The blade whistled past my ear, close enough that I felt the displaced air kiss my skin.
"Too slow."
My father's voice cracked like a whip across the training room. I didn't have time to respond before his boot connected with my ribs, sending me sprawling across the mat. Pain exploded through my side, but I rolled with the momentum, came up in a crouch, and blocked his next strike with my forearm.
The impact rattled my bones.
"Better," Marcus Ashford said, circling me like a predator. "But still not good enough."
I tasted blood. Must've bitten my tongue when I hit the ground. The metallic tang mixed with the familiar flavor of disappointment that always seemed to coat my mouth in his presence.
"Again," he commanded.
I pushed to my feet, ignoring the protests from my bruised ribs. Around us, the other hunters watched from the observation deck... a gallery of silent judges evaluating my worthiness. Among them, I caught Thomas's worried expression. He mouthed something that might've been "careful."
Too late for that.
My father came at me fast, a blur of calculated violence. I'd been training with him since I could walk, knew his patterns like I knew my own heartbeat. He favored his left side after an old injury, compensated with aggressive right hooks, always followed combinations with a leg sweep.
I ducked. Blocked. Countered.
Our forearms met with a crack that echoed through the room. For a moment, we were locked together, and I could see the cold assessment in his steel-gray eyes. Looking for weakness. Always looking for weakness.
"What are you?" he asked, voice low enough that only I could hear.
"A hunter," I gasped out.
"Wrong." He twisted, broke my guard, and had me pinned face-first against the mat before I could blink. His knee pressed between my shoulder blades, his hand fisted in my hair. "You're an Ashford. And Ashfords don't just hunt. We dominate. We destroy. We show no mercy."
He released me suddenly, and I sucked in a desperate breath.
"Stand up."
My legs shook, but I obeyed. Blood dripped from my split lip onto the mat, little crimson flowers blooming on the gray surface.
"Sir," Thomas called from above. "Perhaps that's enough for..."
"Did I ask for your input, Reeves?"
"No, sir."
"Then shut your mouth before I shut it for you."
The observation deck went silent again. My father's attention returned to me, and I forced myself to meet his gaze without flinching.
"Do you know why I push you harder than the others, Elara?"
"Because I need to be better than them."
"No." He circled behind me, and every instinct I had screamed to turn, to keep him in my line of sight. But I held my ground. "Because you have something they don't. Something that makes you either extraordinary or a liability."
I wanted to ask what he meant, but I'd learned years ago that questions were often traps.
"Your mother's blood runs in your veins," he continued, his voice taking on a quality I couldn't quite identify. Disgust? Regret? "And that blood is tainted."
My chest tightened. We never talked about my mother. Never. In twenty-three years, my father had mentioned her maybe a dozen times, always in the context of her death... killed by werewolves when I was three, her body never recovered.
"The only way to purify that taint," he said, stopping in front of me again, "is to prove that you're stronger than it. That you can take everything she was and burn it out through sheer will and violence."
"I understand."
"Do you?" He tilted his head. "We'll see."
He gestured to someone in the observation deck. A moment later, Garrett, my half-brother... descended the stairs carrying a black equipment case. He wouldn't look at me as he set it at my father's feet.
Marcus opened the case. Inside, nestled in foam padding, were tools I recognized from my training manuals. Interrogation implements. Silver instruments that gleamed under the harsh fluorescent lights.
My stomach turned.
"Tomorrow, you'll face your final test," my father said, selecting a wicked-looking blade from the case. He held it up to the light, examining its edge with the appreciation of a connoisseur. "I've spent three months tracking my prey. Another month capturing him. And now, he's ready for you."
"What kind of target?" My voice came out steadier than I felt.
"The best kind." A smile curved his lips, the kind of smile that never reached his eyes. "Dangerous. Intelligent. Strong enough to have killed fifteen of our hunters over the past decade."
Around the room, I felt the shift in atmosphere. Whoever this prisoner was, even these hardened killers respected his threat level.
"Who is he?"
"Kael Thornhart." My father savored the name like expensive wine. "Beta of Silverpine Pack. Second-in-command to one of the most powerful Alphas in the region. His pack has evaded us for seventy years, but I finally got him."
My pulse quickened. I'd heard of Silverpine. Every hunter had. They were ghosts, legends, the pack that could disappear into the mountains and leave no trace. The pack responsible for...
"He killed them," my father said, reading my expression. "The hunting party that went after your mother. He was there. He might have been the one who tore her apart."
Ice flooded my veins, followed immediately by white-hot rage.
"I want him."
