Dawn came late to the ridge, as if the sky were afraid to look at what the night had done.
Atlas sat on the edge of the stone ledge just outside the Moonstone Chamber, bare feet pressed to the cold floor, shirt discarded, the air cooling the last sweat from his skin. The runes behind him had gone quiet. The chamber no longer glowed. But the mark at the base of his throat—silver, sharp, new—still burned faintly.
Lexa slept inside on the pallet someone had dragged in for them, her breath slow, her pulse braided with his. When he listened for his own heartbeat now, he heard two.
He turned his hand over and studied his palm.
The scar there had always been pale, thin, an old white crescent where a blade had once kissed him. Tonight, under the fading blood-moon light, it was darker. Not angry. Awake.
Something in the stone under him hummed, low and distant. An echo rose in his bones, and the present loosened its teeth.
He closed his eyes.
The ridge fell away.
—
The first time he'd stood in the circle, the moon had been clean and white and too high to care about who lived or died.
He'd been younger then—lean, raw, power still sitting awkward on his bones like a coat he hadn't grown into. The training ground had been cut straight into the rock, ringed by rough-hewn pillars. Torches burned along the outer rim, their flames pushed sideways by wind that smelled of snow and steel.
Across from him, Vale rolled his shoulders, joints popping one by one. He'd been older by a decade, broader in the chest, scars already mapping his forearms. His eyes were the same molten gold they were now, but then they'd held something else beneath the arrogance. A kind of fierce, stubborn hope that the world could be forced to make sense if you hit it hard enough.
"Again," Vale said, tossing the knife so it flashed end over end. Atlas caught it by the handle. The hilt felt right in his grasp, familiar in the way of tools handed down from fathers he didn't remember.
"You'll run out of blood eventually," Atlas said.
Vale laughed. "We're Cain-line. That's the point. The Pact isn't for the cowards who faint when they see red."
The Bone-Pact circle was older than the Syndicate. Older than the ridge itself, some said. The ritual was simple as cruelty: two young wolves, cut each other and spilled blood into the same stone. Then they fought until the stone decided which of them was closer to what the moon wanted.
Not friends. Not enemies. Bonded in the way of weapons hammered against the same anvil.
"Strength without restraint breeds tyrants," Vale recited as he stepped forward, bare-chested, calloused feet sure on the cold rock. "Mercy without strength breeds graves."
Atlas lifted the knife. "You love that line," he said.
"It's true," Vale replied. "And it sounds good when you're bleeding. Give me your hand."
They met in the center. The night stood still.
Atlas offered his left hand, fingers splayed. Vale took it, grip firm, calluses catching. With his other hand, he drew his own blade—a twin to the one Atlas held—and set the tip against Atlas's palm.
"You don't flinch," Vale said.
"Should I?" Atlas asked.
Vale's smile went quick and sharp. "Not today." He pressed the knife in.
Pain bit, bright, intimate. Blood welled, warm against the cold air, and slid down Atlas's wrist to spatter the stone. Vale turned his hand and cut his own palm with the same clean motion. Their blood fell together, dark against the carved symbol between their feet.
"If you fall, I follow," Vale said, voice lower now, almost a growl. "If I fall, you rise. For the span of this pact, your blood is mine. My strength is yours."
Atlas had read the words on brittle pages. Hearing them spoken felt different, heavier. They sat in his chest like a weight he'd been waiting for.
He tightened his grip on Vale's wounded hand until both their cuts protested. "If you fall," he said, echoing the rite, "I rise. If I fall, you follow. For the span of this pact, my blood is yours. My strength is yours. Our bones break together."
The rock drank their blood.
The air thickened.
The moon, indifferent a breath before, seemed suddenly closer.
Vale squeezed once, then let go. "Now," he said, shaking his hand out, blood flicking into the dust. "Hit me."
Atlas didn't argue.
They moved.
No audience watched—only the torches, the stone, the sky. The first exchange was all instinct: Vale drove forward, a shoulder-feint and a low sweep of the leg, testing balance. Atlas let himself fall with it, rolled, came up inside Vale's guard, elbow to ribs, heel to knee.
They broke apart. Circling.
