Chapter Four:
Caleb's POV-
No way in hell. There must be a mistake.
I moved faster than thought. Instinct crushed courtesy. My fingers brushed the pale skin at her throat to lift her face—only for the floor of my stomach to drop out.
There, where the skin met jaw and collar like a private brand, was the faintest shimmer of light. A sigil burned into her flesh, thin as moonlight and cruel as iron—an Alpha's mark. Not mine—another shape, older, jagged with a thorn motif I'd seen in twisted tapestries in Blackmoor's vaults, the emblem our elders used to brand the traitors they called enemies.
Thornblood.
The name cut through me like a blade. Heat coiled behind my eyes, not the wolf's heat but the human kind: memory, loyalty, the long ache of a legacy that had raised me in a house built on blood and certainty. Thornbloods. Treachery. The stories my father told me. The pictures of a burned clan pinned to the courtyard wall like proof of a lesson.
My hands slipped. For a heartbeat the world narrowed to a single, ugly thought: She should be dead.
Adam's voice in my head twisted, equal parts triumph and hunger.' Mate, he sang. Mate. Mate. Mate.'
I shoved him down." No. Not now. Not this." I'd trained my whole life to ignore my wolf when the pack needed a harder man. I would not let a name decide my choices.
But the mark burned under my fingers as if it had heat, as if it answered to something beyond doctrine. It tasted like the future on my skin: inevitable, complicated, wrong.
"She's Thornblood," I heard myself say aloud, flat and cold.
I could feel my hands losing their steadiness not from shock but from the war in my chest—rage at the thought of a Thornblood within my borders, curiosity that felt almost like a treacherous tenderness, and something rawer still that the wolf kept whispering in the edges of my thoughts.
I should have carried her to the Council no actually to the royals. I should have a hundred voices explaining what law demanded, what honor demanded, how Blackmoor had survived because we were unflinching. But a man who'd lived with the grind of a pack's survival in his bones knows when a wound is fresh enough to bleed out before bureaucracy can breathe.
I wrapped the jacket tighter around her and, because fury speeds hands, because necessity is merciless, because Adam would howl if I delayed, I lifted her and sprinted.
The trip back to the stronghold was a blur of trees whipping at the windows and moonlight strobing the road. I didn't slow for patrols; I compelled them with a single ordered ping in the mind-link, Hold the line. No one leaves the perimeter. My voice in the link was iron, and my gamma answered with a succinct acknowledgement and an invisible tightening of the defensive net.
At the gate, the sentries went rigid. "Alpha," one started, formal and wary.
"Open," I said. Not a request. The gate obeyed.
They saw her as I carried her up the stone steps—fragile, bandaged, dark hair plastered to a face so pale I almost thought it carved from bone. Half the guards had been at my ceremony preparations earlier; they betrayed by their faces the discomfort of seeing a woman wrapped in my jacket. A litany of authority flooded me—orders I could shout, punishments I could mete out—but instead I barked one thing that surprised me with how quiet it sounded: "Infirmary. Now."
The infirmary was a place of soft lamplight and forever smells of herbs and iron. Healers were already there from the gala preparations, clutching their satchels, hands quick though their eyes were filled with the worried curiosity I'd trained out of them. "Alpha?" They stopped when I entered.
"Help her," I said. "All of you. Bring salves. Boil water. Seal exits."
They moved with professional haste, wrapping and unwrapping, probing and pressing; old women who'd tended pups and broken bones like they'd been raised in my care. I lingered at the edge, breath loud in my ears. I couldn't help touching the mark again, like a man checking whether a wound was real. It warmed under my fingers, and a small spark flared at the base of my thumb—like a reminder that the universe cared less for law than for bonds.
"No one sees her without my permission," I added. I tasted iron like a threat.
"Alpha—" one of the council healers began—old, sharp-eyed Varrin, who'd taught me to read a battlefield like scripture. He hesitated, then bowed. "We'll do what we can, Master Blackmoor."
Master. Alpha. The words filled the infirmary as if to mark the space as mine, to assert the order I had to keep. I wanted, irrationally, to throw the cloak of leadership off and be some private animal who could choose privately. But pack law is an echo; it will answer to itself if we stop speaking the words.
They set her on a low bed. The lamp light caught the angled cheekbone, the jaw that would clench around rage, the lashes that fluttered as if behind them storms still brewed. I pulled a chair to her side and sat, not because I had words to say but because the connection to her—whatever it was—did something to the world inside me that my orders could not touch.
Adam murmured, satisfied and soft in the back of my skull. 'Close. Close. Claim.'
"Don't, I warned him. Not yet."