"Oh, you'll have him." Marcus closed the case with a decisive snap. "For three days, he's yours. Extract everything he knows... pack locations, safe houses, contacts, weaknesses. I don't care how you do it. Use pain. Use pleasure. Use whatever works." He leaned close, his breath hot against my ear. "Break him, Elara. Make him beg. Make him tell you every secret his pack has hidden. And when you've hollowed him out completely, I'll let you kill him yourself."
Something twisted in my gut. Not quite excitement. Not quite dread. Something darker.
"And if I fail?"
"Then you're not an Ashford." He straightened, addressing the room now. "You're just another hunter who couldn't cut it. And we don't keep dead weight in this family."
The threat hung in the air, clear as the scent of blood and sweat that permeated the training room.
"Tomorrow at dawn," my father continued. "You'll go to the lower cells. Alone. No backup. No supervision. Just you and the wolf." He smiled again, and this time there was something almost hungry in it. "Let's see what you're really made of."
He strode toward the stairs, then paused.
"Oh, and Elara? Don't disappoint me. The punishment for failure would be... severe."
Then he was gone, climbing the stairs with Garrett trailing behind him like an obedient shadow. The other hunters filed out after them, some nodding at me with approval, others with pity.
Thomas lingered.
"El," he said quietly, descending to the training floor. "This is wrong."
"It's a test."
"It's a death sentence." He grabbed my arm, forcing me to look at him. His brown eyes were wide with concern. "Kael Thornhart isn't just dangerous. He's smart. Cunning. He's survived three centuries by being ten steps ahead of everyone hunting him. Your father is setting you up to fail."
"Why would he do that?"
"I don't know. But something about this feels off." His grip tightened. "Promise me you'll be careful."
I pulled away, suddenly uncomfortable with his touch, his closeness. "I'm always careful."
"Elara..."
"I need to prepare, Thomas."
He watched me for a long moment, then sighed. "Fine. But I'll be monitoring from the security feeds. If things go wrong, I'm coming in, orders or not."
"Don't." The word came out sharper than I intended. "I need to do this alone."
Because I did. This was my chance to prove I wasn't weak, wasn't broken, wasn't whatever my father thought I was. This was my chance to show that the Ashford name meant something when I wore it.
Even if the cost was someone's life.
Thomas left, and I was alone in the training room with the scent of my own blood and the weight of tomorrow pressing down on me like a physical thing.
I walked to the case my father had left behind, opened it, and stared at the instruments inside. Tools of pain. Tools of control. I'd studied their use in theory, practiced on dummies and simulations.
Tomorrow, I'd use them on a living being.
A werewolf.
A monster.
I closed my eyes and tried to summon the hatred I knew I should feel. Tried to remember the stories my father told about my mother's death, the brutality of it, the savagery of the creatures who killed her.
But all I felt was a strange emptiness, and beneath it, something else. Something that felt uncomfortably like anticipation.
I gathered the case and headed for my quarters. I had preparations to make, research to review, strategies to plan.
Tomorrow at dawn, I would descend into the darkness beneath Thornwood Estate.
Tomorrow, I would meet Kael Thornhart.
Tomorrow, everything would change.
I just didn't know how much.
My room was exactly as I'd left it that morning... spartan, functional, devoid of personality. A bed, a desk, a locked cabinet containing my weapons. No photographs, no mementos, nothing that might suggest I was anything more than a weapon being sharpened for a specific purpose.
I set the interrogation case on my desk and pulled out my tablet, calling up everything we had on Kael Thornhart.
The file was surprisingly thin for a wolf who'd lived nearly three centuries.
Subject: Kael Thornhart
Age: Approximately 287 years
Rank: Beta, Silverpine Pack
Known Aliases: The Silver Wolf, The Ghost of Cascade
Confirmed Kills: 15 hunters (suspected much higher)
Threat Level: Extreme
There was a photograph, grainy and taken from distance. A man with dark hair streaked with silver, tall, broad-shouldered. His face was turned away from the camera, but I could see the proud line of his jaw, the warrior's bearing in his posture.
I pulled up the incident reports next. Ambushed hunter patrols. Rescued captive pack members from three different facilities. Destroyed one of our weapons caches, setting our operations back six months. Always moving, always one step ahead, never leaving enough evidence to track.
Until now.
How had my father caught him?
I scrolled through the capture report, but it was heavily redacted. Large sections were blacked out, marked CLASSIFIED HUNT MASTER EYES ONLY.
Strange.
"Preparing for tomorrow?"
I jumped, hand going instinctively to the knife at my belt. But it was just Garrett, leaning against my doorframe with his arms crossed.
