Chapter 44
Lila
The morning was still dark when we were roused. Cold enough that the dew froze silver on the palace stairs. I dressed in silence, heart thudding louder in my ears. By the time I joined the other candidates in the training yard, my breath fogged in the air, curling like mist.
Beta Ronan was already waiting, flanked by two royal scouts. In his gloved hand, he held a pouch of thick leather. Another scout held a basket of carved tokens–pale bone etched with symbols I couldn’t read.
Each woman was called forward in turn, and handed one of each. No explanation beyond “Find the wolf.”
When my name – Elena’s name – was called I stepped forward with my chin high. My fingers closed around the scrap of fabric inside the pouch. It was coarse and aged, clinging to a sour, musky scent like old sweat, pine, and iron. Manufactured, maybe. But, not unfamiliar.
The bone token was warm in my palm, as if it had been resting near a fire. A shimmer of something brushed over my skin the moment I touched it… magic, light and ancient, the kind that made my spine tingle.
“This is a sacred trial,” Ronan intoned. “Not for blood, but for bond. You are not hunting prey. You are finding kin. Follow the scent. Trust the token. Return by moonfall….. or not at all.”
My stomach clenched. Ruby stirred in the back of my mind. I’d hoped, stupidly, that something in this challenge would stir her fully awake. But all I felt was the usual fog at the edge of my senses.
We should go back to sleep, Ruby muttered, her voice low and scratchy with irritation from being woken up.
Too late for that. I pressed my lips together. We don’t have the luxury of showing weakness right now.
Fine. But we are not weak. she growled, faint but fierce. We’ve done harder things.
When the whistle blew, we ran.
The forest swallowed us quickly; dense and dark, its edges unfamiliar despite being so close to the palace. Some women sprinted like hounds on a scent. Others stuck close, forming silent, unofficial packs.
I tried to follow at first, but something about their path felt wrong. Too easy. I veered left.
The cold bit at my skin as I crouched low, brushing my fingers across the undergrowth. The wind shifted slightly, carrying a whisper of something tangy and sharp. My scrap of fabric barely helped; the scent had faded under the perfume of leaves and soil and time.
Or maybe Ruby didn’t scent as well as she should, like she didn’t heal me as well as she should, But my mother had taught me better than to rely on one
sense.
The land tells a story, she used to say. Follow the one that feels true.
I slowed, scanning the trees. One trunk bore faint claw marks, old but angled in a way that suggested movement up. hand. Not literally, but something inside me answered it, like a whisper pulling me forward.
y token pulsed faintly in my
Other candidates‘ voices echoed distantly; calls and growls and footsteps. I stayed quiet, letting the trees close around me. I imagined the lost wolf. Injured, careful, clever.
I started climbing.
The incline wasn’t steep, but it forced me to slow down, to pay attention. I scanned the edges of the pathless slope for broken branches, patches of overturned moss, and caught a flash of gray fur snagged on a thorn. Not real, but placed. Part of the trial.
Still, it meant I was close. Or at least closer than I’d been.
1/3
14:04 Mon, 2 Jun M G
Chapter 44
My fingers brushed over a shallow indentation in the earth. A paw print, large and smudged. Too large to be like mine, too perfect to be natural. I crouched beside it, breathing through my nose. The scent clung faintly to the edges of the trail again.
The day passed into might. I rose and kept moving.
Somewhere behind me, I heard someone crash through a thicket–twigs snapping, followed by a breathless curse. It sounded like someone following blindly, hoping speed would win out over strategy. I didn’t turn back.
Let them make noise, I didn’t think it was a race, I just needed to,finish.
My token grew heavier in my hand. Maybe not in weight, but in pressure. As if the longer I held it, the more aware i became of its purpose.
Or maybe it was the cold seeping into my bones, making me imagine things I wanted to believe.
We’re close, Ruby whispered. Left of that pine–look for broken ground.
I obeyed without question..
The trees thickened the farther I climbed, canopy closing tighter overhead. The moon filtered through in pale threads. My eyes narrowed in on a trail of disturbed leaves and a hollowed log, marked with a shallow scrape. Deep enough it could be a claw.
It was subtle. A decoy would’ve been more obvious. This was deliberate.
I pressed forward, ducking beneath a low–hanging branch. The silence here was the kind of quiet that made me feel like I was being watched.
Because I was, this was a selection trial after all.
I didn’t let myself think about Damon. But I felt him, somewhere out here. Watching. Judging.
I followed the markings another twenty minutes, my muscles aching, my breath clouding the air. Then, I saw it half–buried beneath leaves near a rock formation. Another silver scrap of fur, bound in twine and draped over a stone. At its center I found a second token, the match to mine.
That’s it, Ruby said, tired but pleased. Good. You remembered how to hunt.
Found it. I closed my hand around the token, stood, and turned back the way I came. I didn’t have much time left so I picked up my pace.
Halfway down the slope, I saw one of the other women, frustrated and muddy, eyes darting. She looked lost. And behind her, another woman was bleeding from a shallow cut down her arm, token still clenched in her hand.
They’d made it this far. But barely.
By the time I emerged from the tree line, the sky had begun to pale. A bell rang in the palace courtyard to mark the trial’s end. My clothes were dirty, my braid half–undone, but the token was still in my hand.
Moderators waited at the edge of the clearing with clipboards and serious eyes. I stepped into the light, dropped my turned away before they could ask me anything.
n into the collection bowl, and
Damon stood at the edge of the woods, half–hidden by the shadows of an old pine. He wasn’t watching the collection. He was watching me.
I froze for half a second, eyes locking with his, then kept walking.
But I’d finished. Not with claws or brute force. With instinct. With stubbornness. With the quiet voice in my chest that said: you don’t get to give up.
I hadn’t won. But I hadn’t failed.
And judging by the heat in Darmon’s gaze, I hadn’t gone unnoticed either.
