Chapter 13: Chapter 13
( Elena)
Marcus comes to find me after breakfast.
He doesn’t knock. He never knocks — it’s a small power move he’s been running since Viktor died, walking into rooms like he already owns them, like he’s just waiting for the paperwork to catch up. I’m standing at the window with my second cup of tea when the door opens and there he is, gray-bearded and composed, wearing that particular expression of his that sits just inside the border of concern.
Rhydian is still in the room.
He’s pulling on his boots in the corner, head down, and he goes very still when Marcus walks in the way prey animals go still — not from fear, I’ve learned, but from the specific focus of something deciding whether to attack.
Marcus doesn’t look at him. That’s deliberate too.
"Elena." He folds his hands. "The council has a concern."
"The council can wait until I’ve finished my tea."
"It’s about your—" a pause, weighted, "—husband."
Rhydian’s boot hits the floor.
"Specifically," Marcus continues, smooth as always, "about whether he’s capable of functioning as a proper Alpha male. Whether he can fight. Whether he can lead. Whether—" he spreads his hands gently, "—the investment the Pack has made in this arrangement is going to yield anything of actual value."
I look at him over the rim of my cup. "He’s been here less than two weeks."
"The border situation with Shadowpine isn’t waiting for him to settle in."
It’s a reasonable point. That’s the thing about Marcus — his arguments are always built on something real. The poison is in the framework around them, not the facts themselves.
I set my cup down.
"Fine," I say. "Training yard. One hour."
Marcus nods once, satisfied, and leaves without acknowledging Rhydian at all.
The door clicks shut and the room is quiet for a moment. I can feel Rhydian’s eyes on my back.
"You’re going to spar with me," he says. Not a question.
"Yes."
"In front of people."
"That’s generally how training yards work."
A beat. "What if I lose."
I turn around. He’s standing now, both boots on, arms crossed, and there’s something in his face that’s trying very hard to look like it doesn’t care and getting maybe sixty percent of the way there.
"Then you lose and you learn something," I say. "That’s the point of sparring."
"I mean—" He stops. Looks at the wall briefly. Back at me. "What if I lose badly. What if I can’t—" Another stop. His jaw tightens. "I’ve been alone for four years. Fighting off rogues and hunting alone. That’s not the same as—"
"Rhydian."
He looks at me.
"I’m not putting you out there to humiliate you," I say. "I’m putting you out there because Marcus needs to see that you exist. That’s all."
He’s quiet for a moment. Then, quieter than usual: "And if I can’t give him that?"
"Then we figure it out," I say. "Together."
The word sits between us for a second. He looks at me like he’s trying to find the catch in it.
He doesn’t say anything. But when I head for the door, he follows.
---
The training yard is half frozen.
The ground is hard, the last of the overnight snow pressed flat and grey under a sky that can’t decide whether it’s done yet. A handful of Pack warriors have gathered at the edges — not a crowd, but enough. Word travels fast here. Always has.
Marcus stands near the fence with two elders, making a point of looking relaxed.
I don’t spare him more than a glance.
I pull my outer coat off and drop it on the bench. Roll my sleeves back. Rhydian is standing a few feet away doing the same — jacket off, sleeves up, and I can see the bandages on his wrists, white against the cold red of his hands.
He’s looking at the yard. Not at Marcus, not at the audience. Just the yard, taking it in, measuring it the way he measures every new space he enters. Old rogue habit — always knowing where the exits are.
"We’ll go light," I tell him, low enough that it’s just for him. "Don’t try to win. Try to stay in."
"I know how to fight," he says, a thread of irritation in it.
"I know. That’s what worries me."
He looks at me.
"You fight like a rogue," I say. "All instinct, no form. In front of these people I need you to look like you’ve been trained, not like you’re trying to survive. There’s a difference."
Something moves in his face. He doesn’t like it — I can see that, the small tightening around his eyes — but he’s getting better at the space between what he feels and what he does with it.
He nods. Once.
We face each other.
The yard goes quiet in that particular way yards go quiet when people are watching something they’re not sure about. I can feel their uncertainty — about him, about this, about what it means for the Pack that their Alpha female is standing in frozen mud across from a rogue she married eight days ago.
Rhydian looks back at me and his eyes are gold in the flat winter light and completely, entirely unafraid.
