KAEL DRAVEN POV
I never liked crowds that smelled of sweat and fear, they were honest, though, no politics hidden behind pleasantries, no silvered smiles. When a man's hands are bloody, you know what he is, you can weigh him by how he holds that blood. I like that clarity. It's why I came to the south pit tonight.
The training yard had been pressed into something sharper, benches ringed the sand, and torches burned with a blue flame that made shadows look hungry. A handful of students had slipped in through back corridors, the kind who wanted a demonstration of how a real Alpha moved when he had nothing to prove except the next breath.
I kept my cloak unfastened, shoulders squared, because showing weakness by ducking looks like hiding. My wolf was a cold thing at my ribs, not the thin-legged pup of years ago but a steady, waiting pressure that liked the scent of blood. Sometimes I thought the animal in me had a better memory than I did. It never forgot how it felt to be used, to be given what it didn't want, to be denied what it needed.
"You shouldn't be here," Celene had told me this morning, soft as silk and sharp as a blade, she expected compliance, she expected that I would crawl back into the scheduled life, dinners, panels, bed by the time the moon hung low and polite conversations about alliances.
Instead I walked the dirt and let the torches throw a crown of light on my cheekbones.
From the edge of the pit I could see faces, Elders' sons, a few hothead Alphas, and the usual crew who took bets on who would crack first. They liked bloodsports, It gave them a small god they could bow to for an hour.
The challenger was a Beta named Ryker Holt. He'd grown famous for a reckless style and a grin that said he'd kill for attention, he strutted into the ring like he owed the world nothing and was ready to take back what he wanted.
"Draven," he called. "Try not to die tonight."
The crowd laughed, I could have left it there and walked away with my reputation untouched but the thing about reputations is they are paper until you set them on fire yourself.
I stepped in.
We moved like two storms meeting: him with flashy kicks and a clumsy arrogance, me with measured intent. I didn't aim to break him so much as teach him where the line ran, he lunged, and the world narrowed to breath and bone, the ring sand kicked up at my boots. Ryker smelled of bravado and cheap ale, I smelled something else beneath it, fear wound in muscle.
His fist landed first, I felt the thud, the sting, and counted it like currency. I answered on pattern and pain until his breath hitched, he smirked even then, the kind of smirk that says you're not done. You go for the strike that tells a man where he is weakest, the jaw, the ribs, the throat, I moved where he couldn't see.
When my hand caught his shoulder and twisted, his face came close enough for me to see the white of his eyes. They were not cocky then, they were small and bright and suddenly human, the crowd roared. Ryker bit the sand and curled, I could have stopped, I didn't.
There's a moment in fights where something older than you decides for you. My wolf reached up like a thought and touched the edge of my reasoning. I felt the bond Jane said I should have kept, no, not bond, but the memory of a heat that wanted one thing, to claim what it had missed. For an instant the world smelled like Aria, her iron and rain and the thing beneath her ribs that had once been mine to hold, It was enough to make the bone in my chest ache.
I pulled back, Ryker was breathing hard, gasping from the air, he spat blood into the sand and looked up at me with a new kind of attention, I flicked a hand to signal the match end.
Master Thorn, who ran the rings for the school, stepped forward, brow knit. He was impressed, which meant I had done my job.
When I left the ring, hands wrapped in cloth and slick with sweat, the crowd parted like reeds. I heard a half-moan of approval, a few curses, and one snide whisper: "Alpha-to-be keeps his teeth in."
Good, let them watch.
My phone, stone-etched with family sigils, buzzed once in my pocket. A message from Father: Remember your duty, tonight we discuss foreign delegations and be ready. Fine, duty always called, even when the wolf wanted other things.
I walked toward the training shed to strip the blood from my knuckles when something stopped me colder than the torches, a name on the roster nailed to the side of a post, I hadn't been looking for it, but the paper had a way of finding what it wanted. People wrote names and they stuck like flies in amber.
Riel, Ava — Pair, Zane Halbrook.
Ava Riel.
I read it once, then again. The paper trembled in my hand, not from wind but from memory, Ava. Our registrar had said it, Miss Riel, when he signed the tablet, I had brushed the name aside because I liked the idea of not knowing but not everything ignorance lets you keep.
It hit like the echo of something I'd thrown away on a night I told myself I'd be strong without, Ava, Aria, same shape, different shell, my heart did something I'd not felt in years, it clenched.
I wanted to tear the roster from the post and set it on fire. I wanted to march to the Registrar's Office and drag the clerk out with his braid. Instead I slipped the paper into my inside pocket and walked on. There was a brittle logic in keeping this secret, maybe he or she, whoever had written that name, didn't mean to hide something, maybe it was nothing but the wolf smelled it like a wound.
A hand touched my shoulder. Celene stood there, pale in torchlight, embroidered gloves gleaming, her eyes were soft as a polished blade. "You fought well," she said, voice velvet.
I forced a smile. "The usual."
Her smile tilted, it was the way she smiled when she wanted to remind me who I would marry. "You seem distracted, Kael. Are you well?"
"Fine." Lies have never been harder to keep than now, she reached up, brushed the sand from my cheek as if she were dusting off a favored statue. A thousand small poison-pricks, each one made me colder.
"Good," she said. "We will see Father tomorrow."
She drifted away and in her wake I could smell perfume like a summer that never came. The world of politics bent itself into its rehearsed shape, and I walked through it like a man