~LYRA’S POV~

Ryland launched the investigation quietly. No announcement, no public declaration, just a shift in how the guards moved through the packhouse and a series of individual conversations he held behind closed doors over the course of two days. I knew it was happening because Cade’s expression changed, that particular tightening around the eyes that meant something had his full attention.

Two guards were eventually identified. Men who’d had unusual access to the residential corridor on the evening the third letter appeared. Ryland dismissed them both.

The pack noticed. Packs always noticed.

Opinions split the way they had since I arrived, the people already inclined to doubt me added it to their list, proof that bringing a wolfless outsider into the packhouse created instability. The people who’d been cautiously watching me recalibrated slightly in the other direction. Theo told me about it in the market one morning, keeping his voice low, his usual easy manner replaced with something more careful.

"It’ll settle," he said.

"It will," I agreed. I wasn’t entirely sure I believed that yet, but I’d learned that some things needed saying out loud before they became true.

—

Kael pushed harder that week.

Not cruelly. There was a difference, and I’d been taught by cruelty long enough to know it. What Kael did in training was something else, a kind of relentless, focused pressure that had no interest in breaking me and every interest in finding where my edges were.

He found them repeatedly. My left side was consistently slower than my right. I telegraphed before I struck. Under sustained pressure, my footwork got sloppy in a specific way he’d identified in our second session and was not letting me forget about.

Thursday morning, I hit the ground for the third time in forty minutes. Wet grass, cold air, the specific physical frustration of knowing exactly what I’d done wrong and doing it anyway.

I lay there for one second. Then I pushed myself up to sitting and stayed there, catching my breath, not looking at him.

"Pain teaches faster than comfort," he said.

He wasn’t standing over me. He was a few steps back, arms at his sides, watching.

"That’s a convenient philosophy," I said, "for someone who enjoys being difficult."

A pause. "Get up."

I looked at him then. There was something different in his voice, not the cold flat register he’d been using in our early sessions. Not warmth either. Something more careful than both. Like he was being precise about something he didn’t want to name.

I got up.

He ran me through the sequence again. I didn’t fall this time. On the fourth repetition, I got through the full combination cleanly, and he said nothing, which by this point I understood meant it had been right.

We worked for another thirty minutes in near silence. When the session ended and I turned to leave, he said,

"You’re better than you were two weeks ago."

It was the most he’d given me. I kept walking.

"I know."

—

The strategy sessions with Eren started that same week, in the small room off the library that he’d apparently been using for weeks with no one’s permission and no one’s objection, because that was how Eren occupied spaces, quietly, persistently, until they simply became his.

He had maps already spread across the table when I arrived. Old ones, territories marked in faded ink, troop positions noted in a hand I didn’t recognise. He was standing over them with a cup of something that had probably gone cold.

"Sit," he said, not looking up.

"Tell me what you see."

I sat across from him and looked at the map. Mountain territory to the north, a river dividing the eastern approach, three separate pack markers positioned along what looked like a disputed border line.

"A border dispute," I said. "Three packs

involved. The middle one is the smallest."

"And?"

"The smallest one is the most dangerous position. They’re bordered on both sides. Any alliance they make commits them fully, because they can’t hold neutrality, they don’t have the territory for it."

He looked up from the map for the first time. That brief, recalibrating look. Then he sat down across from me and pulled the map closer.

"Good," he said. "Now tell me where the weakness is in this formation." He pointed to the eastern flank, where one of the larger pack markers had its troop positions marked.

I studied it. "They’re heavy on the river side. Too heavy. They’re expecting an attack from the water approach, which means they’ve already decided that’s where the threat is coming from."

"Which means what?"

"Which means they’ve already decided. And once you’ve decided, you stop fully watching the thing you’ve dismissed."

I tapped the western side of the formation.

"Here. They think they’re protected because of the terrain, but they’ve pulled resources away from it to reinforce the river side. If you came from the west, you’d hit the gap before they had time to redistribute."

Eren looked at the map for a moment. Then he nodded once. Not effusively. Just, yes. Correct. Move on.

I’d been learning that his nods meant more than most people’s sentences.

We went through three more formations over the next hour. He corrected me twice, explained his reasoning both times without making me feel like an idiot for missing it, and by the end I had a headache from concentrating and a specific, unfamiliar feeling I eventually identified as the satisfaction of being genuinely challenged by something intellectual.

At some point during the fourth map, I asked something I’d been carrying since the beginning.

"Why didn’t you fight for me the way they did?

"Kael demanded Ryland train me. Ryland negotiated a trade. You just showed up in doorways."

He tilted his head slightly, the way he did when a question was interesting to him. "Because you needed space," he said. "Not more men grabbing at you."

I looked at him.

"You’d been handed between people your entire life... Traded, assigned, claimed. The last thing you needed was another Alpha deciding what was best for you before you’d had thirty seconds to decide anything yourself."

I was quiet for a moment.

"That’s surprisingly thoughtful,"

"I have my moments." He tapped the map in front of me. "Focus. Where’s the weakness in this formation?"

I looked back at the map.

The formation was more complex than the previous ones, multiple packs, a shared border, alliances that crisscrossed in ways that made straightforward attack angles difficult to find. I took my time with it. Traced the supply lines with my finger, checked where the natural terrain would force movement, looked for the place where multiple pressures converged.

There. The junction point where two allied packs’ territories met. If the alliance fractured or appeared to fracture, neither side would rush to cover the other’s exposed flank. Not immediately. There’d be a window.

I pointed to it.

Eren looked at where my finger had landed. He was quiet for a second.

Then he nodded once.

"Same time on our next meeting,"