy to a joke no one else understood. But it was his eyes that trapped me—pools of liquid obsidian, pupils swallowing the irises whole. They held no emotion, only cold and calculating.
When his gaze swept over the crowd, it lingered on me for a heartbeat too long. Heat prickled my neck, a traitorous flush crawling up my throat. His armor clung to a warrior's frame—broad shoulders tapering to a lean waist, every movement fluid and precise, as if his body were a weapon honed to perfection. I hated how my pulse quickened. Hated how, even in this graveyard of ash and blood, part of me noticed.
"I am Alpha Zion Kage," he said, his voice a velvety and smooth slithering under my skin. The wolf beneath him snarled, shaking its massive head, sucker blood spraying the cobblestones. "Of the Kuzgun Pack."
Murmurs rippled through the crowd. Kuzgun. Ravens. Harbingers of death. Fitting, for a man who looked like he smelled of carrion and carried death on his back.
Alpha Zion's gaze scraped over us, pausing on Flynn, who stood rigid, fists trembling at his sides. "Sundra's security was compromised last night."
A bitter laugh clawed up my throat. Compromised?. The square was a mosaic of corpses—mothers still clutching infants, old men with throats torn open, The streets were a charnel house. Children's bodies lay stacked like firewood near the smithy. But I bit my tongue until copper flooded my mouth.
"It has come to my knowledge," Alpha Zion continued, gloved hand stroking his wolf's bristling neck, "that there was a traitor among you. Someone who sold border patrol routes to the suckers."
The crowd erupted.
"Liar!" a man shouted.
"Who?!" a woman wailed.
Lorraine stepped forward, her face contorted with rage. "Proof," she spat, her voice raw from smoke and grief. "You Wolves abandon us to die, then slither in after the slaughter to fling accusations?"
Alpha Zion's expression didn't flicker. "The traitor has been apprehended. You'll see their face at dawn."
Flynn edged closer to the Alpha, his eyes alight with a fervor that turned my stomach. At seventeen, he'd spent nights whispering to Kisa and me about earning a Wolf's bond—about volanema wolves choosing warriors worthy of their fury. Now, days from eighteen, he stood a breath away from volunteering for an army that had let Kisa die. Gods, his eyes still burned with that cursed awe.
Alpha Zion remounted, helm swallowing his haunting beauty. "Prepare the square," he ordered his men. "The execution begins at first light."
As he turned, his wolf's tail brushed my leg, leaving a streak of black blood on my trousers. It sizzled, burning through the fabric.
Lorraine gripped my arm, her whisper jagged. "We bury her tonight. Far from this theater."
But Flynn stared at Zion's retreating figure, his breath shallow, lips parted—as if the wolf's shadow had already claimed him.
The woods swallowed us whole, the pines whispering secrets Kisa would've scribbled in her journal. We stopped beneath the ancient oak she'd claimed as her throne, its roots cradling the mossy nook where she'd sprawl for hours, book propped on her knees. Now, moonlight dappled the hollow where Lorraine knelt, clawing at the frozen earth with bare hands. Flynn stood rigid, clutching the tin of ashes like it might crumble. I wanted to scream. To shake him. To fold myself into the dirt and let the cold numb everything.
Lorraine pressed the tin to her lips, her whisper raw. "Grow wild here, my girl. Grow roots where they can't reach you." She tucked it into the grave alongside Kisa's favorite ribbon—sunset-orange, frayed at the edges—and a sprig of dried rosemary. "Bless the lovers who find shade under your branches. Haunt the bastards who tread too heavy."
Flynn collapsed when she finished, his sobs muffled against the oak's trunk. I crouched beside him, my hand hovering over his shaking shoulders. Words felt like ash. Kisa had danced here once, twirling in her too-big boots, singing a tavern ditty she'd memorized just to make us laugh. Now the only music was the wind combing through dead leaves.
Lorraine thrust a burlap sack into my arms. It sagged with the weight of coins, dried venison, and the last jar of blackberry jam Kisa and I had helped preserve. "Take it to Mary," she said, her voice, a little lighter than it had been. "Tell her… tell her it's for the children's pot."
I nodded, the sack's rough fibers biting into my palms. Charity in Kisa's name. A girl who'd stolen bread to feed a stray dog.
Flynn hadn't moved. His fingers dug into the soil, black under the nails, as if he could claw his way down to her. I squeezed his shoulder—too hard, maybe—until he flinched. "Come home before dark," I said.
He didn't look up.