Chapter 4
"Well now," the largest one sneered, his tongue running over yellowed canines as he stepped onto the path, cutting off her retreat to the cabin. "What did the little valley pack throw out for us?"
"She has no scent," the second rogue rasped, circling to her left, his boots crunching in the crust. "No wolf. Just soft, sweet meat."
"A wolfless pet left on the scree," the third laughed, slipping a serrated hunting knife from his belt. "Let's see if she screams like a female before we skin her."
Freya did not drop her basket. She backed up slowly until her shoulder blades touched the solid slate cliff. Her fingers slipped quietly into the sleeve of her cloak, wrapping around the bone hilt of her mother's skinning knife.
Her heart hammered against her ribs, but the panic that should have paralyzed her never came. Instead, the strange, cold current in her veins—the lunar seal—contracted sharply, sending an icy wave of focus straight to her temples.
"You're on cabin land," Freya said, her voice dropping into a flat, calm warning. "Turn around and cross the crags."
The lead rogue barked a guttural laugh and lunged.
Before his claws could close around her throat, a shape exploded out of the mist behind him.
There was no battle cry. No warning snarl. Just the dull, wet *crack* of splintering bone.
Bowen crashed into the lead rogue not like an injured man with a crutch, but like a falling monolith. He held his peeled birch staff in two hands. In a single, seamless arc that defied his supposed limp, the iron-capped base of the staff drove straight into the lead wolf’s solar plexus, lifting the two-hundred-pound brute clean off the snow and slamming him into the trunk of a pine.
The rogue collapsed, gasping for air that would not come, his ribs pulverized.
The other two froze, shocked by the sudden violence from a man they had seen stumbling through the valley rumors.
"He's the cripple!" the knife-wielder yelled, recovering his nerve and lunging forward with a vicious underhand thrust aimed at Bowen's throat. "Gut him!"
Bowen didn't even shift his footing.
To an untrained eye, what followed looked like a desperate, clumsy scuffle in the snow. Bowen seemed to slip, his bad leg giving out as the blade swept past his neck by a hair's breadth.
But Freya, watching with her back pressed against the rock, saw the terrifying truth.
It wasn't a slip. It was supreme martial redirection.
Bowen allowed his weight to drop to the inside of the attacker's guard. His left forearm came up, striking the rogue's wrist with the precision of a guillotine, knocking the blade spinning into a snowbank. Before the rogue could recoil, Bowen’s right palm drove upward into the base of the attacker's chin.
A sharp, sickening snap echoed off the cliff face.
The second rogue went limp before he hit the ground, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle, dead before his body settled in the drift.
The third wolf—the circling flanker—backed away two frantic steps, his yellow eyes wide with animal horror. He looked at his broken companions, then at Bowen, who stood panting in the snow, leaning heavily on his staff again as if exhausted by the exertion.
"What... what kind of monster are you?" the surviving rogue stuttered, turning to flee toward the scree.
Bowen didn't chase him. He simply shifted his grip on the birch staff, drew back his right arm, and hurled the heavy wood through the swirling mist like an imperial spear.
The iron-shod tip struck the rogue square between the shoulder blades with an explosive thud. The wolf pitched forward into the ravine, tumbling through the crags and down into the abyss below.
Silence reclaimed the high ridge.
The wind whistled through the dead pines, carrying the metallic scent of rogue blood away into the freezing air.
Bowen stood in the center of the clearing, his chest heaving, his dark hair plastered against his forehead. He did not look at the bodies. He turned immediately toward the cliff wall, his slate eye locking onto Freya.
He took two uneven, limping strides toward her, the staff gone, his boots dragging slightly in the crimson-stained snow.
"Did they touch you?" he demanded.
His voice was low, vibrating with a feral, terrifying intensity that made the pine needles tremble on the branches above them. The air around him crackled with invisible, suffocating pressure—an imperial command so heavy that had Alpha Garrick stood there, his knees would have buckled under the weight of it.
"No," Freya said softly.
Bowen reached her in two long strides. His massive hands came up, hovering over her shoulders, his fingers trembling with an adrenaline that had nothing to do with fear for himself. He checked her collar, her wrists, his calloused palms brushing the sides of her wool-wrapped arms to ensure not a single scratch had broken her skin.
"They shouldn't have been across the boundary," he growled, his knuckles brushing her cheek, feeling for warmth. "Eldenridge pulled their northern patrols back on purpose. They left this ridge open as an abattoir."
"I know," Freya said. She looked up into his fierce, darkened face, placing her small, bare hands over his wrists, anchoring him. "Bowen. Look at me. I'm whole."
At the touch of her bare skin, the violent storm in his eyes slowly subsided.
The terrifying sovereign aura receded back behind the veil of his glamour, locking itself away in the dark. He looked down at her hands on his wrists, then down into her calm amber eyes.
"You knew how to kill them," she murmured, her voice steady, asking no accusations, only acknowledging the lethal mastery she had just witnessed. "No stray learns that in a ditch."
Bowen’s jaw worked silently for a moment. He did not deny it.
"And you didn't scream," he said quietly. "No wolfless girl stands against three wild wolves without flinching."
"Perhaps neither of us is what the valley thinks we are," Freya said, a faint, knowing curve touching the corner of her lips.
A slow, wry smile broke through the grim lines of Bowen’s face—the first true smile she had seen on him. It transformed his severe, scarred features, lending him an austere, breathtaking majesty.
"Perhaps not," he agreed softly.
He retrieved his staff from the snow, dragged the two dead rogues into a crevice where the scavengers would clean the bones by nightfall, and took Freya’s basket in his left hand, offering her his right arm for the walk back to the hearth.
***
That evening, beneath the cold, flat gaze of the waxing moon, Freya set an iron mortar onto the hearthstone.
"Take off your tunic, Bowen," she said.
Bowen sat on the edge of the sleeping bench. His physical exertion against the rogues had taken its toll; the violent movements had aggravated the deep silver seated in his flesh. His skin was slick with a thin sheen of sweat, the corded muscle across his shoulders bunching as he pulled the rough wool over his head.
Even in the dim amber wash of the firelight, the silver-burns over his chest looked grotesque. They were weeping again—a thin, gray exudate that smelled faintly of burnt copper.