That’s the thing about him that surprised me first. For all the flinching, for all the nights waking up screaming, for all the trembling hands and the walls and the biting — when he’s on his feet with space around him, the fear disappears. Something else takes over. Something that four years alone made and I’m starting to think I can’t fully understand yet.
I move first.
Nothing serious — a testing strike, checking his reaction time, seeing how he reads movement. He deflects it cleanly without thinking, steps to the side, and I see exactly what I expected: beautiful instinct. Raw and unpolished and fast.
He doesn’t counter. Remembers what I said. Just resets.
Good.
I come at him harder. He blocks, shifts his weight, loses his footing slightly on the frozen ground and recovers in a way that looks almost intentional if you don’t know what you’re watching. I catch the flash of frustration on his face — hates the ground, hates not being in control of his own body — and I file it away.
We go back and forth like that for a few minutes. Testing. Getting a feel for each other’s rhythm. And underneath the mechanics of it there’s something else happening, something I don’t have clean words for — this growing awareness of him as a physical presence, the way he moves, the way he breathes, the way he watches my shoulders instead of my hands which is actually exactly right and not something I taught him.
"Stop dropping your left," he says.
I blink. "What?"
"You drop your left shoulder right before you switch direction." He’s breathing a little harder but his face is almost — *interested*. "You’ve done it four times."
Something hot flickers in my chest that is definitely not attraction. Absolutely not.
"Focus," I say.
He almost smiles.
I come at him faster, no more testing, and this time it’s real — real pressure, real footwork, moving him around the yard, making him work. He handles it better than he should. Better than someone who learned to fight in a cave against wolves trying to take his food. His instincts are sharp in a way that formal training sometimes actually ruins, and watching him figure out the difference between surviving and sparring in real time is—
He catches my wrist.
Both hands — quick, decisive, using my own momentum against me — and then everything happens fast: I’m turning, he’s behind me, his arm across my chest and his weight pushing me forward and I hit the yard wall with both palms flat on the fence and him at my back, breathing hard, and—
And I’m pinned.
The yard is completely silent.
I can feel his chest against my shoulders. His arm still across me, not pressing now, just there. His breath is warm on the back of my neck, ragged from exertion.
For a moment neither of us moves.
Then his mouth touches the back of my neck.
Not accidental. Not training. Just — his lips, against my skin, right at the base of my hairline, warm and deliberate and there.
Everything in the yard is very still.
"Lesson learned, wife?" His voice is low, right against my ear, and there’s something in it I’ve never heard from him before. Something that isn’t anger and isn’t fear and isn’t the performance of either.
Something that sounds a lot like him.
I bring my elbow back into his ribs.
Not hard — well, somewhat hard — and he makes a genuine sound of surprise and his arm drops and I spin away from the fence and push him by the shoulder and he stumbles back two steps and then—
I laugh.
I don’t plan it. It just comes out — real, startled, not a polished Alpha laugh but an actual helpless sound because his face is absolutely priceless. The shock of it. The way his hand went to his ribs and then the way he looked at me like he couldn’t decide if he was offended or—
"You *elbowed* me," he says.
"You pinned me."
"That’s— I was sparring—"
"So was I."
He stares at me. His hair is completely destroyed. There’s a flush across his cheekbones from the cold and the exertion and possibly from whatever that was at the fence, and he’s looking at me with his mouth slightly open like he’s arrived somewhere he didn’t expect to be.
"You laughed," he says.
"I know."
"I’ve never heard you—" He stops. Something shifts in his face. Softer and then quickly covered. "You should do that more."
I look at him.
The yard is still watching. Marcus is still at the fence and I don’t need to look at him to know his face is doing something complicated.
I pick up my coat from the bench. Shake the frost off. Slide my arms in.
"Again tomorrow," I say. "Five AM."
"Five," he repeats, like it personally offends him.
"Four-thirty if you keep complaining."
He opens his mouth. Closes it. Shoves his hands into his jacket pockets.
But when I walk past him toward the Pack house I catch it in my peripheral vision — just for a second, just a flash, before he locks it down.
He’s smiling.
Not the small reluctant one from before. Something wider, something that makes him look twenty and young and like someone who hasn’t had quite enough reasons to smile yet but is quietly, privately, beginning to collect them.
I don’t let myself smile back until I’m through the door.
Then I do.