"You should knock."
"Door was open." He stepped inside uninvited, his gaze sliding over my sparse quarters with barely concealed disdain. "Julian and I wanted to wish you luck. Well, I wanted to. Julian's too chicken shit to come himself."
My younger half-brother had never quite embraced the hunter lifestyle. Garrett, on the other hand, had taken to it like a predator to blood.
"I don't need luck."
"No?" He picked up a photograph from my desk—the only one I owned. My mother, taken before I was born. Young, beautiful, with auburn hair like mine and eyes that seemed to hold secrets. "Father thinks you do. He's taking bets with the senior hunters."
My stomach clenched. "Bets on what?"
"On whether you'll succeed or whether the wolf will break you first." He set the photograph down carelessly. "I put fifty on you lasting less than a day before you run screaming."
Anger flared hot in my chest. "Get out."
"Touched a nerve?" He grinned, but there was no humor in it. "You know what the others say about you, right? That you're soft. That you second-guess yourself. That you're more like your weak mother than a true Ashford."
I was across the room before I registered moving, my knife against his throat.
"Say another word about my mother," I whispered, "and I'll show you exactly how weak I am."
For a moment, fear flickered in Garrett's eyes. Good.
Then he laughed, a sound devoid of warmth.
"There she is," he said. "There's the sister I know. The one with fangs." He pushed my knife away slowly, deliberately. "Use that anger tomorrow, Elara. You're going to need it."
He left, and I stood there trembling with rage and something else... something that felt like shame.
I looked down at my hands. They were steady. No shaking. I'd just held a knife to my brother's throat, and my hands were perfectly steady.
What did that make me?
I returned to my desk, to the file on Kael Thornhart, to the preparations I needed to make. But Garrett's words kept echoing in my head.
Whether you'll succeed or whether the wolf will break you first.
I pulled out a notebook and began writing questions, planning my approach, mapping out strategies for the interrogation.
But beneath the practical preparations, a small voice whispered doubts.
What if Garrett was right?
What if I wasn't strong enough?
What if three days alone with a predator revealed that I was exactly what everyone suspected... too soft, too weak, too much like my mother?
I worked until my eyes burned and the words on the page started to blur. When I finally collapsed into bed, still fully clothed, my dreams were dark and filled with golden eyes that watched me from shadows I couldn't escape.
Dawn came too quickly.
I woke to the sound of my alarm and immediately wished I hadn't. Every muscle in my body ached from yesterday's training session, and my ribs screamed in protest when I tried to sit up.
Didn't matter. Pain was temporary. Failure was permanent.
I showered quickly, dressed in tactical gear, and braided my hair back tightly. Then I gathered the interrogation case and headed for the lower levels.
Thornwood Estate was built into the mountainside, with most of its bulk extending downward rather than up. The residential and training areas occupied the upper floors. The armory and planning rooms were one level down. Storage and utilities below that.
And at the very bottom, carved into the living rock itself, were the cells.
I'd never been down there before. The cells were reserved for prisoners too dangerous or too valuable to keep anywhere else, and access was strictly controlled. Even now, I had to pass through three security checkpoints, each guard examining my credentials with careful scrutiny before waving me through.
The temperature dropped with each level I descended. By the time I reached the cell block, my breath misted in front of my face.
The corridor was long, narrow, lined with reinforced steel doors. Emergency lighting cast everything in a sickly yellow glow. Somewhere, water dripped with metronomic persistence.
A guard waited at the end of the hall, older, scarred, with eyes that had seen too much.
"Miss Ashford," he said with a nod. "Your father briefed me. I'm to seal you in and not open the door for three days unless you give the emergency signal."
"I understand."
"You sure about this?" His gaze flicked to the interrogation case. "Thornhart's not like the others we've held. He's... different."
"Different how?"
The guard hesitated. "Quiet. Too quiet. Like he's waiting for something." He pulled a key card from his belt. "Last chance to back out."
"I'm not backing out."
He sighed but swiped the card. Locks disengaged with a series of heavy clunks. The door swung open on oiled hinges, revealing darkness beyond.
"Good luck, Miss Ashford. You're going to need it."
Then I stepped across the threshold, and the door slammed shut behind me with a finality that made my heart jump.
For a moment, I stood in absolute darkness, my other senses heightening to compensate. The smell hit me first—blood, sweat, and something else. Something wild and clean, like pine forests after rain.
Then the lights flickered on, motion-activated, and I saw him.
Kael Thornhart.
Chained to the far wall.
Waiting.