carried across 63

 

63 The Horn 

Fenris 

The embers in the hearth were bleeding out, turning from angry orange to a dull, dying red. 

The den was freezing again, but the cold didn’t register. I just sat in the heavy oak chair in the corner of the room, perfectly still, watching the dark bear pelt rise and fall over her chest. 

Sera’s breathing was ragged. That forced healing was a brutal tax on the body. It hollowed out the muscles, cannibalizing fat and energy just to stitch the skin back together. Every time she inhaled, a faint, wet wheeze rattled in the back of her throat. 

The smells in the room were a mess. Mina had slathered her bruised ribs in some sharp, southern camphor salve that stung the back of my nose. Beneath that was the heavy, metallic stench of Taya’s blood still crusted under my fingernails. But cutting through all of it-thick and suffocating-was Sera. Citrus, vanilla, and the dark, heavy musk of pure, unspent arousal. It coated the back of my tongue. It made my fangs throb against my lower lip. 

Two hours ago, I had stripped the ruined clothes off her body. My hands had literally shaken when I ran that hot cloth over her bare stomach. She had looked at me with those wide, dark eyes, smelling like sex and blood, and demanded I touch her. Fenris, she had whispered. Just my name. Completely unfiltered. Completely raw. 

Walking away from the edge of that bed took more strength than I had ever used in a fight. 

My fingers dug into the wooden armrests of the chair until the oak groaned in the quiet room. The mate bond wasn’t a metaphor. It was a physical, violent tether anchored directly in my sternum, dragging me toward that mattress. It screamed at me to cross the floorboards, rip that pelt off her, and bury myself so deep inside her that she forgot she ever belonged to anyone else. 

But she did belong to someone else. 

The blood drying on my knuckles flaked off, falling into the dark fur of the chair. In the dim light, it looked completely black. It looked exactly like the dark smears sinking into the ice three years ago. 

The Jagged Peaks. Deep winter. 

The wind howling through the ravine was so sharp it felt like shattered glass slicing against my face. 

We had just finished clearing a rogue encampment. They were starving, desperate exiles who had been picking off our supply caravans before the winter storms hit. We had decided to send a message. It wasn’t a negotiation. It was a butchery. There were twenty of us, Ironmaw’s elite guard. I didn’t even draw a sword that day. I just used my hunting knife and my bare hands. 

The fighting was over. The adrenaline was slowly bleeding out of my system, leaving a familiar, hollow calm. The ravine was eerily quiet, save for the wet crackle of burning pine from the rogue tents. Black, oily smoke choked the pale, overcast sky. The smell was a sickening mix of scorched hair, opened bowels, and hot blood cooling rapidly on the frost. 

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I stood knee-deep in red snow, wiping the gore from my jaw with the back of my leather gauntlet. Yvara was crouching near a dead rogue a few feet away, calmly wiping her curved dual blades clean on a patch of untouched ice. She wasn’t breathing hard. Neither was I. 

This was my entire existence. This was the only thing I was good for. I was the Butcher. Point a target, and I kill it. That was the arrangement. 

Dimitri was the Alpha. He was the golden heir when father was alive. He sat in the warm, dry council rooms back at the fortress. He smiled at southern diplomats. He brokered trade routes and secured our borders with words and ink. I slaughtered the threats in the freezing mud so he never had to look at them. I kept his hands clean. It was a perfect system. I never wanted the throne. I just wanted to be the shield that kept my brother alive. 

Then the horn blew. 

It wasn’t a sharp, high-pitched rogue horn. It was a deep, resonant Ironmaw blast. But it came from the wrong direction. It came from the South. The deep territory. Behind our own defensive lines. 

You don’t blow a war horn in the heart of your own lands unless the rot is already inside the house. 

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