And yet the mark had a gravity. When the healers cried for clots and bandages and a utensil to cauterize a stubborn vein, I offered my palm. The mark hummed against my skin again. It wasn't rage or mercy; it was recognition, of a sort that made my breath hitch. Something in the bones of me answered.
Deep down I was panicking. I didn't know if she'd survive. There is silver and wolvesbane in her system. Soo many wounds and scars. Broken bones obviously. It might take days, weeks even for a female like her to heal. She'd been hurt so bad.
"Her name?" Varrin asked, voice low and professional.
"No identification on her," I said. "She's been traveling. She's—" My throat closed. Thornblood, I thought, and the word felt like a stone. "—she's a survivor. She'll remain under Blackmoor protection until Council decides."
There it was—invoking the Council. The safe, tedious step. The right step. The step that would let me hand her over to doctrine and be absolved. But the harsher cord inside me tugged.
Because in the dark corners where I hide the parts that would rot the pack if shown, a private prayer whispered: Not yet. Not to them.
The healers worked. Bandages wrapped in disciplined hands; herbs smoked out infection in the air. I watched the slow art of them sew her back into the world, and with each pass of thread I felt something else stitch inside my chest, a dumb, stubborn curiosity that had nothing to do with law.
A whisper of history pushed through like a tide. My father's voice—older, sharper, made of cauterized memories—said, They were traitors. We were burned. Remember the lesson. It was a lesson I'd been schooled on before I could walk properly. The Thornbloods were the stain that justified a thousand cruelties. I had been raised with the righteous anger of survivors as my breakfast.
But I also remembered a different thing, a sliver I rarely let myself entertain: a small, impossible image of my grandfather packing blacked scrolls in shame late at night, the way his hands trembled near a portrait of a woman whose face I didn't recognize. Imagined doubt can be more dangerous than a real blade. I folded it away because leadership sells you the luxury of certainty.
The lamp near her head guttered as a draft found it. I leaned in without thinking, watching the slow lift of her chest. Her breath came ragged but still alive. For a savage fraction of time my wolf leaned forward—curiosity, hunger, the giddy foolishness of a creature who knows what mating means.
She thinned her lips like a hard thing. A Thornblood who refused to be small. The rogue that almost had her chewed on her defiance, and in that I understood something else: she would not be content to stand in a corner and rot while men and laws decided her life.
I found I did not want Council to cut into that life like a butcher's knife.
A soft cough escaped her then, a breath. Her lashes fluttered. She muttered something—half a name, half a prayer. My name? I didn't know, and Adam howled at the edges again in a way that felt like pleading.
"No," I said to the wolf. "Not yet."
I rose then and moved to the window, tracing the dark silhouette of the courtyard. Tonight the pack prepared a ceremony. There were banners planned, speeches, families algebraically arranged into alliances. Things I'd believed in once, before everything else congealed into power.
And yet something in me loosened—a hinge I had welded shut for decades. She might be Thornblood. She might be the blood of a line we'd been taught to despise. But she was on my cot. She breathed. Her life was tied now, however strangely, to the order I led.
My hands shook when I took the cloak from the healer's table. I wrapped it around my shoulders and walked back to her bed. I did not know what the law would say when the Council saw the mark. I only knew the iron truth inside my ribs: I would not let her die at the hands of my people without knowing first what this bond meant.
I leaned down, my breath a hot line over the mark at her throat. The sigil pulsed faintly—and with it, a whisper of something else: a name I did not know, a memory that was not mine. I closed my eyes. For a stunned moment I allowed myself a thought that would be treasonous in every way: What if she is meant to save us from what we became?
Then the doors to the infirmary slammed open. Footsteps. Voices—low, urgent. The Council emissary, Varrin's voice hard where it should be soft.
"Alpha," a voice said. "Word came in. We need you in the Hall. There are questions. The Council will not be pleased."
My jaw tightened. Outside, my betrothal plans waited; inside, a Thornblood slept under my roof. The world was a hinge and somebody had placed a hand upon it.
I straightened, gloved fingers curling against the cloth at her shoulder. I gave one last look at the sleeping woman with the red wolf's mark and felt Adam's low rumble like distant thunder.
"Tell the Council I'm coming," I said. "And no one touches her without my order."
A dozen eyes met mine. Resolve is contagious and also dangerous. I walked toward the Hall—king's stride, iron and oath—and left the infirmary in a hush that felt like the calm before a real storm.
As I crossed the corridor, I tasted the odd, copper tang of destiny. I had a mate who had a name I'd been raised to hate. Between those two things my life would split, and I had no idea which side of me would survive it.