Every strike, every block, every stumble sent new fire through their opened palms. Blood slipped down their fingers, smeared on shoulders when a grip caught too hard, on jaws when a backhand connected. The pact was in the contact—it made each touch mean more than pain. To bruise the other was to prove he could withstand the same.
Vale's laugh split the cold. "You're holding back, Silver."
"I'm thinking," Atlas said, breath steady.
"There's your problem." Vale lunged, low and fast, their chests colliding. They traded blows so close it felt like a conversation carried in the language of bone and sinew. "The moon doesn't want thought. It wants blood and obedience."
"And you?" Atlas asked. "What do you want?"
Vale grinned through a split lip. "A reason you deserve the crown more than the men who will try to kill you for it."
He hooked Atlas's ankle, dropped him hard, knelt to drive a fist toward his throat.
Atlas rolled left, took the hit to the jaw instead of the windpipe, tasting copper and satisfaction. He let the momentum carry him, rolled across Vale's back, caught his arm, twisted. Vale hit the stone with a grunt that knocked air out of both of them.
They lay there for a moment, chests heaving, foreheads pressed to rock gone warm under their blood.
"Better," Vale said.
Atlas pushed up to his knees. His hand found the carved symbol under them—the same mark now etched, faint and silver, into his own skin. It pulsed once beneath his touch.
Something shifted. The circle felt smaller. The night felt closer.
He reached for Vale without thinking, helped him sit. Their cut palms slapped together in a grip they'd both remember long after muscle forgot the exact blows.
"Our bones break together," Vale repeated, softer now. "Or not at all."
Atlas met his eyes. In that moment, they weren't teacher and student. Not Alpha-line and Scatter. Just two wolves who had both decided not to die easy.
"You bleed the same," Vale said, almost approving. "Silver. I thought it was just a name your House liked."
"I thought Scatter was just a word for 'doesn't follow orders,'" Atlas replied.
Vale laughed, rough, genuine. "Sometimes." He sobered. "Listen to me, Cain. When you lead, they will want you to be merciful or merciless. They'll pretend those are the only choices. They're wrong."
"What else is there?" Atlas asked.
Vale's golden gaze flicked up to the moon and back. "Balance," he said. "You put your hand on the scale and you never let them see which way it's tipping. You understand?"
Atlas didn't answer with words. He simply tightened his grip.
The pact settled into their bones. The scars on their palms began to close, already knitting in the shape of the promise.
They left the circle together, shoulders bumping, the night behind them a witness that didn't care but would remember anyway.
—
The hum of the Moonstone brought him back.
Atlas opened his eyes to the present—the same ridge, the same stones, a different life.
The scar in his palm throbbed once, echoing a heartbeat that wasn't his. He flexed his fingers, watching the pale crescent catch the weak dawn light.
Beside him, from within the chamber, Lexa stirred. The tether answered her movement with a soft, insistent pull. Not a leash. Not anymore. A line connecting two points the moon had decided belonged in the same constellation.
"You're far away."
Her voice was sleep-rough, warm. He turned.
She stood at the threshold of the chamber, wrapped in a blanket, hair mussed, the mark at her throat glimmering faintly. Her eyes found his hand, his face, the sky.
"How long have you been out here?" she asked.
"Long enough to remember things I'd rather forget," he said.
She came to sit beside him, shoulder to shoulder, blanket shared between them. For a moment they simply watched the sun struggle with the last bruise of red on the horizon.
"You and Vale," she said quietly. "It wasn't just politics, was it."
He huffed. "Nothing important ever is."
She slid her hand into his, thumb brushing the old Bone-Pact scar. The tether hummed, new vow singing over old.
"What did you promise him?" she asked.
Atlas watched their joined hands, past and present written in pale lines and fresh silver.
"That we would rise and fall together," he said. "And that our bones would break the same way."
"And did they?" she asked.
He thought of the cell. Of Cassian's smirk. Of Vale stepping back into a world that had gotten very good at lying to itself.
"Not yet," he said.
The wind shifted. Down in the trees, a wolf howled—low, distant, answering a memory instead of a command.
Atlas squeezed Lexa's hand, anchoring himself in the only vow that mattered now.
One oath had been forged under white moonlight in blood and stone.
Another, under a Blood Moon, in flesh and soul.
The ridge would remember both.