Dominic's POV
Dominic knocked the water pitcher off the desk before he even realized his hand was moving.
It hit the stone floor and shattered. Water spread across the room in a wide, dark puddle, soaking into the cracks between the stones. His aide, a young soldier named Crest, jumped back with wide eyes.
Dominic didn't apologize. He pressed both palms flat against the desk and dropped his head, breathing slowly through his nose the way the healers had taught him.
In. Out. Focus on one thing.
But it didn't work. It never worked anymore.
The voices were too loud tonight.
Not voices from the room. Crest hadn't said anything. The voices were inside Dominic's skull, layered on top of each other like a hundred conversations happening at the same time in a very small space. Every person within a hundred meters was thinking something, and Dominic could hear all of it, whether he wanted to or not.
Crest was thinking about a letter from his mother that he hadn't answered yet.
The soldier outside the door was thinking about his boots hurting.
Somewhere down the corridor, a group of wolves celebrating the festival were thinking about food, about girls, about who was going to win the arm-wrestling match after the ceremony.
And beneath all of it, like a river of noise that never stopped, were the deeper thoughts. The angry ones. The worried ones. The ones people buried under their smiles during the day, but couldn't hide from Dominic at night.
He lifted his head.
"Get out," he said to Crest.
Crest left immediately. He was a good aide because he had learned very fast that when the Commander said get out, the correct answer was to get out quickly, close the door quietly, and not come back until morning.
Dominic was alone.
He walked to the window and looked out at the snow. The Moonfall Festival was in full force below him, torches, howling, drums that pulsed like a second heartbeat under his feet. Every howl that went up from the crowd hit him twice. Once in his ears. Once in his mind, where he could feel the emotion behind it. Pride. Joy. Belonging.
He hadn't felt any of those things in three years.
The curse had started after the Battle of the Northern Ridge.
Dominic had been the one to end the battle. He had gone in alone when his unit was pinned down, fought through an entire enemy line, and carried three injured soldiers out on his back before anyone else could reach them. They had given him medals for it. They had written his name in the history books.
What they hadn't written in the books was what the enemy healer had done to him before he escaped.
She had pressed her hand against his forehead and said something in a language he didn't understand, and since that night, the world had never been quiet again.
Every thought from every person around him poured into his head like water through a broken dam. At first, it was just the people nearby. Then the range grew. Then the volume grew. Three years later, he could hear the thoughts of an entire fortress full of wolves, all at once, every hour of every day and most of the night.
No healer had been able to fix it.
No medicine had touched it.
He had tried everything. Isolation. Meditation. Special rooms lined with materials that were supposed to block mental energy. Nothing worked. The noise just kept coming, and coming, and coming, until some nights Dominic lay flat on the floor of his room and stared at the ceiling and wondered how much longer a person could survive like this before something inside them simply broke.
He was starting to think the answer was not much longer.
He had only come to this pack because his last option had told him to.
An old wolf named Greta, the most powerful mind-healer he had ever found, had looked at him across a table three weeks ago and said very plainly, "I cannot cure you, Commander. But I think something here can help you survive it."
"What?" he had asked.
She had slid a folded piece of paper across the table. On it was written the name of this pack. Nothing else.
"I don't know exactly," she had admitted. "But I know the answer is there. I have felt it."
He had almost laughed at her. He was a man who believed in facts, in strategy, in things that could be seen and measured. He did not believe in feelings.
But he had been so desperate that he came anyway.
That was before tonight. Before the kitchen.
He had only gone down to the lower levels because the festival noise upstairs had pushed him to the edge of what he could handle. He had been looking for a quieter corridor, just a few minutes less, and he had heard the crash of the bowl and followed the sound without thinking.
He had stood in the doorway of the kitchen and watched the whole thing.
The officer. The shattered bowls. The girl on her knees, picking up the pieces with a cut hand, her face completely still, like she had been through this so many times that she had learned not to flinch.
And then she had stood up and started to move.
Dominic had been prepared to feel nothing. He felt nothing most of the time now that the curse had buried his own emotions under the weight of everyone else's. But when that girl started to dance, something happened that had not happened in three years.
The voices went quiet.
Not all the way. Not completely. But they dropped from a roar to a whisper, and in that whisper there was space, and in that space Dominic could hear himself think for the first time since the Northern Ridge.
He had stood completely still, afraid to breathe, afraid that if he moved even slightly, it would stop.
It had lasted only a few minutes. When she stopped moving, the voices came rushing back. But those few minutes had felt like water after years in a desert.
He had followed her to the corridor.
He had found her outside in the snow.
And now he had given her the reassignment order, and he was standing in his room listening to three hundred wolves think about festival wine and old arguments and what they were going to eat tomorrow, and he was holding onto the memory of those few quiet minutes like a man holding onto a rope over a cliff.
His hands were shaking.
He made them stop.
He sat down at the desk and opened his journal, the one place he could still organize his thoughts, and wrote two words at the top of a blank page.
She's real.
Because that was the thing that scared him most. Not that the girl hadn't worked, not that the quiet had been an accident. What scared him was that she had worked. That the answer to three years of madness might be a twenty-four-year-old kitchen girl who had never howled in her life.
Because if she was the answer, that meant he needed her.
And needing anyone was the most dangerous thing Dominic Stone had ever done.
A knock at the door.
"Come in," he said.
Crest opened the door just enough to lean through. His face said that whatever he was about to say, he wished he weren't the one saying it.
"General Silas is here, sir. He says he needs to speak with you tonight. About the reassignment order."
Dominic went very still.
Silas. Of course.
The General had been watching him for three years, circling like a wolf waiting for the right moment to move in. Every stumble, every bad day, every time Dominic had snapped at a soldier or missed a meeting because the noise in his head had become too much to function, Silas had been there, watching, filing it away, building a case.
He's unfit for command. Dominic had heard that thought from Silas directly, more than once, sharp and clear and cold.
"Send him in," Dominic said.
Silas entered without any of the warmth that came with the festival. He was older than Dominic by fifteen years, broad and grey-haired, with the kind of careful face that never showed what it was actually thinking.
Except it always showed to Dominic.
Right now, Silas was thinking something that made Dominic's blood run cold. Not the thought itself, Silas was too careful to let the full shape of a plan form clearly in his mind. But the feeling underneath it was unmistakable.
Satisfaction.
Like a man who had just figured out exactly how to win a game he had been losing.
"Commander," Silas said pleasantly. "I heard you issued a reassignment order tonight. A kitchen girl." He smiled. "Unusual choice."
"It's handled," Dominic said.
"Of course." Silas nodded. "I only mention it because the girl Sera, isn't it? She has a bit of a reputation in this pack. Some of my officers find her..." He paused, choosing the word carefully. "Unsettling."
Dominic said nothing.
"I'd hate for her presence close to you to become a distraction," Silas continued. "Given your current condition."
Given your current condition. Dominic heard the words, and he heard the thought behind them at the same time, the real one, the one Silas didn't say out loud.
She's going to be the thing that finally breaks you. And I'm going to make sure of it.
Silas smiled again, said goodnight, and left.
Dominic sat in the quiet of his room, the noise of the festival pressing at the walls, the voices of three hundred wolves filling his skull, and understood for the first time that he wasn't the only one who had noticed what happened when Sera danced.
And whoever had told Silas was going to be a very serious problem.