Fox crouches down to the children’s height, demonstrating a simple parry with exaggerated slowness. His wooden sword moves through the air like honey dripping, each position held just long enough for small eyes to track. When he nods, five tiny bodies lunge at him at once, wooden swords swinging wildly, their high-pitched battle cries filling the air.
My heart practically melts as a tiny girl with wild curls latches onto his leg while a boy no higher than his knee attempts to climb his back like a tree. Fox pretends to stagger under their weight, his face softening in a way I’ve never seen before.
The little girl’s practice sword connects with Fox’s stomach. His eyes bulge comically as he pretends to clutch at his “wound,” staggering three exaggerated steps backward before collapsing in slow motion—first to his knees, then sprawling flat on his back with limbs splayed like a star.
The little girl shrieks with laughter, raising her sword in victory while her friends cheer. I join in grinning and clapping, until all at once, a horrible thought breaks through the back of my mind.
How long until that little girl will be expected to kill actual monsters?
Six years, maybe? Less than ten, surely, if the children are considered old enough to fight at twelve.
How many of these children will die before they ever get a chance to grow up?
Over the next week, I fall into a painful routine.
Every morning, I wake up pressed against Aurelia, having somehow shifted toward her in the night. I fight my every instinct, forcing myself to climb out of bed while trying not to wake her. Then, I leave the tent as fast as possible so Aurelia won’t notice how achingly hard I am just from being close to her.
At first, shifting and running for a couple of miles is enough to straighten out my thoughts and make my body calm down, but after a few days that doesn’t work anymore. I try jumping in an ice-cold creek, but when even that can’t completely clear my head, I finally give in and jerk myself off before returning to the camp as if nothing happened.
Usually, by the time I get back, I find Aurelia awake, either eating breakfast or talking to her squirrel as if he understandsher. She’ll say good morning, apparently not caring at all where I’ve been, and then we go out to the practice field with the rest of the camp.
Once the other wolves notice how good Aurelia is with a sword—when she wants to be, that is—they stop looking at her with so much hostility, and their gazes become more curious. Unfortunately, that means that some of them want to spar with her, and I grind my teeth all afternoon as I wrestle with the insane urge to kill anyone who touches her.
Finally, it’s time to return to camp where the torture only gets worse. We go to dinner and sit with either Kai or Luka while putting on the show of being mated, before it’s time to return to our tent and silently fall asleep next to each other so we can do it all again the next day.
Before long, there’s only two weeks left until the full moon and Aurelia’s birthday when we’re supposed to travel to the castle with Kai and the others.
I keep hoping that Aurelia might change her mind about wanting to go, but she doesn’t bring it up at all. She hasn’t mentioned a single thing to me about her mother or the supposed sister she never knew anything about, so I have no idea what she’s thinking, and it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing we should discuss by passing notes in our silent tent. I keep thinking I should find a way to ask her about it anyway, but then I become distracted by the rest of our painful daily routine and can’t find time to get the words out.
Somewhere in the back of my head I know that my entire day has shifted to center around Aurelia, as have my every waking thought—and apparently, some of the sleeping thoughts as well. I know my fixation isn’t safe for her, but more and more I catch myself finding new ways of justifying it:
This is only temporary.
What’s one more week?
Of course I can’t stop thinking about her, she’s with me every second of the day.
After next week, we’ll go back to Vernallis, and then everything will go back to normal.
I still can’t give her “more” as she put it, but maybe after this ludicrous test run she won’t want “more” anyway… And, if perhaps sometimes thinking about that makes my vision black out with rage, then that’s my problem to handle.
I’ll handle it next week.
It’s late morning and the sun glints off Aurelia’s blade as she dances backwards, avoiding a thrust from her sparring partner. She’s winning the match, but she looks ridiculous while doing it. Her hair is tied back in two loose braids, and she’s wearing a frilly skirt of all things, cut short enough to show off several inches of thigh above her knees.
My sword hangs forgotten at my side as Luka circles me, his third unanswered attack leaving him huffing with impatience. I catch myself tracking a bead of sweat sliding down Aurelia’s neck, the way her feet pivot in the dirt, how she tosses her hair from her eyes with a quick jerk of her chin.
Luka’s practice blade catches me hard across the ribs, and a growl of pain escapes my lips before I can stop it. I whip around, scowling, and glare at him, even though I know it was my fault for not paying attention.
“Sorry, I thought you’d block it,” he says, smirking before his eyes shift over my shoulder. “She must be good if you’re fucking her every night and still can’t focus on—ow!” He yelps when the flat of my blade cracks against his temple and gives me areproachful look as he rubs the side of his head. “Just saying what everyone’s thinking.”
I lower my sword, jaw clenched. I hate to admit it, but he’s right. I’m more distracted than I can remember being in a long time, and the worst part is, the feeling is all too familiar.
This is like those early days training Aurelia, when I’d spend hours watching her, growing more and more restless, but unable to do anything about the heat building under my skin.
That was fucking torture.
I couldn’t tell back then if she was doing things on purpose to get my attention, or if I was so focused on her that I was reading too much into everything. She would stare at me with this wide-eyed look that I could swear was saying“come get me.”But since she never said it out loud, I didn’t know for sure if she was even aware of what she was doing.
