Voren’s expression darkened in one fast, clean movement, like a light being switched off behind his eyes. ’You can’t let it happen,’ Bloodfang yelled in his mind. ’Not until the mate bond is restored.’

"It’s, complicated-" Ravyn started, and then, "Rav."

Daisy’s voice came in pitched with careful precision, her hand finding his arm with the ease of someone who had practiced the gesture enough times to make it look natural.

"Let them go. They’ve already apologized, and they’re all contributing to the cost of the cure anyway."

The look Ravyn turned on her from the corner of his eye was the kind that asks a question very quietly and is not comfortable with the answer it’s finding.

But he had his entire pack watching him. He had Bryan three feet away. He had things that still needed managing regardless of what was happening inside him right now.

His response came down over the gym like a drop in temperature.

Daisy was watching his face with every bit of focus she had, reading it the way she always did, searching for the softening that was not coming. He wouldn’t do it. Not here. Not in front of all of them. Not to her. He simply wouldn’t.

His voice, when it finally came, was as cold as bare skin pressed against January concrete. "Daisy, I think you need the exercise as well. And I’d strongly suggest you start praying that Seraphine is kind enough to tell you to stop."

The shame hit her faster than the actual words did. Her vision went white at the edges, the strength left her legs without any warning at all, and she went straight down, a clean, complete faint that the entire gym watched happen in total silence.

Seraphine was already on her feet. "I’ll check on her." It was the duty of a doctor to not neglect a patient but this time, she had her motives for doing so.

She crossed the floor without hurrying, crouched down beside Daisy, and leaned in close enough that what she said next was only ever going to reach her.

"You sent assassins after me." Her voice was almost pleasant about it, carrying the easy tone of someone discussing the weather. "No pressure at all, but I have a scorpion in my bag, and if your eyes aren’t open in the next three seconds, I am dropping it directly into your pants."

"Sera!" Daisy’s eyes flew open, her whole body jolting upright like a current had gone through it.

Seraphine straightened, folded her hands in front of her, and looked completely at peace with everything happening around her. "I knew you were faking."

She walked back to her bench without a single glance over her shoulder and settled herself back down with the unhurried composure of someone who had never left.

The gym held its complete silence, absolutely, not a sound from a single person in it.

Something moved inside Ravyn’s chest, quiet and carrying a kind of finality, like a door pulling shut on a room he’d been standing just outside of for a very long time.

He kept his eyes on Daisy as she gathered herself up off the floor, and he watched her face carefully, wondering what he ever saw in her to choose her over Seraphine.

What exactly happened during those years to make him hate Seraphine for no reason when all she did was stand on top of the mountain and scream her love for him?

Everything settled on just one thing. Daisy was the one who gave him a son and for that, he could overlook it all, even through the disappointment settling in his chest about her behavior.

He turned back to the room. "Everyone, find a partner. Time is getting short."

The gym eased back to life, carefully, incrementally, the way sound comes back up in a space that isn’t quite sure it’s safe yet. Partners were found and claimed with none of the usual noise or jostling, everyone moving with the particular quiet of people who had just watched something they were still processing.

Seraphine stood up from the bench. "Bryan, will you train with me?"

Bryan’s whole face opened up like sunrise. He was already moving toward her before the sentence had fully landed.

Ravyn stepped smoothly into the space between them. "Bryan, sit with the group and observe today. You train with your peers at the academy." He looked up. "Alpha Voren with Damon. I’ll work with Sera."

"Absolutely not," Seraphine objected, with the kind of clean finality that doesn’t leave a single gap to negotiate through. He never trained with her when she was his Luna and now?

Ravyn’s expression tightened slightly at the edges. He’d assumed that handling Daisy the way he had would’ve bought him something with Seraphine, some degree of goodwill, some small opening he could begin to work with. It was becoming very clear it hadn’t bought him nearly as much as he’d been counting on.

’Do you regret it now?’

Axel, Ravyn’s wolf spoke in his mind with the particular patience of someone who had been waiting a long time to ask that question out loud. Ravyn pushed back against it immediately, the refusal rising in him before he’d even fully processed the words.

’I don’t regret having Bryan. So no, I don’t regret it.’ He let that sit for a beat, then added, with more resolve than the moment probably warranted, ’Don’t worry. I’ll build something with her slowly. She’ll come around to the investment. She just needs time. Seraphine is soft. She always has been.’

’I’ve been trying to reach her wolf,’ Axel revealed, and something in his tone had quietened now, more careful, like he was delivering news he’d been sitting on for a while. ’She won’t allow it. She keeps the door completely closed. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, Ravyn. They don’t want anything to do with us.’

Ravyn refused to let that land the way Axel intended it to. Refused to pick it up and carry it. There had to be something still there, some remaining thread of the Seraphine he remembered, the one who had loved this pack with everything she had, who had given and given long after most people would have stopped.

People didn’t just hollow that out completely. They didn’t just become nothing toward you overnight.

’If she hated us, Ravyn said, finding the one thing he knew he could stand on, then why does she let Bryan call her mother?’

Axel was done arguing with his human but could not help putting the last words in Ravyn’s head.

’I always told you,’ he said finally, that letting Daisy get as close as you did was the beginning of your downfall. She ate through your good sense if you think Seraphine’s love for Bryan is somehow going to find its way to you. That’s not how this works.’

He paused again, shorter this time. And from where I’m standing right now, watching what she’s doing, how she’s moving through this room, I don’t think she’s just upset. I think she’s planning something, and I think it’s pointed directly at us.

’Axel.’ Ravyn’s irritation cracked through the link, sharp and final. ’Shut up. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

His wolf went quiet. Whether out of obedience or the particular weariness of an animal that has said everything it has to say and decided to let the human learn the rest on his own was impossible to tell.

Ravyn attention speared back to Seraphine, standing there with that composed and completely unbothered expression, and to the choice she was clearly already in the process of making.

"If you won’t let Bryan train with me," she said, her voice carrying no frustration, no heat, just the clean practicality of someone rerouting around an obstacle, "then let me train with Damon. You and Voren can take each other. Two Alphas sparring in front of the pack. Honestly, that would be worth watching."

She had already taken the full measure of the gap in strength between Voren and Ravyn, already knew exactly what she was setting in motion.

Getting beaten in his own gym, in front of his own warriors, would cost Ravyn something that salary deductions and public apologies couldn’t come anywhere close to repairing.

Ravyn read the whole thing in less than a second. "As Alpha, I’m requiring you to train with me. Damon is my beta, and Voren doesn’t train with women in a professional capacity."

"I’d actually like to try that," Voren said, his voice entirely pleasant, carrying the relaxed, unhurried tone of a man who had nowhere else to be and nothing in particular to lose.

The color drained from Ravyn’s face.