(Ronan)
Pain had a voice.
Not a scream. Not a howl. Not even a word.
It was a hum—low and constant, threaded through his bones like a second heartbeat that refused to die. It vibrated along his teeth, lived in the raw meat of his back, settled behind his eyes until even blinking hurt.
Ronan Stormfang had once been the golden heir of the Northern Howl.
Son of an Alpha, born under an unbroken moon.
Trained to lead. Trained to kill.
His name had been sharpened into a weapon long before he grew into it—whispered in the training yards, spoken with reverence around the fire, gritted between the teeth of enemies.
Here, his name meant nothing.
Here, he was just another beast in a cage.
He didn't know how long he'd been in the pit.
Time melted after the first moon cycle. Or the third. Or the tenth. The sky never changed down here. No moon. No stars. Only the stink of metal and rot and his own blood, turning black on stone.
They could have killed him.
They should have killed him.
They didn't.
The chains that wrapped his wrists and throat were hammered from silver so pure it burned even when he kept still. Runes crawled along the links—old, hungry sigils that drank power, swallowed rage, devoured wolf.
He had torn his throat raw howling against them.
The chains only grew warmer. Hungrier.
The ones who put him here weren't simple rogues.
Rogues snapped and snarled and stank of unclaimed blood. Rogues were wild noise and fractured loyalty.
These creatures were something else. Shadows wearing skin. Their eyes were wrong—too red, too bright, veins webbed black across their irises like someone had poured ink into their souls. Their scent was sour, off, threaded with old magic and something that didn't belong to wolves at all.
They moved like puppets dragged by invisible strings.
And behind them… beneath them…
something worse watched.
He didn't see it. He felt it.
In the moments between torture and unconsciousness, when the silver cooled enough for him to breathe, a presence dragged cold fingers through his mind. It slid along his bones, tasting his anger, swallowing his fear.
It spoke sometimes.
Not aloud. Not in language.
More like a thought that wasn't his.
Wolf-born heir of the storm.
Betrayer of blood.
Servant of fire.
The first time it called him that, he vomited until there was nothing left but bile and breath.
He didn't understand the words, but his bones did. Some old part of him recognized the title. The accusation. The promise.
He hated that it knew him.
He hated even more that part of him listened.
They taught him to hate in the pit.
Hate his father—for sending him out alone that night.
Hate his beta—for running when the trap sprang and the air split with the smell of blood and iron.
Hate his pack—for not coming. For not knowing.
But most of all…
They taught him to hate her.
Beatrice Fairmoor.
The omega who should have been nothing.
A whisper at the edge of his vision.
A smear of green-stained fingers and dirt-smudged cheeks in the healer's den.
She had healed him when no one else dared, her hands steady even as his blood soaked her wrists. She'd patched wounds his own warriors were too proud to admit they couldn't handle.
She'd met his stare without flinching.
He'd hated that.
He'd needed it.
He remembered her eyes more clearly than he remembered his father's face.
Down here, they used that.
The shadows poured poison into the cracks of his mind. She let you fall. She didn't come. She chose her skin over your life. Omega vermin. Witch-blood. Traitor's whore.
At first, he fought it. Refused to believe.
Beatrice had always been too stubborn, too foolish, too… earnest to abandon him.
But the pain wore down the edges of his certainty.
Every time the chains seared deeper into his wrists.
Every time the whip carved another line across his ribs.
Every time they drowned him in hallucinations of his pack rotting in the snow—
It became easier to believe the lie.
She left you.
He clung to his fury like a lifeline. It was the only thing they couldn't strip from him.
If he was going to die here, he would die hating her.
He told himself that so often, it almost felt true.
The wolf inside him did not agree.
It paced within the narrow confines of his body, teeth bared, claws raking at his insides. It threw itself against the cage of his ribs, howling at a moon that wasn't there.
In the beginning, Ronan kept his wolf leashed, the way he'd been trained.
Control is power.
Emotion is weakness.
The heir does not break.
But the pit didn't play by pack rules.
The chains didn't just bind his body—they gnawed at the edges of his control, chewing through discipline and tradition, leaving raw nerve and instinct exposed.
The wolf tasted Beatrice on his memories and refused to let go.
It remembered the way her fingers sometimes shook until she forced them still. The way she used her own sleeve to wipe away someone else's blood. The way she looked at him like he was both weapon and boy, Alpha and something fragile.
