54
Nerina
Covenant Ship
The deck was carnage.
Blood slicked the planks, bodies sprawled in broken heaps. I stumbled over a severed arm and gagged at the iron stench rising from it. Near the mast lay the scarred man—what was left of him—mangled so thoroughly I almost didn’t recognize his face. His eyes stared skyward, glassy and empty, whatever had lived behind them fled long before death claimed the rest.
Veyrion turned to his crew, voice brisk, commanding. “Check the survivors. Stop the bleeding. Bind what can be bound until we reach the healers.”
His men obeyed without hesitation. They moved with practiced efficiency, kneeling beside captives and crew alike—pressing cloth to wounds, splinting broken limbs, forcing water past cracked lips. Soldiers’ hands, yes, but there was care in them too. Something fierce. Protective. Almost reverent.
I dropped to my knees to help where I could, binding a sea-elf’s wrist with trembling fingers. The world narrowed to blood and pulse, to the steady rhythm of survival. For a moment, I forgot the burns at my wrists. Forgot the ache in my limbs, the hollow gnawing in my belly.
A shadow fell across me.
My chest seized. I turned slowly—almost afraid he’d vanish if I moved too fast. Alaric stood over me, blood spattered across his coat, storm-gray eyes tracing every mark the shackles had left on my skin. His mouth curved into that crooked, infuriating smirk—but the edges of it shook. Sarcasm edged his words, but beneath it—
Relief. Raw and unguarded, cracking straight through him. The chaos dissolved. No chains. No screams. No blood. Just him.
I wanted to throw myself at him. To strike him and cling to him in the same breath.
Something in his face faltered. The smirk wavered, shadows pulling hard across his eyes. He stepped closer—close enough that the scent of iron and storm clung to him, close enough that I saw the tremor in his hands before he shoved them through his dark, blood-matted hair.
“Damn it, Nerina,” he said, voice rough, stripped bare. “I thought I’d lost you.” His eyes found mine again, storm-gray and breaking. “Don’t ever do that to me again.”
I couldn’t answer.
All I could do was drink in the sight of him—bloodied, shaking, alive—and know how close I’d come to never seeing him again.
And worse—
A traitorous part of me was glad he hadn’t been the only one who came.
The freed captives were tended as best as we could manage. Veyrion’s men moved with brisk efficiency, binding wounds, salving burns, whispering assurances in a dozen tongues. Some were led away in ships bound for the healers’ hall, where trained hands and magic could finish what crude bandages had begun. Others—those still strong enough to stand—were escorted back to their villages, to families who had likely mourned them already.
Moriko was among them. Her skin gleamed faintly in the firelight, river stone veined in deep greens. Two of Veyrion’s warriors supported her between them. She turned once, golden eyes finding mine through the smoke. “The river remembers,” she whispered, her voice frayed but certain. Then she was gone—swallowed into the night with the others bound for home.
I pressed a hand to my wrist where the salt-burns still throbbed. The hold already felt like a memory, but Moriko’s words lingered—an echo that refused to wash away.
I watched it all in a strange haze, my body hollowed by hunger and pain, my eyes unwilling to look away. They had been dragged aboard this ship as prizes, caged and silenced. Now they were carried down its gangplank as survivors, touched by something dangerously close to hope.
And at the center of it all stood Veyrion.
He bowed broad shoulders to lift a wounded Korrathi as though the creature weighed nothing. His voice—low, steady—soothed a panicked sea-elf until her trembling eased. He moved among them with the surety of command and the tenderness of a man who saw lives instead of trophies.
In that moment, he was more than a wolf. More than the commander of the Covenant. He was in the thick of it—hands streaked dark from bandaging wounds, fingers gentle as he checked bindings, whispering soft reassurances to creature and crew alike. Not above the blood. Not above the fear. In it. Holding it together.
I had expected fury when he found me, his ship nowhere in sight. Instead, he had only said we would discuss it later.
Watching him now—caring for these beings, for creatures like me—I couldn’t stop the swell of awe that rose unbidden.
I should not have felt it. There was an undeniable pull to Veyrion. Curiosity, perhaps.
When I turned, Alaric was there—silent, eyes fixed on me as though he’d read every thought I’d tried to bury.
Those who hadn’t survived were left where they fell.
