Chapter Two — Blood Recognizes Blood
764 Words
The woods at Ravaryn’s border are thicker than I remembered. Branches knit together overhead, strangling out the moonlight. My cloak is heavy with river-water and cold, but I push forward, following the memory of whispers from a life already burned.
Kael Ravaryn does not keep court in his father’s hall. He builds power in shadows—training, recruiting, executing loyalty like a test of flame. Somewhere deep inside these woods, he is carving his rebellion one body at a time.
I know this because I watched it once already. From a distance. From a cage.
Not this time.
Every step is a gamble. Patrols could find me, or worse—the hounds Malrik looses when he wants terror to precede him. My boots sink in mud, and the winter air rattles sharp in my chest. The forest smells of pine sap, rot, and something metallic threading beneath it all.
Blood.
The sound reaches me next—harsh voices, boots striking earth, then silence too heavy to be natural. I drop low, slipping between roots until the trees open into a clearing.
Torches burn in a rough circle, light searing across bark and flesh. A dozen men stand in formation, faces hard, eyes fixed on the center. And there—Kael Ravaryn, the young Alpha, framed in fire.
He is taller than memory, sharper. Shadows cling to the angles of his face, the strong cut of his jaw, the iron-gray wolf pelt draped over one shoulder. His eyes—cold as frozen steel—burn with a focus that swallows the clearing whole.
At his feet kneels a man, bound and broken, his mouth bloody from confession or refusal.
Kael doesn’t ask again. He doesn’t shout. He simply draws the blade at his hip, wipes it once against his palm, and lets it rise in the torchlight. The silence between heartbeats is a grave. Then steel arcs, swift and merciless.
The man collapses without a cry, head rolling into shadow. The ground drinks greedily.
I choke on the gasp before it can betray me—but my lungs are slow, traitors in their own right. My eyes—my cursed eyes—meet his.
Kael freezes.
Blood spatters his cheek, shining dark in the torchlight. His gaze sharpens, narrows. The moment stretches, sound draining away until all that remains is the thunder in my veins.
And then—
It happens.
A pulse, electric, raw, tearing through marrow and soul. Like fire recognizing fire. Like the universe stitching two broken halves with cruel inevitability.
The mate bond.
My heart slams so hard I nearly stumble backward. Heat floods my chest, a pull deep in the gut that coils like a chain, like a promise, like a curse. His scent—wolf, steel, storm—floods my senses. And under it, something startlingly human: a warmth I should never feel for him.
No. No. This wasn’t supposed to happen. In my last life, there was no bond. No recognition. Only flames and indifference. Fate itself is changing its script.
His eyes flicker—something unreadable, something dangerous. His nostrils flare once, as if he scents me across the distance, as if he too feels the tether snapping taut between us.
I can’t breathe. I can’t think. My body remembers the pyre, the ropes, his gaze as I died beneath it. Panic claws me open.
Run.
Before thought catches, I’m already turning, tearing into the underbrush. Branches whip my face, roots bite my boots, the forest claws me back toward him—but I force myself away, away, lungs burning with fear and something worse: desire I refuse to name.
Behind me, silence reigns in the clearing. No shout. No pursuit.
Only his eyes carved into my memory, blood-painted and unyielding, as if he let me go not out of mercy, but calculation.
—
Kael’s POV (brief glimpse):
The men drag the traitor’s corpse away. Kael does not look at them. His blade drips, forgotten at his side.
He stares instead at the gap in the trees where she fled.
A girl. No—something more. Her scent still lingers, threading smoke and silver into the night. And the pull… goddess, the pull. A mate bond. Impossible. Inconvenient. A weakness wrapped in fire.
His jaw tightens. He cannot afford this. Not now. Not ever.
“Just a nobody,” he mutters, voice iron. “Forget her.”
He wipes the blood from his blade and sheathes it, even as the memory of her eyes refuses to release him.
For ambition must come before everything else. Even destiny.
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- Writer
