POV: Calla
We looked at each other through the window for a long moment.
Then I stepped away from it.
"Stay inside," Kael said.
"No."
He looked at me.
"They came for me," I said. "I'll deal with them."
I walked to the door and pushed it open before he could say anything else. The cold air hit my face and I stepped outside into the clearing and stood there with my hands at my sides and waited.
Darian saw me the moment I came out. He crossed the clearing in long quick strides and stopped three feet away. Same distance as the ceremony. I noticed that. I don't think he did.
He looked at me. My white dress, now dirty. My bare feet wrapped in Kael's cloth. The moonflowers long gone from my braid.
"You're alive," he said.
"Disappointed?"
His jaw tightened. "Calla—"
"What are you doing here, Darian."
"I came to bring you back."
I looked at him for a moment. Then I laughed. It wasn't a kind laugh. I hadn't planned it. It just came out.
"You stood in front of the whole pack," I said, "and told them I had no place among them. You said it clearly. You said it loud enough for every single person to hear." I kept my voice even. I was good at that. "And now you've walked into a forest that everyone says will kill you, to bring me back to the place you just threw me out of."
"It wasn't—" He stopped. Started again. "My father—"
"I don't want to hear about your father."
He closed his mouth.
The five other wolves had spread out behind him. All of them watching me. A few of them were looking past me and I knew without turning around that Kael had come out of the compound.
Darian's eyes moved over my shoulder. They went cold and hard in a way I had never seen on his face before.
"Who is that," he said.
"None of your business."
"Calla." His voice dropped. "That is Kael Mordain. Do you understand what that means? He is—"
"I know who he is."
"Then you know you need to step away from him right now."
I did not move.
Darian's eyes came back to me. They were doing something complicated. Not just anger. Something underneath that. Something that looked almost like fear.
"Step away from him," he said again. "And come home."
"That place is not my home." I said it simply. "You made that very clear."
"Calla—"
"You rejected me." I kept my voice flat and quiet. "You didn't just step back. You told them I was not a suitable pack member. You said I had no place there. Those were your words. Your voice. Your choice." I looked at him. "I don't belong to you or your pack anymore. You made sure of that."
His face changed. The coldness cracked a little and something raw showed underneath.
Then one of the wolves behind him said something low to another one. I didn't catch the words. But I caught the tone. The small laugh behind it.
Darian heard it too and he made a mistake. He was tired and scared and ashamed and he made the worst mistake he could have made standing in front of me.
He straightened up. His face went back to being an Alpha's face. Closed and hard.
"You are wolfless," he said. His voice came out loud enough for all six of them to hear. "You have no wolf, no shift, no bond. You have nothing to protect you out here. You need to come back because without a pack you won't survive."
The word hit the same way it always hit.
Wolfless.
I felt something move in my chest.
Not the small quiet pull from before. This was different. This was a shove. Hard and sudden from the inside, like something throwing itself against a door.
"Don't," Kael said behind me. Quiet. Just to me.
I couldn't help it.
"I'm not wolfless," I said.
Darian looked at me.
"Calla." His voice had a kind of pity in it now and that was worse than the anger. "I know it's hard to accept—"
"I am not wolfless." I said it again. Slower. "I never was. Someone sealed my wolf away when I was born. Locked it so no one would know what I was. I have had a wolf my entire life and no one told me. Not the pack. Not the healers. Not you." I stepped toward him. "You rejected me for something that was done to me. You humiliated me for a lie."
Darian stared at me.
"That's not—" He shook his head. "That's not possible."
"Look at her eyes."
That was one of the wolves behind him. A young one. His voice had gone very strange.
Darian looked at my eyes.
I didn't know what he saw. I felt it though. The shove from inside my chest had spread upward into my throat and behind my eyes and the warmth of it was bright and pushing and I could not have stopped it if I tried.
Darian took one step back.
The five wolves behind him went completely still.
Kael stepped up beside me. He didn't touch me. He just stood there.
"What is happening to her eyes," Darian said. His voice had changed. The Alpha sound was gone. He sounded like the boy from the fireside. Young and unsure.
"Something that should have happened a long time ago," Kael said.
The warmth behind my eyes peaked. It was not painful. It was not fear. It was the biggest thing I had ever felt and it had nowhere to go yet and my body did not know what to do with it.
My knees went.
I heard Darian shout my name.
I heard Kael move.
And then the ground came up and the forest went dark and the last thing I felt before everything disappeared was that pull in my chest. Steady and warm and no longer small at all.
When I opened my eyes the light was different.
The ceiling of the compound. Stone. Grey. Familiar now.
I lay still and looked at it and waited for myself to come back the way you wait for your eyes to adjust in a dark room.
Something was different.
I turned my head slowly and looked at the wall of carvings.
All those women. My face. Over and over.
I looked at them for a long time.
Then I sat up. Straight and slow and calm. Kael was in the chair by the fire. He was watching me. His face was very careful.
"How do you feel," he said.
I thought about the question. I ran through the answer in my head. The warmth in my chest. The strange new steadiness in my body. The way the ceiling had looked when I woke up. Clear and sharp, like I was seeing it properly for the first time.
I opened my mouth to tell him I was fine.
But the voice that came out was not entirely mine.