Chapter 31: Assassins
Seren had come to the garden alone in the cool of the evening.
Not because she had forgotten the rules.
But because she needed five minutes to remember she still existed outside the bond, outside the weight of three alphas who felt every hitch in her breath, outside the palace that had begun trying to kill her the moment she stopped being invisible.
She thought of her mother and her best friend Lysa. "Oh, how I missed them." She muttered under her breath.
She slipped out through the servants’ door behind the east wing, past the laundry lines heavy with wet linen, past the refuse pits that smelled of rotting roses and yesterday’s wine. The moon was three-quarters full, silvering the gravel so it looked like frost under her slippers. The air carried late-blooming damask, damp earth after the afternoon shower, and the faint iron bite of the river miles away.
She walked until the palace lights dimmed to pinpricks behind her, until the only sounds were the crunch of her steps and the distant trickle of water over marble.
She stopped at the old sundial in the moon-rose garden.
The stone dial was cold beneath her palm, its bronze gnomon casting a long black finger across the hours.
She closed her eyes.
Just five minutes.
Five minutes without Isolde’s voice in her head correcting posture, without the councillors’ calculating stares, without the bond pulling at her like three separate heartstrings tuned to the same taut note.
She never heard them coming.
The first warning was the bond itself. A sudden, violent, white-hot spike of alarm from all three alphas at once.
Her eyes snapped open.
Too late.
A shadow detached from the hedge to her left—black cloak, black gloves, black blade already rising in a clean arc toward her throat.
She twisted on instinct.
The knife sliced air where her neck had been a second earlier.
She stumbled backward, heart slamming against her ribs so hard she tasted copper.
Another shadow, at the right side.
Not two.
Three.
They moved like wolves trained to hunt upright: silent, synchronized, faces hidden behind dark hoods. Moonlight caught the glint of curved steel in their hands—daggers made for silence, for close work, for throats.
Seren’s mouth opened to scream.
A gloved hand clamped over it from behind.
She bit down hard, tasting leather and salt and rage.
The man hissed, grip loosening for a fraction of a second.
She drove her elbow back into the pit of his stomach with every ounce of strength she had.
He grunted, doubled.
She broke free, only to meet the point of the second blade coming straight for her chest.
Instinct took over.
She dropped, low, fast, the way Kael had drilled into her during those stolen midnight sessions in the training yard.
The knife passed over her shoulder, tearing silk and skin in a single hot line.
Pain bloomed along her collarbone. Sharp and immediate.
She rolled.
Gravel bit into her palms and knees.
A boot came down where her head had been.
She scrambled backward until her spine hit the sundial’s stone plinth.
Three figures closed in slowly, certain.
No words.
No taunts.
Just the quiet efficiency of killers who had already calculated the odds and liked them.
Seren’s breath came in short, panicked bursts.
The bond roared. Kael’s fury like wildfire in her veins, Aeron’s cold command slicing through it, Theron’s voice already shouting orders somewhere far above, boots pounding stone.
They were coming.
But they were too far away.
She pressed her back against the sundial.
Her right hand closed around a loose chunk of gravel.
Useless.
The nearest assassin raised his blade.
Moonlight slid along the edge like liquid silver.
And then...
A blur of iron-grey fury exploded from the hedge line.
Kael.
He hit the first assassin like a siege ram, shoulder to chest, driving the man backward into the thorn hedge. Bone cracked audibly. The dagger flew from the assassin’s hand, spinning end over end into the roses.
Kael didn’t pause.
He twisted, caught the second man’s wrist mid-strike, snapped it with a wet crunch that echoed across the garden, then drove his elbow into the assassin’s throat.
The man dropped, choking, hands clawing at his crushed windpipe.
The third assassin pivoted. His fast blade flashing toward Kael’s kidneys in a vicious backhand arc.
Kael didn’t even look.
He caught the wrist without breaking stride, yanked the man forward off-balance, and slammed his forehead into the assassin’s nose.
Blood sprayed black in the moonlight.
The man staggered.
Kael finished it with a single, brutal twist.
Neck snapped.
