Page 52 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

“Come on,” he says.

We go. He doesn’t hold anything back. He comes in low and fast the first time, taking my legs out before I’ve got my weight sorted. The mat comes up and hits me in the back of the head. I get up. He puts me down once more - I keep putting him down. Every time, he gets back up without a word and comes at me again. My hands stop bleeding somewhere in the middle of it. Neither of us says a word for a long time. He never asks me what this is about, doesn’t stop when it stops being friendly. It runs longer than it should and I’m the one who calls it. Tonight, it’s me who puts a hand up. Callum straightens, breathing hard, blood at the corner of his mouth.

“You good?” He asks me.

“Fine.”

He looks at me for a while. He knows what that word is worth coming out of a man standing where I’m standing, because a man doesn’t get as good as he is at this without having been there himself at some point. He doesn’t ask, simply picks his shirt up off the mat and lets the whole thing go. Nobody has ever done that much for me at the end of a fight.

I walk to my cabin with the compound going quiet around me. It’s not until I’m inside with the door shut that I let myself look at how big it is. Every day since the ridge. Every debrief, realm, hour on the road with her, every time she put her hand in mine to take us across, every meal at a long table where she leaned over and told me who in the room was worth watching. Two nights in that castle. Her knocking on my door and coming in with nothing to say. Her on the floor of my room with her teeth on my throat and both of us holding still. Her asleep against my chest with my arm over her. All of it with this sitting inside her while she decided, over and over, that I didn’t get to have it.

She doesn’t know I was at her door. So now there’s something I’m keeping from her, too. That I know. I don’t have all of it. What she knows about me is still hers. How big, how bad, how long she meant to sit on it, whether she was ever going to hand it over at all. Those are questions I will ask her eventually. Tonight, there’s only one and only one person alive who can answer it.

Chapter 29

Nyxiana

Kaspian stands in my doorway, doesn’t leave for a while after he’s said he’s leaving.

“Send word,” he says. “Any hour. I don’t care what it is.”

“I know,” I tell him.

“You say that. You’ve said it since you were nine.” He puts a hand on my shoulder and leaves it there. “Nyxi. Send word.”

Then he goes, he looks back once, from the bottom of the steps, then he’s moving, out across the yard toward the guest cabin down by the treeline. My cabin gets very quiet without him in it. I set down the tea I never finished. It’s been cold for an hour. A new tread crosses the yard. It’s heavier than my brother’s. It comes at a different pace. I know whose it is before it reaches my porch. I’ve been listening for it since he came off the ridge and walked into this pack.

Valen stops in my open doorway with the night behind him. His knuckles are split across both hands, the right one worse than the left. His shirt is damp through at the collar, clinging where it’s caught on him. There’s dirt driven into the knees of his trousers and a mark coming up along one cheekbone that will be a good color by morning. Whatever he did with the last two hours, he did it hard.

“What happened to you?”

“You’ve known since the first time you saw me,” he says without moving from the doorway. “That’s what I heard through this door tonight. That I was never a wolf. You’ve had that since the ridge, and let me stand out there anyway.”

The cool air comes past him into the room.

“I want the rest of it. All of it. Out loud, from you, tonight.”

“Come in and sit down.”

“No.”

My pulse goes faster than I can account for. I spend my life reading what this does to other people. Tonight, it’s the other way around, there’s a man in my doorway who has come for the truth and me standing in my own cabin holding it. There’s no version of what I’m about to say that arrives smaller than it is. I stop looking for one.

I put the cup down on the table. Then I stand. He isn’t going to sit down, and I’m not doing this from a chair.

“I’ll give you all of it,” I say. “As much as I have.” He doesn’t answer that.

“You were never a wolf who failed to shift. There’s nothing in you that ever could have shifted. There was never a wolf in there for you to fail.”

He doesn’t tell me to stop.

“Your blood is divine. Older than dragonfire, older than anything the dragons carry, older than my mother’s line. That’s what’s in you, what has always been in you.”

Nothing moves in his face. Nothing at all. I’ve been trying to read that face for months and I get exactly as much off it now as I ever have.

“The rest of it I read in the archive at Doria. In the sealed room, from the last page, in the old script.” I keep my voice level. “It named a living lock. Divine-blooded, made after the catastrophe, by the founders themselves, put in place to hold the seal and to mend it when it cracked. Made, Valen. Not born.”

His hand, which has been moving on the doorframe, stops.