Kai's POV
I should have walked away.
The punishment had been ordered. The guards were carrying it out. There was nothing left that required my presence at this window no decision still unmade, no instruction still unissued. I had other things to do. A pack to run. A ceremony to prepare for. A hundred responsibilities that had nothing to do with a girl in a torn shirt trying to hold herself upright in the courtyard below.
I stayed anyway.
Up. Down. Up. Down.
I told myself it was oversight. That a punishment carried out poorly was worse than no punishment at all it sent the wrong message, created the wrong impression, undermined the authority it was meant to reinforce. I told myself that was why my eyes kept returning to her every time I tried to look away.
It was a convincing argument.
I almost believed it.
Her legs were trembling. I could see it clearly from here that fine, continuous shaking that wasn't weakness exactly, or not only weakness, but the specific trembling of a body that had been pushed past what it was built to hold and was now running on something that had no name. Stubbornness. Fury. Some quiet, fundamental refusal.
Her back was still bleeding. The shirt clung to it in dark patches, and every time she landed, every time the impact traveled up through her knees and her spine, I watched her shoulders flinch with the effort of not reacting.
She wasn't making a sound.
That was the thing that kept snagging at me, catching like a splinter under skin I couldn't stop pressing. She wasn't crying. Wasn't begging. In my room she had I had heard her voice break, had felt her tears against my fingers when I held her jaw but here, in front of the pack, she had gone somewhere interior and unreachable, and whatever was happening on her face was too far away for me to read.
Why won't she just stop?
The answer came immediately, unhelpfully: Because you told her not to.
My jaw tightened.
"She deserves this," I said under my breath. To no one. To myself. To my wolf, who had been pacing since the moment I ordered the jumping and showed no signs of settling. "She attacked Ayoya. She embarrassed the pack. She carries her father's blood and her mother's cowardice and she has been a problem in these halls for six years."
My wolf did not respond to this argument with any enthusiasm.
Below, her knees buckled. A guard stepped forward quickly, catching her before she could hit the stone, and something in my chest pulled tight in a way I did not examine closely.
She's going to fall.
Good. She should learn what it costs to
She already knows what things cost.
The thought arrived without invitation and I shoved it back down hard.
"Keep going," I muttered, even though no one up here could hear me. Even though the guards below were already lifting her, already setting her back on her feet, already waiting for her legs to find their rhythm again.
My wolf stirred again. Restless. The pacing had gotten worse.
"Stop," I told it quietly.
It did not stop.
You are not supposed to feel this, I thought, with the specific exhaustion of someone having an argument they have lost before. Not for her. Not for a traitor's daughter. Not for someone who has given you nothing but trouble and the memory of what her parents did to this family.
The door behind me opened.
I didn't turn. I knew her scent had known it for years, warm and sweet and familiar in the way of something that had been present so long it had become part of the landscape. Ayoya moved quietly, the way she always did, with the graceful, deliberate softness of someone who understood that how you entered a room was its own kind of language.
"You're watching her."
Not a question. Gently said, but not a question.
"I'm making sure the punishment is executed correctly," I replied.
A pause. Then her footsteps crossed the room, stopping beside me at the window. For a moment we both looked down at the courtyard at Laura, still moving, still keeping herself upright through what appeared to be sheer, irrational will.
"I'm glad you're doing this," Ayoya said softly. Her voice had the particular quality it always carried when she was performing composure smooth on the surface, something pressurized underneath. "She attacked me. She needed to be punished."
"Yes."
"I only went to wake her." She lowered her gaze slightly. "I wanted to help with the ceremony preparations. I thought if we started early " A small, wounded exhale. "And she just came at me. I didn't even fight back."
I watched Laura's shoulders flinch on a landing.
"She's performing," I said.
Ayoya's fingers curled gently around my arm. "Are you feeling sorry for her?"
The question landed wrong. Too knowing. Too precisely aimed.
"No," I said.
"You're watching very carefully for someone who feels nothing."
My jaw tightened. "I am watching to make sure my orders are followed."
She turned toward me slightly, her eyes moving over my face with that quiet searching quality I had always found either comforting or unsettling, depending on the day. Today it sat somewhere between the two.
"You went soft with her before," she said carefully. "In your room. I could tell when you came out."
"I was not soft."
"You let her speak."
"She spoke before I could stop her."
"Kai." Her voice dropped. Not angry something more careful than anger. More strategic. "She looks at me like she hates me. Like I took something that belonged to her. I've felt it for months that look she gives me across rooms, across tables." Her lips pressed together. "I was scared this morning. When she came at me, I genuinely thought "
"She didn't attack you because of you," I said.
Ayoya blinked. "Then why?"
I didn't answer, because the honest answer was I don't know if she attacked you at all, and that thought was one I was absolutely not prepared to stand behind.
"She has nothing," I said instead. "She has nothing to be jealous of and nothing worth protecting. She is here because pack law requires it and for no other reason."
Below, Laura fell.
Her knees hit the stone and for one long second she stayed there head bowed, arms braced, the guards hovering uncertainly above her and something in my chest did a thing I could not name and would not describe.
One of the enforcers looked up toward the balcony.
Waiting.
Ayoya moved. Smooth, deliberate, stepping directly into my sightline, her hand rising to my jaw and turning my face gently toward hers.
"Don't," she said softly. "Don't watch her."
Her eyes were bright with tears that hadn't fallen yet held carefully in reserve, deployed with precision. I had always known, on some level, that Ayoya's tears were a tool she wielded rather than a response she couldn't control. I had never held it against her. It was survival, in its own way.
"She chose this," Ayoya continued, her thumb tracing lightly along my jaw. "Whatever she's feeling down there she chose it. You didn't do this to her. Her blood did."
Her blood.
My wolf snarled faintly.
I pushed it down.
"The ceremony has to be perfect," Ayoya murmured, stepping closer, her free hand resting flat against my chest. "Everything we've built everything your family has rebuilt since what her parents did it has to be untouched by her. You understand that, don't you?"
"Yes," I said.
"She can't ruin this."
"She won't."
Below, the guards had lifted Laura back to her feet. She was moving again slower, yes, her head slightly bowed, but moving. Still moving. My wolf went very still at that, watching in a way that felt less like restraint and more like attention.
Ayoya's arms slid around my neck.
"I just need to know you're with me," she whispered. Her lips brushed the corner of my mouth. Soft. Certain. The touch of someone who has learned that physicality is its own form of argument. "I need to know that when you look out that window, you see her not whatever story she's telling with her face."
I pulled my eyes from the courtyard.
I looked at Ayoya instead at the face I had looked at for years, the face the pack expected to see beside me, the face that represented everything ordered and correct and forward-moving about my life.
"I'm with you," I said.
Her exhale was soft with relief.
She kissed me then properly, both hands rising to thread through my hair and I let her, and I kissed her back, and I let her guide me away from the window, step by step, until the courtyard was behind me and the sight of trembling legs and blood-dark fabric was somewhere I couldn't see.
Her hands moved against my chest.
"Don't think about her," she murmured between kisses.
I didn't answer.
I kissed her harder instead, pulling her closer, filling my hands with the warm familiar certainty of her, drowning the noise in my head beneath something physical and present and real.
My wolf went quiet.
Not settled. Not appeased. Quiet in the specific way of something that has decided to wait rather than surrender patient and watchful and certain, with the deep animal certainty of a creature that knows that what is its will eventually make itself known.
I ignored it.
I chose to ignore it.
And somewhere below us, in the courtyard I was no longer watching
Laura kept moving.