Silence fell. Sudden. Absolute. Broken only by the drip of blood from Kael’s knuckles onto the gravel.
He turned to Seren.
She was still pressed against the sundial, one hand clamped over the cut along her collarbone, blood seeping steadily between her fingers, staining the midnight-blue silk almost black.
Kael crossed the distance in two strides.
He dropped to one knee in front of her, chest heaving, eyes blazing gold, every line of him vibrating with barely leashed violence.
His hands, now gentle, gently pulled hers away from the wound.
The cut was shallow but long; blood welled in a bright line across pale skin.
He pressed his palm over it, hard, applying pressure.
"Hold still," he growled, voice rough with the wolf still riding him.
Seren’s teeth chattered.
"They...they knew exactly where I was," she whispered. "They were waiting."
Kael’s jaw tightened so hard a muscle jumped.
"They’ve been watching."
Footsteps pounded along the gravel paths. Heavy, urgent.
Aeron and Theron arrived at a dead run.
Aeron reached them first.
He dropped beside Kael, eyes scanning the sprawled bodies, then locking on the blood seeping through Kael’s fingers.
"How bad?"
"Shallow," Kael said. "But it needs binding. Now."
Theron was already tearing a strip from his own shirt. White linen, expensive, ruined in seconds.
"Move," he snapped at Kael.
Kael shifted aside without argument.
Theron pressed the cloth to the wound, tying it tight with practiced speed.
Seren hissed through her teeth.
Aeron’s hand cupped the back of her neck. Steady, grounding, thumb brushing the base of her skull.
"You’re safe," he said. Low. Certain. "We’re here."
She looked up at him, then at Kael and Theron.
"They weren’t trying to kill me," she whispered.
Three sets of eyes sharpened.
"They wanted me alive," she said. "They were going to take me. Drag me out. To Magnus."
The bond flared—rage, fear, possession so raw it stole her breath.
Kael’s voice was low, lethal.
"Then we stop playing defence."
Aeron rose.
He looked at the bodies—at the black cloaks, the curved daggers, the lack of any identifying mark.
"Northern steel," he said quietly. "But the footwork is palace-trained. Someone inside these walls told them exactly where she’d be. When she’d be alone."
Theron finished tying the bandage.
His voice was overly calm.
"We have a traitor."
Aeron nodded once.
He turned to Seren.
"You do not leave the tower again without all three of us. Not for air. We already told you. Not ever."
She nodded—still shaking.
Kael rose, eyes scanning the shadows beyond the hedges.
"They’ll try again," he said. "Sooner this time. Harder."
Aeron’s hand tightened on Seren’s shoulder.
"Then we stop waiting for them to come to us."
He looked north—toward the red glow on the horizon that had grown brighter, broader, in the last hour.
"We take the fight to them."
"And when Magnus’s next envoy arrives at dawn with more demands..."
Aeron finished the sentence.
"We send him back a message of our own."
Seren looked between them.
Her voice was quiet, steady despite the blood on her gown, and the tremor in her hands.
"What kind of message?"
Aeron met her gaze.
"The kind that bleeds."
Somewhere beyond the palace walls, in the northern camp, a single rider galloped toward the command tent.
He carried no scroll.
He carried a severed head.
One of Magnus’s own envoys.
The head had been cleanly taken—professional, precise.
Pinned to the scalp with a silver dagger was a single scrap of parchment.
Words, written in fresh blood:
*She stays.*
Later, in the eastern tower, as the first grey light of false dawn crept across the sky, Seren felt the bond shift again. With certainty.
Then she heard a sound, faint but unmistakable through the open window. It was the soft metallic click of a crossbow being cocked in the darkness beyond the garden hedge.
It was aimed straight at her heart.
She froze.
Kael’s head snapped toward the sound.
Aeron moved with the speed of light, placing himself between her and the window.
Theron was already drawing his blade.
But the bolt never came.
Instead, from the shadows outside, a single voice drifted up. Low, amused, a female voice.
"Well," it said, carrying just far enough to reach them.
"Looks like I owe Elowen an apology. She told me you’d be harder to kill."
The voice laughed once, soft, delighted.
Then the shadows emptied.
