Kaelen’s POV

The warehouse stank of sweat, cheap ale, and old blood.

I shouldn’t have been here. An emperor in a pit-fighting den buried beneath the border district, surrounded by drunks and gamblers and men who’d slit your throat for a handful of copper. But the intelligence report had been specific. Rogue activity. Possible recruitment channels running through the underground fighting circuit. And I was done trusting secondhand information.

Cassian stood beside me, arms crossed, jaw tight. He hadn’t said a word since we’d entered, but his disapproval radiated off him like heat from a forge.

"Relax," I muttered.

"I’ll relax when we’re out of this cesspit."

The crowd was a seething mass of bodies packed shoulder to shoulder against wooden barriers that groaned under the pressure. The pit below sat maybe fifty feet from where we stood, elevated slightly on a makeshift platform near the back wall. Lanterns swung from the rafters on rusted chains, throwing lurching, uneven light across everything.

A fight was already underway.

I barely glanced at it. Some brute hammering at a smaller opponent who kept slipping sideways. Standard fare. I scanned the crowd instead—looking for tattoos, insignias, anything that marked rogue affiliation.

Then the sound hit me.

A growl. Low. Guttural. Rising from somewhere deep in the chest cavity, a place where sound became something more than sound. It cut through the noise of the warehouse like a blade through silk—not louder, but different. Primal. Feral. The kind of sound that bypassed the ears entirely and went straight into the spine.

Every hair on my body stood on end.

Inside me, Alex—my wolf—went absolutely still. Then he erupted.

Claws raking the inside of my skull. A howl so violent it rattled my teeth. He was thrashing, tearing, slamming against the walls of my consciousness with a force I hadn’t felt in years. His voice was a scream inside my head.

MATE. MATE. THAT IS OUR MATE.

My hands found the railing. Locked around it. My knuckles went white.

"No," I whispered.

HER. IT’S HER. CAN’T YOU FEEL IT—CAN’T YOU—

"Kaelen?" Cassian’s hand closed on my arm. "What is it? What’s wrong?"

I couldn’t answer. My eyes had found the pit.

The smaller fighter—the one I’d dismissed—was a woman. She was down. One knee in the sand, arm clutched against her ribs. Blood covered her mouth, her chin, the front of her fighting wraps. Her opponent towered over her. Twice her size. He was grinning.

She looked broken.

She looked finished.

Then she rose.

Not slowly. Not hesitantly. She came up like something uncoiling from the earth—fast, explosive, every muscle firing in a sequence I recognized so deeply it stopped my heart.

She drove her fist into the man’s jaw, shattering the bone. The impact was savage, destroying the man who was twice her size. He staggered backward with blood pouring from his nose and mouth. The crowd screamed.

But I couldn’t hear them.

I could only hear Alex, howling, howling, howling.

Because I knew those movements. I knew the pivot of her hips. The angle of her elbow. The way she chambered her strikes from the center of her body rather than the shoulder. Sir Marcus had drilled that technique into every member of the Imperial Knight Guard. I’d watched him teach it a thousand times. Feet grounded. Core rotation. Strike from the root.

Imperial technique. In a border pit-fighting warehouse. Coming from a woman who moved like she’d been forged in the training yards of the palace itself.

"Kaelen." Cassian’s grip tightened. "You look like you’ve seen a ghost."

A ghost. Yes. That was exactly what I was seeing.

She hit the man again. And again. Ribs. Liver. Temple. Every blow precise and devastating. He staggered. His guard collapsed. She brought her knee into his face, and his nose burst open like rotten fruit. The spray painted the sand red.

I was already moving.

I released the railing and shoved into the crowd. Bodies packed tight—shoulder to shoulder, chest to back, a wall of flesh and noise and the stink of ale. I drove forward with my shoulder. Someone cursed. An elbow caught my ribs. I didn’t feel it.

"Kaelen!" Cassian’s voice behind me. "What the hell are you—"

I crashed into a man holding a tankard of ale. It flew from his hand and shattered against the floor. He spun, snarling, but I was already past him—shoving two more men aside with both arms, using every inch of my height and every pound of my weight to carve a path through the bodies.

Twenty feet. I was still twenty feet away.

In the pit, she was destroying him. Not fighting anymore—punishing. Each blow landed with a sound I could feel through the floor. The man tried to swing. She sidestepped like water flowing around stone and buried both fists in his kidneys.

He went down.

Face-first into the sand. Arms splayed. Still.

I pushed harder. A cluster of men blocked the way, shoulders locked together, screaming at the pit. I grabbed the nearest one by the collar and hauled him sideways. He stumbled into his companions. A gap opened. I surged through.

Still too far.

I could hear the crowd roaring, faint beneath Alex’s relentless screaming inside my head.

GO. GO FASTER. SHE’S RIGHT THERE. RIGHT THERE—

I pushed closer. Bodies were everywhere. The crowd was surging forward, pressing against the barriers. The noise was a physical thing—a wall, a weapon, a living creature that swallowed everything.

I shoved a man so hard he crashed into the woman beside him. They both went down. I stepped over them, tearing through the hundreds of people.

The referee checked the fallen man. Amidst a shower of gold coins sailing through the air, he seized her arm and thrust it high.

"Winner!"

The warehouse exploded. Every throat in the building opened at once, and the sound that came out was not human. It was animal. Feral. A detonation of raw, mindless noise that shook the rafters and rattled the lanterns on their chains.

And in that moment—one single, frozen heartbeat of time—she turned her head.

Not much. Just enough.

The lantern light caught her face. Sweat-slicked. Blood-smeared. Older than I remembered. Harder. The softness I’d known was gone, replaced by something carved and brutal and beautiful in a way that made my chest crack open.

Silver hair plastered to her skull and neck, darkened with sweat and blood but unmistakable. Ice-blue eyes that I had seen in every dream and every nightmare for years.

Elara.

Alex screamed her name inside me so loud my vision blurred.

My wife. My mate. The mother of the children I had craved for years. Standing in a pit-fighting warehouse with blood on her hands and something dead in her eyes that hadn’t been there before.

"ELA!"

I screamed it. Tore it from my throat with everything I had. The name ripped out of me like a physical thing, carrying with it years of searching and grief and rage and want.

The crowd swallowed it whole.

She didn’t hear me. Didn’t turn. The referee released her arm, and it dropped. She swayed. Then hands were on her—an older man, gray-haired, moving with the urgency of someone who’d done this before. He wrapped her arm over his shoulder and took her weight against his side. She was trembling. Crying, I think, though I couldn’t be sure from this distance.

He turned her toward the tunnel exit.

"ELA!"

Nothing. The noise was too massive. Too absolute. My voice was a whisper against a hurricane.

I lunged forward. Several men stood between me and the barrier. I grabbed the first and threw him sideways. The second I shouldered into the railing so hard the wood cracked. Another stepped back on his own, eyes wide.

But the crowd behind the barrier had already surged to fill the gap. A mass of bodies, pressing forward to throw their coins and scream their adoration. They became an impenetrable wall of celebrating people.

I pushed violently against them, screaming her name until my voice was hoarse. "ELA!"

Through the gap in the bodies, I watched the older man guide the crying, trembling Elara into the tunnel and toward the exit. Her silver hair caught the lantern light one last time—a flash of pale fire in the darkness—and then the shadows took her.

As I watched her disappear, my desperate, throat-shredding cries were completely swallowed by the roar of the warehouse.