“Maybe. Or just the past bleeding through.”
“You think it’s Roman?”
“I think something’s coming.”
She follows my gaze out the narrow window. Snow falls like it has for weeks—thick, relentless, soft as breath and sharp as bone. The mountains beyond the trees are jagged silhouettes, half-swallowed by storm clouds. Isolation has always suited me, but lately it feels like being buried alive.
“He’ll come for us again,” I say. “For all of us. But not the way he did before. This time it’ll be quiet. Smarter. Closer.”
“You think it’s about you,” she says, and it’s not a question.
“I think he knows I’m the last piece he doesn’t understand.”
She places her hand lightly on my forearm. The touch is gentle, almost reverent. I don’t pull away, but I don’t lean in either. I don’t know how anymore.
“You’re not just a piece of the Pact, Mary. You’re not a relic.”
“I feel like one.”
“You feel like someone who never stopped fighting, even when the war was over. That’s not the same thing.”
For a moment, the ache behind my ribs flares, hot and sharp and far too close to the surface. I swallow it down, let the silence settle back around us like snowfall.
Eventually, she squeezes my arm once, then turns to go. “Get some sleep,” she says over her shoulder. “Even ghosts need to rest.”
I don’t sleep.
Not in the common rooms, where the hearth’s too bright and the conversation too full of hope. I climb the northern tower, the one Cassian reinforced himself after the last siege. It creaks in the wind, groaning under the weight of frost, but I like it up here.It’s high enough that I can see past the trees, out to the frozen lake and the black spines of pine that claw at the sky.
I lay my blanket down on the wooden floorboards and sit with my back to the stone wall, knees hugged close, breath fogging the air in short, even bursts. There’s no insulation up here, just raw wood and cold stone, and it suits me better than the warmth downstairs.
I close my eyes, and the dream finds me fast.
I am chained to something ancient—stone, maybe, or bone—but it burns like iron. There is firelight flickering, not warm but searing, strange colors that shimmer in and out of the edge of my vision. The smell of smoke is sharp and cloying, threaded with the distinct musk of something alive. And then I see them.
Eyes, golden and sly, watching me from just beyond the reach of the fire.
When I wake, the wind has stilled and the scent of fox lingers in the air, so faint I almost think I imagined it.
But I don’t.
Because the wolf in me, the part I try to keep buried under duty and control, growls low in my chest like it recognizes something coming.
And it doesn’t like it one bit.
2
SILAS
My bones ache like they remember every kill I never wanted to make.
The training mats are slick with sweat and blood that isn’t mine, though the knuckles on my left hand are cracked raw from the last sparring rotation. Harrow had me running drills with three of the new recruits—jumpy, underfed wolves pulled from mercenary stock and half-trained in Syndicate tactics.
They moved like they’d never been in a real fight, all bravado and no instincts, and now one’s nursing a dislocated shoulder and another’s leaking blood from a busted brow. The third didn’t get up at all. I didn’t bother checking if he was breathing.
He shouldn’t have lunged like that.
The floor smells like iron and burned ozone. Somebody's using stun fields again. The hum lingers behind my eyes long after the field's dropped, a low-frequency buzz that makes my teeth itch. I crack my neck once to the left, then to the right, and let the cold settle back in under my skin where it always belongs.
