Fin woke to an empty bed.

He hadn’t planned on being awake. What dragged him out of sleep was the absence of her, his arm sweeping across cold sheets where Serena should have been. His hand found nothing. His body registered the wrongness before his mind caught up.

"Serena?"

The silence that answered was worse than any alarm.

Then it hit. A searing, bone-deep agony that ripped through his chest and radiated outward, the same savage frequency he’d felt the night he saved her life. His lungs locked. His vision whited at the edges. This was her pain, bleeding through their matebond with the subtlety of a war drum.

He was dressed and moving at alpha speed before his next heartbeat. Shirt, boots, weapons belt, all of it muscle memory while his nose tracked her scent down the corridor. The forest and moon fire.

This was exactly why he needed to get her initiated into Shadowclaw. She was a queen living under guest protocols, and guest protocols did absolutely nothing when your mate was burning alive from the inside out.

Her scent trail led to the hall outside their quarters. He found her on the stone floor, curled on her side, white hair soaked dark at the temples and plastered to her neck. She was wearing her training suit over a silk camisole and shorts, every inch of the fabric damp with sweat. Her breathing came in shallow, staccato pulls that made his chest cave.

"Baby... you’re burning up."

Those words dragged her back to the surface. Her eyes opened, glassy and unfocused, blinking at the vaulted ceiling before finding him. Confusion first. Then recognition. Then the quiet, infuriating attempt to look like she was fine.

"Fin..." Her voice was a rasp.

She’d come out here for fresh air. He could see it in the way she’d positioned herself near the open archway, back against the stone, trying to cool down without waking him. Always trying to handle it alone.

His hand moved from her face to her throat. Two fingers against her pulse. Racing. Thin. The kind of pulse that ran when a body was working too hard to keep itself running.

He scooped her off the floor before she could push herself upright, one arm hooking beneath her knees, the other bracing her back, lifting her like she weighed nothing. The scrawny frame that hid all that fire was trembling against his chest.

✦✦✦

Aurelia: Serena. Can you hear me?

Serena: Yes.

Aurelia: I’m fighting to hold this back. Are you controlling me?

Serena: No. I have no idea how to shift.

✦✦✦

Fin’s gaze locked onto her eyes. Gold flickered through the green, pulsing in uneven surges, there and gone and there again.

Xeon: I feel her wolf. She’s close to the surface. Ask her if she’s fighting a shift.

"Is your wolf trying to shift?"

Serena’s jaw clenched. She didn’t answer, which was an answer in itself.

Fin didn’t wait for a verbal confirmation. He carried her outside, past the east corridor, through the doors that opened onto Shadowclaw’s inner forest where patrol lines still held and Aeron’s wards still covered.

He found a boulder at the edge of the clearing and sat against it, settling her into his lap with her back to his chest. His hand found the space between her shoulder blades and began slow, firm circles, pressing warmth and steadiness into her through his palm.

He held her for a long time. The pain lancing through their matebond made him grunt through gritted teeth every few minutes, his body absorbing echoes of what hers was enduring. He kept his breathing even by sheer force of will. She needed steady. So she was going to get steady.

Her ragged breathing fractured first into hitches, then into sobs. The sound split him open. She cried the way old wounds bled, slowly and with great reluctance, as if her body had decided without her permission.

His chest cracked wide.

He pressed his mouth to the crown of her head and held it there.

"Serena, breathe. I’ve got you."

Xeon: The silver did a number on her. Worse than anything I’ve ever seen.

Fin: What can I do?

Xeon: You either need to Alpha command the shift. Or mark her again to give her body a break.

"Fin..." Serena said, voice fracturing around his name.

"Yes." He kept his voice level with the kind of effort that left bruises on the inside. Because her pain was lancing through him too, white-hot and relentless, and the only thing keeping him from losing his mind was the fact that she needed him to keep his.

"My wolf wants to know if you can command the shift."

Fin looked at her. Commanding another wolf to shift was an Alpha’s authority, and only over wolves within his own pack. That was wolf law, not his. That went for all wolves.

Xeon: It will work. She’s your fated mate.

The certainty in his wolf’s voice left no room for doubt. Fin didn’t need it repeated. He already knew what he was going to do it the moment she asked.

He pressed his forehead to the back of her head. Drew one breath. Let it go.

"Shift, Serena."

Fin was expecting the bones.

He had dreaded this moment with her specifically, because first shifts were brutal under normal conditions. With silver poisoning in the mix, the damage to her wolf’s neural pathways would make it exponentially worse. Every bone would crack and reform, every tendon would stretch and rewrite itself, and she would feel all of it.

He braced for the sound. The wet snap of a femur splitting. The scream that always came after.

Instead, what hit him was a searing white heat that detonated through his entire body so violently that a strangled noise tore from his throat. Every nerve ending fired at once, his muscles locking as if the shift was happening to him too.

Serena let out a high, shattered whimper that broke into a sob halfway through, and white light exploded from her body.

When the light cleared, a white wolf stood where she had been.

Fin had seen hundreds of shifts. Thousands, if he counted training grounds and battlefields and the war summit alone. He had never seen anything like that. There were no bones cracking, no drawn-out agony of a body reshaping itself over minutes. One second she was human and breaking apart. The next, she was whole.