Chapter 7
A wild, animal panic seized me.
"Let go of me!" I snarled, thrashing against his grip, driving the toe of my boot toward his knee. "Get off me, beast!"
The moment the words tore from my mouth, Lucian released his hold.
He did not tighten his grip. He did not pull me closer. He dropped his hands from my wrists instantly and took two broad, deliberate paces back into the swirling ash, yielding the ground.
He stood with his empty hands raised at chest height, palms open, showing no weapon and no intent to pursue.
"I have yielded the space, Diana," he said, his deep voice thick with an agonizing effort at restraint.
I stumbled back, hitting the rough basalt of the megalith behind me. My boots scrambled for purchase on the loose shale as I dragged ragged air into my burning lungs. My wrists burned where he had held them, but my skin was intact.
My right hand flew defensively to the hollow of my throat, fingers curling over my collar.
Beneath the linen, the resin was weeping hot and fast, soaking the fabric with a fragrant, molten moisture. The air between us crackled with invisible static, pulling at my marrow, demanding I cross the three paces of soot separating us and press my face against his chest.
*Hold your ground,* I ordered myself, digging my fingernails into my neck until the sharp prick of pain cut through the daze. *He is a butcher. An exile.*
"Why didn't you strike?" I demanded, my voice raw against the wind. "You disarmed me. You could have snapped my neck."
Lucian did not move toward me. He remained standing in the open center of the ring, the wind whipping his dark hair across his brow, his silver eyes fixed on my guarded stance.
"Because I do not wage war against my own blood," he said steadily. "And I will never lay a hand on you to break you."
"Your blood?" A harsh, breathless laugh tore from my throat. "I have no blood! I am a scentless defect from the capital gutters! The Sanctum built me from ash!"
"Glenn built a cage out of ash," Lucian said, his voice dropping into a solemn, grieving register that echoed off the frozen megaliths. "He carved out the scent gland of a three-moon-old pup so she would never know who she was. He gave you silence so you could never hear the howl of your own clan."
"Stop it," I whispered, pressing my back flat against the basalt pillar.
"He told you the Western Marches fell to honorable combat," Lucian continued, keeping his distance, letting each word land like an iron weight. "He told you the royal house of the Silver Line was wiped out by the Moon Mother's wrath. It was murder, Diana. Forty Inquisitors, poison in the feast hall, and a silver scalpel taken to an infant's throat."
"Lies," I insisted, though my voice sounded paper-thin, shuddering against the drum of my racing heart. "You are an outlaw trying to save your skin."
"Your name is not Diana," Lucian said.
He spoke the sentence not in the common imperial dialect, but in the rolling, melodic cadence of Old High Lycan—an ancient tongue forbidden by the Sanctum since before I drew breath.
Yet when the syllables left his mouth, my mind didn't translate them. My blood understood them instantly.
"Your name is Aeloria," he whispered across the clearing. "Firstborn of King Valerius and Queen Isolda. True Luna of the Western Throne. My fated mate."
The name struck me like a physical hammer.
*Aeloria.*
Inside my head, a foundation cracked. A searing splinter of memory tore through the dark: the smell of burning silk, a woman with hair like spun starlight weeping as she pressed me to her breast, and the blinding glint of a curved silver blade descending beneath cold torchlight.
My knees gave out.
The shock ripped through my nervous system so violently that my legs turned to water. I slipped down the face of the basalt pillar, my vision darkening around the edges.
Lucian moved forward on instinct, reaching out a broad hand to catch my shoulder before my head struck the jagged rock shelf. "Aeloria—"
The moment his fingers brushed the leather of my shoulder, I lashed out.
My hand came up, slapping his arm away with all the strength left in my battered frame. "Don't touch me!"
Lucian froze.
He pulled his hand back immediately. He didn't argue. He didn't attempt to close the distance again. He stepped back two full paces, sinking into a low crouch on the gravel, leaving the space between us entirely untouched.
"I won't," he murmured, his silver eyes clouded with an unspeakable, ancient grief. "I won't touch you until you ask it of me."
I stayed pressed against the base of the rock, panting, my chest heaving beneath the weight of the revelation. The scent around him—cedar, crushed needles, lightning over dark water—was suffocating in its intensity, but he remained where he was, giving me room to breathe.
"Why..." I managed, my knuckles scraping into the frozen shale beside my hip. "Why steal the reliquary? If you hate the Sanctum, why not burn it to the ground?"
Lucian reached behind his shoulder. With calm, measured movements, he unbuckled the wide leather harness securing the box to his back.
He lowered the blackened silver casket to the snow between us.
The oilcloth slipped further. The runes on the celestial metal pulsed in slow, heavy synchronization with the ache in my collarbone. A ribbon of pale silver vapor seeped from the seam, drifting low over the ash toward my boots.
"The reliquary was never a holy relic, Diana," Lucian said quietly. "It doesn't hold the core of the Moon Mother. It holds what Glenn stole from you eighteen winters ago."
My breath hitched.
"Look at it," he said, rising slowly to his feet, leaving the casket resting on the stone. "Follow the trail to Frostfall. See the truth with your own eyes, or put another quarantine bolt through my skull when we meet at the glacier. The choice will be yours."
He didn't draw a blade. He didn't issue a threat.
With a fluid, silent grace that defied his massive frame, the rogue Alpha turned toward the northern ridge. He leaped onto the lower shelf of the basalt wall, his dark form cutting through the bruised shadow of the eclipsed moon.
Within three heartbeats, he was gone, swallowed by the rising blizzard of the high pass.
He left no blood behind.
He left only the heavy iron box resting in the snow, the echo of a forgotten name ringing in my skull, and a fierce, unquenchable fire burning in the hollow of my chest.
The imperial raven found me three leagues past the volcanic rim, its iron-forged feathers slick with grease and sulfur.
It was a clockwork monstrosity, engineered by the Sanctum’s alchemists to fly through mountain squalls that would snap the wings of a living bird. It dropped out of the leaden sky, striking a basalt outcrop with the dead clang of an anvil, its mechanical talons digging deep into the frozen shale. Bolted to its leg was a hollowed cylinder of lacquered bone, sealed with Glenn’s personal crest in crimson wax—the weeping eye of the Sun God.
