The iron-heavy scent of my own blood had become as familiar as the mountain air.
I leaned against the stone pillar of the training ring, my chest heaving. Sweat tracked through the dirt on my face, stinging the fresh cut on my cheek. Kael stood across from me, breathing hard, his knuckles bruised. He'd stopped grinning three hours ago.
"Again," a voice commanded from the shadows of the overhang.
Gabriel. Even without looking, I felt him. His presence was like a heavy velvet curtain draped over the courtyard. He was sitting on a stone bench, a whetstone scraping rhythmically against a long, black-steel blade.
Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.
"She's had enough, Alpha," Kael panted, wiping his brow. "She's been at it since before the sun hit the peaks. Even a wolf needs to eat."
"She isn't a wolf," Gabriel said, his voice a low, dangerous rumble. He stood up, the black blade catching the dying light of the afternoon. "She's a Primal. And a Primal doesn't get to have 'enough'."
He walked toward me. Every step he took was a lesson in lethality. He didn't have the flashy, arrogant strut of Logan. Gabriel moved like a shadow—silent, purposeful, and inevitable. He stopped in front of me, his abyssal eyes scanning the bruises on my arms with a cold, unreadable intensity.
"You're holding back," he said, stopping inches from me.
"I'm exhausted," I spat, my voice cracking. "There's a difference."
"No. You're afraid." He reached out, his thumb catching a drop of blood on my lip. The touch was electric, a jolt of heat that bypassed my brain and went straight to the dormant fire in my gut. "You're afraid that if you let the silver fire out, you'll lose the girl who lived in the Silver Moon. You're mourning a ghost, Aria."
I flinched away from his touch. "I'm not mourning anything. I hate them."
"Hate is just a different way of staying connected," Gabriel whispered. He leaned down, his face so close I could see the flecks of obsidian in his irises. "I don't want your hate. I want your hunger."
He turned to Kael. "Dismissed. All of you. Leave us."
The warriors didn't hesitate. They vanished into the fortress, leaving the courtyard in a sudden, ringing silence. The wind picked up, whistling through the black iron spikes of the ramparts.
The King's Scar
"Walk with me," Gabriel said. It wasn't an invitation.
I followed him away from the training grounds, deeper into the fortress where the air grew damp and smelled of ancient stone. We reached a balcony that hung over a sheer drop of three thousand feet. Below, the world was a sea of dark pines and mist.
"You asked me why I wanted to burn the world down," Gabriel said, his back to me. He began to unbutton the cuffs of his shirt, rolling the sleeves up to reveal forearms corded with muscle and crisscrossed with silver-white scars.
But it was the mark on his shoulder that caught my breath.
It wasn't a wolf's bite. It was a brand. A series of ancient runes burned deep into the muscle, pulsing with a faint, sickly violet light.
"The Council's Curse," I whispered. My hand moved instinctively toward it before I could stop myself.
Gabriel didn't pull away. He stood perfectly still as my fingers ghosted over the jagged edges of the brand. The skin was cold—unnaturally so.
"They didn't just exile me, Aria," Gabriel said, his voice devoid of emotion. "They tried to turn me into a mindless guardian. They branded me with the Shattered Soul curse. Every time I shift, the runes eat a piece of my mind. Eventually, there will be nothing left but the monster."
I looked up at him, my heart aching with a sudden, sharp empathy. This was why he lived in the wastes. This was why he took in the broken and the rejected. He wasn't just a King of Rogues; he was a man living on borrowed time.
"Is that why you need me?" I asked, my voice barely a whisper. "Because the Primal is the only thing strong enough to break a Council curse?"
Gabriel turned, his hand catching mine, pinning it against his scarred chest. I could feel his heart—slow, steady, and incredibly powerful.
"I thought I needed a tool," he said, his gaze dropping to my mouth, his eyes darkening with a sudden, raw hunger that made my knees weak. "But every time you look at me with those silver eyes, I realize I might have found something much more dangerous than a weapon."
He leaned in, his lips inches from mine. The air between us was thick with a tension so heavy it felt like it could snap the stone beneath our feet.
"Don't get too close to me, Aria," he breathed, his voice a warning and a plea all at once. "I'm a dying man, and I have a habit of dragging everything I touch into the dark with me."
"Maybe I'm tired of the light," I whispered back.
I was the one who closed the distance. I stood on my toes and pressed my lips to his.
It wasn't a soft kiss. It was an explosion. It tasted of salt, iron, and a desperate, starving need. Gabriel let out a low, guttural growl and pulled me flush against him, his hands tangling in my hair as if he wanted to memorize the very shape of my skull.
In that moment, the silver fire didn't just hum. It roared.
For the first time since the rejection, I didn't feel like a broken girl. I felt like a Queen reclaiming her throne—and Gabriel was the dark kingdom I had been waiting for.