Chapter 6
Even unconscious, his scarred fingers remained clamped tightly over the leather straps that held the dire-wolf bone mask to his temples. He held them with stubborn, unyielding desperation, as though parting with the wolf skull would strip away his very survival.
"I will not take it off," I murmured, knowing his wolf could still perceive my presence through the haze of the fever. "You have my word."
His grip relaxed by degrees, his arm falling heavy onto the coarse wool blanket.
Taking the utility blade, I carefully sliced the back of his leather tunic and the linen beneath, peeling the stained fabric away to expose the wound. The air grew dense with herbal steam as I poured the cleansing infusion over the injury, neutralizing the surface traces of the aconite.
The broken iron spearhead remained wedged firmly in the upper muscle beneath his shoulder blade.
"Stay still," I whispered.
Taking the iron pincers, I clamped onto the broken shaft, braced myself, and drew the barbed iron out in one swift, steady motion.
Malakor’s frame tightened, his hands gripping the iron frame of the cot so hard the rails groaned under the strain, but he uttered no sound. He endured the removal in resolute, absolute silence.
I dropped the blackened metal into the water basin, where the venom neutralized with a faint hiss.
Working quickly, I applied the cold moon-flower poultice directly to the wound, binding the shoulder tightly with fresh linen to stem the bleeding and draw out the remaining poison. His breathing, though still shallow, settled into a more rhythmic cadence, the dark fever-flush slowly retreating from his neck as his natural healing took hold.
He would recover.
I let out a long breath, resting my hands on the basin's rim, exhausted from the tension of the ordeal.
Taking a fresh cloth dipped in warm water, I began wiping away the sweat and soot from his back.
As the wet cloth cleared away the grime, my hand abruptly froze.
The linen slipped from my fingers, splashing quietly into the basin.
My breath caught in my throat.
His back did not bear the clean, honorable marks of combat.
There were no broadsword sweeps, no fierce claw-scars earned in battles between rival Alphas, no heroic injuries sustained defending a pack border.
His entire back, from the base of his neck to his waist, was marked by an intricate, layered network of pale, raised scars.
Old lash marks.
Dozens of them, crisscrossing in dense, deliberate patterns. They bore the distinct, permanent texture of wounds inflicted with silver-laced cords—designed under the old laws to suppress a shifter’s natural healing so that the skin would never knit smooth, leaving an indelible record of servitude.
And there, just below his left shoulder blade, set permanently into his flesh, was a brand.
A circle of twisted briars enclosing a double-headed silver serpent.
The room seemed to tilt beneath my boots.
A cold, paralyzing shock rushed through my veins, rooting me to the spot.
*No.*
I recognized that emblem.
I had seen the branding iron resting in the embers of the imperial compound when I was only seven years old. It did not belong to the northern tribes. It was not the crest of any conquering army.
It was the private seal of House Aethelgard.
The mark of my father’s royal kennels.
It was a brand reserved exclusively for the most expendable servants in the dynasty: the Shadow Decoys.
Orphaned shifters taken from the lower reaches of the realm, stripped of identity and rank, trained under strict silence to serve as shields for the trueborn heirs. They were dressed in the garments of young nobles, placed in exposed carriages along contested roads, and forced to taste every cup and platter before a royal lip touched it.
They were given no names. They were forbidden from speaking in the presence of the court, held under harsh discipline to ensure absolute obedience.
Memories, long obscured by ten years of conflict and imperial politics, surfaced with sudden, vivid clarity.
*Ten years ago.*
*The winter of the Great Frost.*
I remembered slipping down into the lower levels of the kennels in the middle of the night, carrying a piece of bread and a tin of soothing balm.
I remembered a boy in the cold cellar—a nameless decoy who had broken a decorative cup in the great hall and had been chained in the damp straw, awaiting severe punishment at dawn. He was small, shivering in the freezing draft, his wrists bound to an iron ring in the floor.
He had not cried out. He had not begged.
He had looked up at me with wide, solemn amber eyes—the exact color of fallen autumn leaves.
Instead of turning away, seven-year-old me had knelt in the straw. I had offered him the bread, and using a silver hairpin taken from my mother’s dresser, I had worked at the rusted padlock until the collar fell away.
*“Do not be afraid,”* I had whispered into the dark. *“Run into the forest. Do not look back. Do not let them find you.”*
He had not spoken. He had possessed no voice to answer.
He had only stared at me, his fingers lightly brushing the edge of my nightgown in silent, stunned reverence.
Then he had slipped away into the blizzard, and I had never heard of him again.
My gaze snapped back to the massive, powerful warrior resting on the iron cot before me.
The placement of the brand was unmistakable.
The memory was real.
The dreaded Butcher of the Wastes—the Alpha who had unseated great lords, dismantled centuries of aristocratic rule, and united the continent under an iron banner—bore the mark of an enslaved shadow from my father’s own house.
"Who are you?" I whispered into the quiet room, my voice trembling in the firelight. "Moon Goddess… who are you?"
Malakor did not stir.
In the warm glow of the hearth, his scarred back rose and fell with slow, steady breaths.
His hand remained resting on the iron bedframe, inches from the silver dagger I had left upon the table—the blade he had returned to my hands, and the life he had thrown himself in front of an assassin's spear to protect.
By midnight, the fever broke.
I stayed on the low wooden stool until the dark, purplish discoloration fully receded from the edges of his torn shoulder. The crater where the poisoned lance had punched through muscle slowly knitted closed, the raw tissue sealing beneath the stubborn, astonishing vitality of an apex Alpha. Yet the ancient scars—the raised white tracks of the silver scourge, the savage serpent brand of my father’s royal kennels—remained unhealed, carved into his flesh forever.
I did not reach out to touch him again.
I sat with my arms wrapped around my knees, listening to the heavy cadence of his breathing while the blizzard howled against the stone turret. Every dancing shadow cast by the dying hearth looked like a specter dragged from my childhood: the freezing cobblestones of the imperial kennel cellar; the bitter reek of vinegar, lye, and dried gore; the sound of children weeping into the dark while my father’s master-of-hounds tested the silver-tipped lash against bare skin.