In the dark, the wolf whispered her name not in hatred, but in ache.
That terrified him more than anything else.
He didn't know what changed first.
The whispers.
The chains.
The air.
One moment, the silence in the pit pressed down on him like a hand on the back of his neck.
The next, it tilted.
A pressure in his chest shifted—subtle at first, then sharp. Like a cord being yanked taut from the inside, stretching from his ribs out through the stone, past the earth, into the distance.
He doubled over, breath tearing at his lungs.
The wolf went still.
Then it lunged.
Her.
The thought wasn't a word so much as a recognition that hit him like a punch.
Heat tore through his veins. The runes along the walls flared a deep, angry red as the bond awakened—no longer a faint, unclaimed thread he'd been pretending not to feel, but a blazing line of fire connecting him to one person.
Beatrice.
Not in memory.
In truth.
He felt her cross some invisible boundary far above him—the moment her boots touched the cursed soil of the Deadlands. The land itself shuddered in response.
The chained magic in the pit responded, snarling.
His lips peeled back from his teeth.
"No," he rasped, voice rough with disuse. "No. She can't—she wouldn't—"
But she was.
Every step she took shook the silver around his wrists. Every breath she drew gusted against his skin like wind. Her fear tasted sharp as metal. Her determination burned.
Part of him wanted to roar at her to turn back.
Another part—older, crueler—smiled.
If she came here, he could make her pay.
For not saving him.
For not bleeding with him.
For waking this bond he never asked for, never wanted, could not control.
If she truly came, if she was reckless enough to descend into the dark…
He could put his hands on her throat and demand answers.
He could make her look at what he had become.
And if she was telling the truth—
if she had never stopped trying to find him—
if she had risked everything to step into this cursed ground for him—
Then the thing that had been born in this pit, the creature forged from pain and rage and old magic, would burn the world to keep her.
Hope was a dangerous thing.
Ronan laughed anyway.
The sound ricocheted off the walls—half snarl, half broken, the sound of a man who had finally found something more terrifying than pain.
The chains rattled.
Stone shifted.
The runes along the walls spat sparks of bloody light as the bond twisted, tightened, demanded.
Closer, it seemed to whisper.
Closer.
Closer.
He dropped to one knee, panting, vision blurring at the edges as the air grew heavier.
The presence that had been watching him in the dark flared with interest.
Ah, it seemed to purr inside his skull.
There you are, Flame-bound.
He felt it press against the bond like a hand pushing on an open wound, testing its strength, tasting its power.
A snarl tore from his throat.
"Get out," he growled, more wolf than man. "She's not yours."
A pause. Then cold amusement.
Not yet, the presence whispered.
The runes dimmed again, receding like a tide of blood.
Ronan forced himself back to his feet, every muscle shaking. He braced one hand against the rough stone wall and bared his teeth at the darkness.
"Come on then," he muttered, speaking to chains, to shadows, to ghosts only he could hear. "Send whatever you want."
His lips twisted.
"Let her see what you turned me into."
Above him—far above, at the lip of the pit—a heartbeat.
He froze.
The wolf stilled, ears pricked, body coiled.
A second heartbeat followed, then the soft, careful scrape of boots against stone.
Her scent hit first.
Fire root and crushed herbs. Damp forest. Salt and something softly, stubbornly sweet under it all.
Beatrice.
His hands clenched into fists so tight his nails broke skin.
He dragged in a breath and forced his face into something that wasn't shock, wasn't relief, wasn't the wild, desperate joy that wanted to rip through him.
He picked the sharpest emotion he could find and wrapped himself in it like armor.
Rage.
She stepped into view at the top of the pit, a dark silhouette against the thin sliver of light. Her cloak fluttered in the stale air. Her eyes shone, wide and searching, catching the faint red glow of the runes and turning it to something almost luminous.
For a heartbeat, everything stopped.
The hum of pain. The whispering shadows. Even the chains seemed to hold their breath.
She looked down at him like she wasn't sure if he was real.
He looked up at her like she was the last mercy he'd never wanted.
His lips curved into something that didn't belong on the boy he used to be.
"You're too late," Ronan said.
His voice echoed through the pit—cold, unfamiliar, edged with something feral.
Beatrice flinched—but she didn't look away.
Of course she didn't.
She never had.