The words hang between us, sharp and heavy as obsidian blades. The cold seeping into my side from the iron wound is nothing compared to the chilling impact of his statement. My pain, my rejection, my exile… I had thought it was a singular agony, a tragedy that belonged only to me. In that one, horrifying moment, I realize it is not a unique event. It is a pattern. A signature.
My voice is a hoarse whisper, forced past the lump of ice in my throat. "Who… who are you?"
The man—the grey wolf—looks away from my scar, his stormy eyes meeting mine. The raw, personal hatred in them recedes slightly, replaced by a grim, assessing light. He is deciding what to tell me, what I am worth. The silence stretches, filled only by the crackle of the poultice on my skin and the distant rustle of the forest.
"My name is Kael," he says finally, the name itself sounding like a stone scraping against another. "And I am what they call an exile. Same as you, it seems. Though my banishment was quieter."
"Your father…" I press, my own pain forgotten, consumed by a desperate need to understand this echo of my own trauma. "What did Damien do to him?"
A muscle jumps in Kael's jaw. His face, already a mask of hard lines and old pains, seems to tighten further. For a moment, I think he won't answer, that the wound is too deep, too raw to be exposed to a stranger. But then he lets out a short, bitter laugh that holds no humor at all.
"Do?" he repeats, his voice dripping with a venom that has been brewing for years. "He did what Alphas do. He consolidated his power. He eliminated a threat. He called it justice."
He limps over to the base of a tree and sinks down, his movements weary, as if the memory itself is a physical weight. "My father was not some packless rogue. He was Valerius, Damien's First Fang, commander of the Blackwood warriors. He was loyal. He was strong. But he was not a fool."
He picks up a twig, snapping it into smaller and smaller pieces with sharp, angry movements. "My father saw the rot setting in. Damien inherited the pack from his own sire, an Alpha who nearly led our people to ruin through weak pacts and indecision. Damien swore he would never be his father. He became obsessed with purity. With absolute strength. He started casting out any wolf he deemed 'imperfect'—the old, the lame, those whose first shift wasn't strong enough. He preached that compassion was a disease that would weaken the pack from within."
The words are a punch to the gut. Weakness our enemies would exploit. Damien had said something just like that to me. It wasn't just a rejection; it was his core philosophy.
"My father," Kael continues, his voice low and dangerous, "he spoke against it. Not in open rebellion, but in council. He argued that our strength had always been in our resilience, not our cruelty. He believed alliances with other creatures—the Fae of the deep woods, the river sprites—were vital. He said that a pack that cannibalizes its own is already dying. Damien saw this not as counsel, but as dissent. As a challenge to his authority."
He looks up, and his grey eyes are filled with the ghosts of a past I am only now beginning to understand. "An Alpha who is afraid of a whisper of dissent is not a strong Alpha. He's a terrified one. And a terrified Alpha is the most dangerous creature in these woods."
I nod slowly, my mind reeling. It's a story I know in my own bones, even if I never had the words for it. I was just another whisper he had to silence.
"So he framed him," Kael says, his voice flat. "It was sickeningly simple. A border skirmish with the Stonefang Pack was orchestrated. Secret messages, supposedly from my father, were 'discovered.' Messages promising to weaken our defenses from the inside in exchange for territory. It was all lies, but Damien presented the 'proof' to the council. He was a master of political theater."
"There was a trial?" I whisper, picturing the Great Hall, the silent, watching eyes.
"Oh, a grand trial," Kael scoffs, the word tasting like poison in his mouth. "A farce. Damien gave my father one chance to save himself: renounce his 'soft' ideologies, beg for the Alpha's forgiveness, and admit his treason. My father refused. He stood there and told Damien that a house built on fear is a house already in ruins."
Kael's knuckles are white as he crushes the last of the twig into dust. "So Damien declared him a traitor. And to prove the point, to make an example of him that no one would ever forget, he marked him." He looks pointedly at my cheek. "A deep, gashing scar. The 'Traitor's Mark.' A sign that you have betrayed the essence of the pack."
My hand instinctively flies to my own face, my fingers tracing the raised, jagged lines. It's not a 'Rejected' mark. It's a 'Traitor's' mark. He branded me with the same symbol he uses for his political enemies. He didn't just see me as weak; he saw me as an act of treason against his bloodline.
"After the marking," Kael's voice grows even colder, "Damien couldn't just have him executed. That would look like tyranny. So he declared an 'honorable duel.' A one-on-one combat to let the Goddess decide the truth. But my father was wounded, his spirit already shaken by the pack turning on him. And Damien… Damien did not fight with honor. He fought to kill. He broke my father's leg first, then toyed with him before finally… finishing it. Honor is just the pretty word Alphas use for murder they want the pack to celebrate."
I can see it all. The cheering crowd. The blood on the ground. The righteous, pragmatic Alpha standing over the body of his rival, his lesson taught to all who watched.
"And you?" I ask, my voice barely audible.
"Me?" He gives a hollow laugh. "I was his son. I screamed for justice. I called him a murderer in front of the whole pack. A mistake. The pack doesn't like inconvenient truths. So I was given a choice. A quiet exile, or I could join my father in the dirt. My mother begged me to live." He gestures around at the oppressive, silent trees. "So now I live. I survive. And I wait."
The word "wait" hangs between us, filled with a decade of cold, patient fury. The clearing is silent now, but it's a new kind of silence. It's not the lonely quiet of my isolation. It's the shared quiet of a tomb, the silence of two ghosts looking at each other, seeing their own wounds reflected in the other's eyes. The deep, burning ember of rage in my chest, the one that has been keeping me alive, recognizes the inferno banked behind Kael's grey eyes. It finds a kindred flame.
He is no longer just a potential threat or a savior. He is an ally. Not one of choice, or even convenience. An ally forged by the hand of a common enemy. An ally of scars.
My perception of him shifts entirely. His lean, scarred body doesn't just speak of survival anymore; it speaks of defiance. His cynicism is not a flaw; it's armor. His coldness is a shield forged in the fire that almost consumed me.
He sees the change in my eyes. His own expression transforms as well. The bleak emptiness of memory is replaced by a new, sharp, calculating light. He is no longer just telling his story. He is assessing me. He sees my ruined dress, my malnourished frame… but he also remembers the corroded iron claws of the Hound. He sees the power I used, a power that is not of the wolf.
He sees me not as a pathetic, rejected girl, but as something new. An unforeseen variable. A weapon that has fallen into his lap.
"He cast you out because you were wolfless, didn't he?" Kael states, it isn't a question. "He saw something he didn't understand and called it a weakness. That is his way. He is blind to any strength that doesn't look exactly like his own."
He gets to his feet, the limp in his leg more pronounced. The pragmatist is back, his moment of shared vulnerability over. Business must now be attended to. "We can't stay here," he says, his voice now crisp and commanding. "The smell of dead Hounds will draw more of them, and worse, pack patrols from the Blackwood or the Stonefang. This clearing will be a warzone by sunrise."
He looks at me, and for the first time, there is something other than hatred or calculation in his eyes. It's a sliver of shared purpose. "I know a place. A sanctuary. Somewhere deep in this wood where their trackers get confused, where the very air chokes out their senses." He offers me a hand up, his grip strong and calloused, but not unkind.
"It's a place the Alphas fear and the Forgemaster's dogs can't find. It's not an easy journey, especially for someone in your state. But it's our only chance."