Marked by the alpha king I was meant to destroy

The river was cold enough to numb her hands, which was the only reason Mira could stand to keep them under the surface as long as she did.

Blood didn't come off easy. She'd learned that much over the years - the way it clung to the creases of your knuckles, dried dark under your nails, turned the water pink in slow, unhurried ribbons even after you thought you'd scrubbed it all away. She watched the current carry the color downstream and felt nothing.

That, more than anything, should have frightened her.

It didn't. Not anymore.

The rogue wolf she'd left behind in the tree line hadn't given her a choice - not really. He'd caught her scent three nights running, followed it patiently, methodically, the way predators did when they suspected they'd found something valuable. He hadn't said what he thought she was. He hadn't needed to. She'd seen the way his eyes lingered too long on the collar of her shirt, the way his hand had twitched toward it in the half-second before she put a blade between his ribs.

He was looking for the mark, she thought, flexing her fingers under the water. He almost found it.

Almost didn't count. Almost was the difference between another quiet night and the end of everything she'd spent twenty-two years hiding.

Mira pulled her hands from the river and pressed them, still damp, against her collarbone - over the fabric, over the place where the mark sat dark and deliberate against her skin like something had reached into her at birth and signed its name. A crescent wrapped in thorns. Every child in every pack in the kingdom grew up hearing the story behind it, sung to them like a lullaby, warned to them like a curse.

Once every hundred years, a Blood Moon Wolf is born. That wolf is destined to destroy the Alpha King.

She'd spent her whole life being the answer to a question no one was supposed to know she carried.

By the time she reached the cottage, the shaking in her hands had nothing to do with the cold.

"You're late," said the old woman by the fire, not turning around. Greta never turned around anymore - her hips had gone bad two winters back, and turning cost more than it was worth most days. But her ears still worked fine, and her nose worked better than that. "And you smell like a body."

"I smell like river," Mira said, toeing off her boots. "The body's the rogue's problem now. He's not smelling anything."

"Mira."

"He was hunting me, Greta. He'd have gone straight to the border patrol with what he suspected. You want me to have let him?"

Greta didn't answer that. She never did, when the answer was something neither of them wanted to say out loud. Instead she held out one gnarled, trembling hand, palm up, and waited - the way she had every night since Mira was six years old and screaming from nightmares about fire she didn't remember and a mark she didn't understand yet.

Mira crossed the small room and knelt, wrapping the old woman's cold fingers between her own, warming them the way she'd been taught, the way she did every night without fail even when her own hands were the ones that needed warming. This was the softest part of her day. Maybe the only soft part.

"Your knuckles are worse," Mira murmured, running a thumb over the swollen joints. "I'll get more of the yarrow salve tomorrow."

"Tomorrow you'll be hunting rogues in rivers."

"I can do both. I contain multitudes."

That earned her the ghost of a smile - small, dry, real. Greta wasn't her blood. Greta wasn't pack, not anymore, not since the massacre had taken everyone who could have claimed that word honestly. But Greta had found a bleeding, orphaned six-year-old in the woods with a mark no child should carry and had chosen, deliberately, to keep her alive instead of reporting her. That made her more family than blood had ever managed.

"You felt something tonight," Greta said. Not a question.

Mira's hands stilled over hers.

"Don't lie to an old woman who's been reading your face since you had fewer teeth than fingers."

Mira exhaled slowly, watching the firelight move across the old woman's face instead of answering right away. How did she explain a feeling that didn't have a shape yet? A pull, sudden and violent, low in her chest, the moment she'd looked toward the ridge -

"There was fire on the Ashwood border," she said instead, which was true, and easier. "Alpha's men. Burning out a rogue camp, I think. I watched for a while."

"And?"

"And nothing." The lie came smoother than she liked. "I came home."

She hadn't come straight home. She'd stood on that ridge far longer than was safe, watching a man walk through open flame like it owed him nothing, watching him end a challenger's life in the time it took her to draw one unsteady breath - and then watching him stop. Turn. Look up toward the exact patch of darkness where she'd been hiding, as if some invisible thread between them had gone taut.

He hadn't seen her. She was certain of that. And yet something in her chest had answered him anyway, some traitorous, wordless part of her that had gone still and aware in a way it never had before, not once in twenty-two years of hiding from every eye in the kingdom.

She hadn't needed anyone to tell her who he was. Everyone knew Alpha King Darius. Knew him the way you knew a storm was coming - not by sight, but by the way the air changed first.

He was the reason her pack didn't exist anymore.

She had been four years old when his forces - or forces flying his banner, at least, which in Mira's mind had never been a distinction worth making - burned everything she'd ever known to the ground. She didn't remember much of it. Smoke, mostly. Someone screaming her name before the sound got swallowed by something louder. Greta always said it was a mercy that Mira didn't remember more, and Mira always thought that was easy for Greta to say, since she hadn't been the one whose entire life had been reduced to smoke and a single dark stretch of screaming.

Everyone else who might have remembered the details was dead.

Which was, in its own bleak way, the entire point. The prophecy didn't require Mira to remember why she hated him. It only required her to hate him enough to finish what fate had apparently decided the day she was born.

Kill the Alpha King before he discovers who you are.

Simple. She'd been raised on simple. Simple was supposed to be the easy part.

"You're doing that thing," Greta said.

"What thing."

"Where you go somewhere I can't follow you."

Mira forced a smile, the kind she'd perfected over years of practice - easy, sharp-edged, designed to end a conversation rather than continue one. "I'm tired. Rogue-killing takes it out of a girl."

Greta studied her for a long moment, the kind of look that used to make Mira confess things as a child purely to escape it. She didn't confess anything now. She just held the old woman's hands a little tighter, until Greta finally sighed and let the subject go, the way she always eventually did - not because she believed the deflection, but because she'd learned, same as Mira, that some things were easier carried in silence.

Later, lying in the dark with the fire burned down to embers, Mira pressed her palm flat against her own collarbone again, over the mark, over the place where something had answered a stranger from half a mile away without her permission.

She thought about the fire he'd walked through without flinching. The three seconds it had taken him to end a man's life. The way he'd turned toward her hiding place like he'd felt her there.

She thought, uselessly, that she hadn't expected him to be beautiful.

It was an idiot thought, and she was furious at herself for having it, and she had it anyway - turning it over and over in the dark like a stone she couldn't quite skip across still water. Alpha King Darius. Destroyer of her pack. The man the entire kingdom feared, the man she had spent twenty-two years training to kill.

Her body had gone electric at the sight of him, and she didn't have a single frame of reference for what that meant, because nothing in her training had ever accounted for the possibility that the moment she finally saw her enemy's face, some traitorous part of her chest might recognize him as something else entirely.

It doesn't matter, she told herself, closing her eyes against the dark. Beautiful men die the same as ugly ones. It doesn't matter what he looks like when I put a blade through him.

She almost believed it.

Almost, she was starting to understand, was becoming a dangerous word.