Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 76: Shadowfang’s Grief

~LYRA’S POV~

Shadowfang’s grief didn’t look the way I’d expected grief to look.

I’d expected something visible, the heavy, saturated kind of mourning I’d seen in the days after the battle, people sitting in corners and not getting up, the quiet collapse of people who had been running hard for too long and had finally been given permission to stop. I’d seen that in Silverclaw, in Moonveil, in the packhouse halls where warriors had sat against walls with their heads back and their eyes closed and just breathed.

Shadowfang’s grief looked like silence and controlled anger.

It looked like people standing very straight when they didn’t have to. Like conversations that stopped the moment you entered a room and resumed at a slightly different pitch when you left. Like the particular quality of a pack that was still deciding what it was going to do with the thing it was feeling, and hadn’t finished deciding, and wasn’t going to be rushed.

—

Dravec met me at the gates on the first morning. He’d arranged the schedule with the particular efficiency of someone who had been managing difficult logistics for a decade, meeting times, ceremony attendances, which families had specifically requested to speak with me and which had not. He walked me through the first morning with the quiet steadiness that I’d come to understand was just his natural register, and he shielded me from the worst of the hostility without pretending the hostility wasn’t there.

"They’ll come around," he told me during a brief pause between the second and third family meetings. "It takes time with Shadowfang. We’re not quick to change our position on things."

"I know," I said.

He looked at me.

"I kinda stayed here," I said. "Remember."

He blinked. He sometimes forgot that, it was clear, that the person currently standing in Shadowfang territory as its temporary head was also the person who had scrubbed the floors of this specific packhouse. That the history wasn’t abstract.

"Right," he said, after a moment.

"I’m not saying it as a complaint. Just as context. I understand the pace."

He nodded, and we kept moving.

—

The memorial ceremonies were held on the second day.

They were formal, structured, the particular ceremony that Shadowfang had developed over centuries for the acknowledgment of their dead. Different from Silverclaw’s version, different from what I’d seen in Moonveil, more austere, more contained, built around the expression of grief through endurance rather than through release. Warriors stood for long periods without moving. Speeches were brief and factual. There was no breaking down in public. There was instead a kind of iron steadiness that seemed to communicate: we are still standing, and we will keep standing, and that is the tribute.

I stood through all of it.

I was aware of the eyes. Not hostile, mostly, the families who had lost soldiers in the battle were past the point of hostility and had arrived somewhere more complicated. They looked at me with the particular expression of people who were trying to decide what to do with a fact they hadn’t anticipated: that the person their Alpha had died protecting was standing in front of them, and she was real, and she was here, and the situation required something of them that they hadn’t had time to figure out what to call.

Not entirely ready to love me. Not willing to hate me either. Somewhere in the uncomfortable middle that was the truest place for grief that was still working itself out.

I didn’t try to resolve it for them. I just stayed present and let them look.

—

The harder moment came on the third day.

A warrior named Valerie, I’d been told she had served under Kael for ten years, one of the people who had known him longest as an Alpha rather than as a young man still proving himself, was polite throughout the official meeting. Completely composed, appropriate, saying the correct things about the transition of leadership and the future of the pack. I could see, under the composure, that she was running the politeness as a task, the way you ran a task that needed to be completed before you could get to the thing you actually wanted.

When the meeting was concluding and I was about to stand, she said: "One more question."

I waited.

"Did he suffer?" she said. Her voice was direct. She was looking at me with the focused quality of someone who had decided to ask the thing they needed to know and wasn’t going to be managed away from it.

I looked at her. At ten years of service in her face, and whatever the specific version of loyalty was that Shadowfang produced, the thing that looked from the outside like cold professionalism and was probably, from the inside, something considerably more complicated.

"No," I said. "He was gone very quickly." I paused, because she deserved the full answer. "And the last thing he did was make sure someone lived."

She held my gaze for a moment. Then she nodded once, sharp, the kind of nod that meant the information had been received and filed and she was done with the interaction now.

She walked away.

I watched her go and felt the particular quality of that exchange sitting in me, not comfortable, not resolved, but real. Kael had ten years of that kind of loyalty from that kind of person and he had spent years being unable to show them what it meant to him because he’d been taught that showing what things meant was the first step toward losing them. I hoped he’d known, in the way that you knew things you never said out loud.

—

On the last morning, I went to the grave.

Dravec had offered to come with me. I’d told him I’d prefer to go alone, and he’d understood the preference without requiring it to be explained.

Kael’s marker was on the mountain he’d been born on, a stone grave-marker, simple, his name and his years and the title he’d held. Nothing embellished. Nothing that didn’t need to be there. Very Kael.

I put my hand on the stone. It was cold, which I’d expected, and the particular cold of stone that had been sitting in mountain air made it feel more present than I’d anticipated. I stood there for a moment, hand flat on the surface, not sure what I was going to say.

"I don’t know if you can hear me," I said finally. Quietly, because the mountain was empty and the wind was low and it seemed like the right register.

"But you should know that Shadowfang is going to be fine. They’re stubborn and proud and completely impossible, and they are absolutely going to be fine."

I paused.

"Dravec is good. You chose him well. Or he chose you, I’m not sure how that worked with you."

The wind moved through the trees below. The mountain was quiet the way mountains were quiet, which was differently quiet from anywhere else.

"I’m also going to be fine," I said. "Eventually. I’m not quite there yet, but I’m not not moving toward it."

I looked at the name carved into the stone.

"I’m not going to tell you I forgive you for Shadowfang. I did that a long time ago and it still stands. But I’m not going to tell you the garden doesn’t matter to me either, because it does, and you knew it did, and you don’t get to be wrong about that just because you’re not here to hear me say it."

I stopped.

"You were mine too. Even when you were too stupid to say it right, you were mine. So we’re even."

The wind shifted.

Not dramatically, not the kind of shift that meant anything if you were being rational about meteorology. Just the wind changing direction the way wind changed direction on mountains, moving from north to west in a single quiet alteration.

I stood there a moment longer with my hand on the stone. fɾeeweɓnѳveɭ.com

Then I straightened, stepped back, and walked back down the mountain toward the packhouse and the work and the living people who needed me to keep doing what I was doing.