Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 45: The Third Move

~RYLAND’S POV~

Four days of nothing.

No creatures. No attacks. No word from Selara’s direction, whatever direction that actually was. Just silence on every front, which should have been a relief and instead felt like the particular discomfort of waiting for something you know is coming and can’t see yet.

We couldn’t afford to read the quiet as a good sign. We couldn’t afford to read it any way except as borrowed time. So we used it.

Training intensified across the board. The newly recruited werewolves, younger wolves who’d been brought into active service faster than anyone had planned for, trained in the outer yard under Cade’s supervision from early morning. I watched from the upper gate one morning, arms on the rail, and let myself note what I was seeing.

Cade ran them hard and clean. Pairs drilling defensive stances, then groups of three working the rotation, one pressing, two holding position, switching without verbal signal. He was teaching them to read each other by movement rather than instruction, which was the only kind of coordination that held under the kind of pressure they were about to face. He corrected form without stopping the drill, a tap on the shoulder here, a sharp word there, the kind of teaching that required the lesson to keep moving. None of the new wolves looked comfortable. That was correct. Comfort meant the challenge had been set too low.

Zade ran the full warriors through the east field. His approach was different from Cade’s, more pressure, higher intensity, longer sequences before rest. He believed that fatigue was the real test and he wasn’t wrong. I watched two of the senior warriors run a three-on-one drill at a pace that would have exhausted most people in half the time, and then run it again from the other side. The warriors he trained were the people who would be between everyone else and whatever came through the gates. They needed to be past exhaustion and still functional.

Across the packhouse, Mira had taken over one of the smaller rooms and converted it into something between a study and a spell sanctuary. Documents spread across every surface, the particular smell of her work drifting into the corridor, herbs and ink and something older that didn’t have a common name. She was looking for anything in the existing records that could give us an edge against creatures that operated on principles we didn’t fully understand yet. She hadn’t found a definitive answer. She hadn’t stopped looking.

Everyone was occupied. Everyone was doing the thing they were best equipped to do.

I wasn’t going to be the one standing still.

— freewebnovёl.ƈom

Lyra and I sparred privately in the smaller training courtyard behind the west wing, away from everyone else. Not because the training needed to be secret, because there was something about the space with fewer eyes on it that let both of us be less careful than we would have been with an audience.

We’d been going for twenty minutes when she threw a combination that caught me more completely than it should have. The follow-through had weight and timing behind it that I hadn’t fully accounted for. I stepped back, absorbed it, and looked at her with something that was probably very close to genuine surprise.

"Kael has been doing excellent work," I said.

"Yeah." She reset her stance, not even slightly modest about it. "I won’t deny that. Fortunately, he’s not here."

"Unfortunately, you mean. "Don’t you miss your trainer?"

"Not even a little." She came forward again. "Training with him is intense. Every session feels like he’s personally offended by everything I do wrong."

"That’s how it’s supposed to feel," I said, blocking and stepping sideways. "That’s what gets results."

"Oh, I know it gets results." She threw another punch, I caught it, she immediately went for the opening my catch had created on the other side.

"That’s the whole point. I would never say he wasn’t effective. He absolutely helped get me to where I am." She landed a clean hit. "I just don’t miss it."

I moved back and gave myself a second. She was right, Kael’s methods had clearly worked. The way she moved now was different from the girl who had scrubbed floors in Shadowfang. The way she read openings, the way she committed to a line without hesitating.

"He should be the one in this courtyard with you, technically," I said. "That’s his assignment."

"He’s got his hands full with Shadowfang," she said. "So does Eren with Moonveil. Everyone has their own battle to manage right now."

"But..."

"Not but, Ryland." She cut me off and came forward fast. "This is training. That’s all this is."

She threw a hard right. I caught it with my fist and didn’t let go, used the momentum to pull her forward, closing the distance between us in half a second.

We ended up inches apart.

She kissed me.

I didn’t pull back. I kissed her back, and for a moment the training courtyard and the silence from Selara and the smoke we were all bracing for ceased to exist in any practical way.

Then a sharp pain shot through my left arm.

"See," Lyra said, twisting out of the hold and taking my arm with her, redirecting it into a lock that put me firmly pointed in the opposite direction. "One kiss and you’re completely distracted."

I turned around. She was standing there looking entirely too pleased with herself, breathing normally while I was catching up to the last few seconds.

"That was impressively underhanded," I said.

"It was tactical."

"It was a distraction technique using personal leverage."

"Yes," she said. "That’s what tactical means in a real fight."

I rubbed my arm. "You’re going to be very difficult to fight seriously going forward."

"Good," she said. "That’s exactly the point."

"I’m genuinely not sure whether to be impressed or insulted."

"Be impressed," she said. "Insulted is a waste of energy."

I looked at her. She was trying to keep the expression neutral and not entirely succeeding.

"So your strategy," I said, "for fighting me, is to kiss me and then throw me across the courtyard."

"It worked, didn’t it?

"Once," I said. "It worked once."

"Once was enough. "The point isn’t to do it repeatedly. The point is that you learned something about managing your focus under unexpected conditions."

"And you learned that kissing me is an effective combat technique."

"I already knew that," she said.

I opened my mouth. She raised an eyebrow. I decided not to finish the sentence.

"Again?" she said.

"Absolutely. And I’ll note that fair warning has now been issued."

"Warning noted," she said. "Doesn’t change the outcome."

She was probably right about that, which was its own kind of problem.

We reset. She came forward. I blocked the first strike, read the second, moved around the third, and was genuinely focused this time with everything fully accounted for...

The explosion hit.

Not close, distance, from the direction of the eastern border, the particular sound that wasn’t quite thunder but carried like it. We both stopped at the same instant. No need for words. We were already moving before the echo had finished.

We came out of the courtyard gate and onto the upper path that ran along the wall’s top and the smoke was already visible, a column of it, thick and black, rising from somewhere past the tree line to the east.

Lyra stood beside me looking at it.

"Where did that come from?" she said.

I looked at the smoke. At the direction. At the distance between it and us, and what sat between us and it in terms of territory.

"Selara just made her third move,"