“What else?”
“My grandmother’s voice.” The grief surprised her, rising sudden and sharp. “She raised me. Taught me the old stories, theEarth ones, about heroes and monsters and girls in red cloaks walking into dangerous woods.” Her laugh came out cracked. “She’d have something to say about all this. Something wise and slightly sarcastic and exactly what I needed to hear.”
“Is she—”
“Gone. Years ago.” Elsa stared into the dying flames. “But I still hear her sometimes. In my head. When things get hard enough that I don’t know what to do.”
Sylas pressed his face to her hair, breathing deep. “What would she say about tomorrow?”
The question deserved consideration. Elsa closed her eyes, summoned the memory of a weathered face and sharp eyes and hands that had always known exactly when to hold on and when to let go.
“She’d say that sometimes the wolf isn’t the villain. That sometimes the girl in the red cloak knows exactly where she’s going.” A smile tugged at her lips. “And that running doesn’t mean running away. Sometimes it means running toward.”
His breath stuttered against her neck.
“Your grandmother sounds wise.”
“She was.” Elsa turned in his arms, facing him in the firelight. “Your turn. What scares the Alpha King of the Yzefrxyl?”
He didn’t deflect. Didn’t offer the non-answer she half expected. Instead, he met her gaze with the kind of raw honesty that felt like a wound.
“Becoming my father.” The words dropped like stones. “He was Alpha before me. Strong. Brutal. Effective.” His jaw tightened. “Andmad.The throne consumed him by the end. The pressure. The isolation. The weight of a kingdom that demanded everything and forgave nothing.” His claws traced patterns on her hip. “I killed him to take the crown. I don’t regret it—he would have destroyed our people if I’d let him continue. But I seehim sometimes. In the mirror. In my decisions. In the moments when control slips and the beast takes over.”
Elsa processed this. The casual brutality of it—killing his own father. The weight it must carry. The constant fear of following the same path.
“You’re not him.”
“Not yet.” His gaze burned into hers. “But the Blood Moon strips away everything civilized. Tomorrow night, I’ll be closer to what he was than what I pretend to be. And you’ll see it. All of it.”
“Good.”
He blinked. “Good?”
“I don’t want the version of you that pretends.” She lifted her hand, pressing it flat against his chest where his heart beat slow and steady. “I want this. The real thing. Even the parts that scare you.”
Silence stretched between them, heavy with implications. The fire crackled. Somewhere in the fortress, guards changed shifts and servants moved through corridors and a kingdom continued its careful dance of power and survival.
Here, in this room, there was only the two of them and the weight of what was coming.
“If tomorrow goes wrong—” he started.
“It won’t.”
“If it does.” He pushed forward, voice rough. “If challengers come for me during the hunt. If the court decides a human Luna is an insult to tradition. If something happens that separates us—”
“Then I find my way back to you.” The certainty in her own voice surprised her. “I’m a navigator, Sylas. Getting lost and finding my way is literally what I do.” Her hand slid up his chest, over the corded muscle of his neck, to cup his jaw. “You can’t lose me. The bond won’t let you. I won’t let you.”
Something cracked in his expression. Something raw and wanting and desperately, terrifyingly hopeful.
“Little human.” The words came out broken. “You don’t know what you’re promising.”
“I know exactly what I’m promising.” She pulled him closer, until their foreheads touched, until they were sharing breath and heat and the trembling edge of something neither of them had words for. “I’m promising you forever in a world where nothing is guaranteed. I’m promising to run tomorrow because the ritual demands it, and to let you catch me because I want you to. I’m promising—”
He kissed her.
Not the brief press she’d given him in the bath. This was consuming—his mouth claiming hers with a desperation that said he was trying to memorize this too, trying to hold onto something soft in a life that demanded constant hardness. She opened for him, let him in, gave back as good as she got while the fire painted them in gold and orange and the deepening shadows of a winter night.
When they finally broke apart, both breathing hard, he rested his forehead against hers and closed his eyes.