Chapter 4

• Lucien
• The runes were still faintly glowing when he left the chamber.
• He didn’t speak. Not to Reid and not to the guards posted at the stairwell. His steps were silent but the air followed him like smoke, heavy with questions no one dared ask.
• The fortress was awake now.
• He could feel it in the walls, the pulse beneath stone and rune. Even the wolves moving through the corridors walked slower and sharper.
• Their eyes followed him like they already knew something had changed. That something had shifted.
• They were right.
• He hadn’t told anyone what he saw.
• What she did.
• What it meant because he wasn’t sure.
• Rhea had touched a blood rune carved in stone centuries ago and it had answered.
• Only pack blood responded to those runes and she wasn't.
• Lucien stepped into the war room, the door groaning behind him as it shut. Reid was already there, leaning against the map table, arms crossed, eyes narrowed.
• “She activated a bloodseal,” Lucien said before Reid could speak.
• His Beta straightened. “You’re sure?”
• “I saw it with my own eyes.”
• Reid swore under his breath. “She’s not marked. She has no scent. That shouldn’t be possible.”
• Lucien didn’t reply. His hand drifted to the scar beneath his collarbone, the place where the curse had first branded him. The night everything changed. The night he gave something away he hadn’t fully understood.
• “I don’t think she knows what she is,” Lucien murmured. “But the runes do.”
• “And what do they say?”
• Lucien looked at him.
• “They answered her.”
• That silenced Reid. For the first time in weeks, even he looked shaken.
• A few moments passed before he spoke again. “You think she’s Bloodbound?”
• “I think she is”
• Reid ran a hand through his hair. “We buried the last of them. You saw to that yourself.”
• “I thought I did,” Lucien said. His voice was quieter now. “But what if we missed one?”
• “Or what if one survived?”
• Lucien’s gaze sharpened. “Exactly.”
• Reid stepped back from the table, pacing. “This could tear the council in two. Half the packs think you’re already too dangerous with the curse and now you’re harboring a ghost from the war?”
• “She’s not a threat.”
• “Then why does she have no scent?” Reid snapped. “Why does she trigger every blood seal in the stone? Why can’t even your wolf sense what she is?”
• Lucien didn’t answer.
• Because he didn’t know.
• All he did know was that the beast inside him which was rabid, cursed, impossible to control had gone quiet in her presence.
• That wasn’t safety.
• It was a different kind of warning.
• A softer kind.
• The kind that came before a fall.
• The rest of the day passed in a haze. Reports. Updates. Patrols returning with nothing but snow and silence. No one had moved.
• That evening, when the fortress fell quiet, he returned to the upper chambers.
• The door to Rhea’s room was shut.
• He stood outside for a moment, his palm resting on the stone.
• No sound inside.
• No movement but she was there.
• He could feel her again, her pressure was overwhelming. It felt like standing beneath a storm that hadn’t broken yet.
• He knocked once.
• No reply.
• He entered anyway.
• Rhea sat on the bed this time. Back straight, arms loosely crossed, hair falling over her shoulder. She didn’t speak.
• Lucien stepped into the firelight.
• “Why did the runes answer you?” he asked.
• Her head tilted slightly. “I don’t know.”
• “You remember something? From the war?.”
• “I remember screaming,” she said. “And fire, and hands that didn’t belong to me.”
• Lucien stilled. “Whose hands?”
• She looked up at him then.
• “My sister’s,” she said. “I think.”
• He froze.
• That wasn’t the answer he expected. That wasn’t an answer anyone should have.
• He moved toward her before he could stop himself. Sat in the chair across from her, elbows on his knees, voice low.
• “What else do you remember?”
• She hesitated.
• “There was a girl,” she whispered. “In the lab. We looked the same. They said I was a match. I don’t remember her name. Just that she screamed when they took her.”
• Lucien’s blood ran cold.
• Bloodbound experiments. The twins. One to survive, one to die. That was the protocol.
• But sometimes, rarely they didn’t die.
• Sometimes, they traded places and that meant
• She wasn’t a survivor.
• She was a shadow.
• A remnant.
• A twin left behind.
• “You’re not supposed to exist,” he said quietly.
• Later that night, after she’d fallen asleep, if that’s what she called it. Lucien sat alone in the library.
• Ancient texts and dust-covered ledgers. Records from the Blackridge war, some sealed with the royal mark.
• He found what he was looking for in a burned journal, the corner marked with dried blood.
• Experiment 12-B
• Subject: unknown
• Identical pair; one marked, one dormant.
• Project incomplete. Last seen during the fall of the Eastern Lab.
• Presumed Dead
• Lucien stared at the entry.
• ‘Dormant’
• He thought of her stillness. Her control. The fact that she didn’t react to his wolf, didn’t submit to power, didn’t belong anywhere and yet touched every part of this fortress like she was born inside it.
• She wasn’t dormant.
• She was waiting.
• And now?
• Now, the runes answered
• As Lucien reached for the next page,
• the air in the room shifted.
• He turned just as the candlelight guttered out.
• On the wall behind him, someone had carved a symbol into the stone.
• Not recently.
• Not by hand but by blood and at its center was a name he hadn’t heard since the war.
• Vale.