Claimed By Three Rival Alphas

Chapter 92: Aiden

~LYRA’S POV~

Eren’s most trusted second arrived from Moonveil on the fourth day.

His name was Aiden, not a name I’d heard before, but apparently someone Eren had relied on for years, described to me once in passing as the most effective person he’d ever put in a difficult situation and the least talkative about what he did in it.

He was built like a wall. Not tall exactly, but wide in the shoulders and dense in the way that people who had spent their entire lives in physical training became dense, the specific gravity of someone who moved very deliberately because they were used to things breaking when they didn’t. He came in quietly, gave the room one assessment sweep, and stood in the corner until Eren noticed him.

The news he’d brought wasn’t good.

"The dissenting voices," Aiden said, once Eren had indicated he should speak, "have gotten louder. You knew about two houses with reservations. It’s four now, maybe five depending on how the Harren vote goes." He delivered this information the way he appeared to deliver all information: directly, without visible emotion about it, as if facts were facts and emotion about them was a separate issue to be addressed separately. "Senior houses. Not fringe positions."

Dravec was also in the room. He’d been staying close since the letter situation, which I’d decided not to comment on either way.

"They say the Moonborn is an invitation for extinction," Dravec said. He said it clearly, without softening, which I appreciated. "Their specific argument is that before her, the wolf packs were fragmented enough that the Huntsmen had no reason to fully mobilise. Now the packs are unified under a Moonborn and the Huntsmen are fully active. The logic, as they’re presenting it, is that Lyra is what caused this." He looked at me briefly. "They want Moonveil out of the alliance before she burns the pack down around them."

The room held that.

Eren’s jaw was set in the specific way it set when he had heard something he considered both wrong and requiring a considered response rather than an immediate one.

He sat with it for about twenty seconds.

Then he reached for paper and wrote a message. Short. He handed it to Aiden.

"Send it through the senior house channel," he said. "Tonight."

Aiden read it without expression. Looked at Eren. "This is direct."

"Yes," Eren said.

Aiden left to send it.

I found out afterward what it said. Eren had written, to the dissenting Moonveil houses, that anyone who wanted to formally withdraw from the alliance was welcome to do so. The Ashwood was available. Moonveil’s alliance share of the eastern trade routes was not. The offer stood until morning and would not be renewed.

The silence from the dissenting houses that followed was, according to Aiden when he reported back, satisfying.

Nobody withdrew.

—

Aiden stayed.

I wasn’t entirely sure whether that had been planned or whether he simply hadn’t been given a return timeline and defaulted to remaining useful wherever he was, which felt consistent with the impression I was developing of him.

He turned up at morning training on the fifth day. Not participating, standing at the edge of the yard with his arms crossed and the particular quality of someone assessing a thing they’d been given secondhand information about and wanted to form their own view on.

I was sparring with two of Silverclaw’s senior warriors simultaneously. This had been Ryland’s idea, initially, as a training modification for when Solene’s speed started outpacing single-opponent drills. Both warriors were good. They were giving me a genuine problem from two angles, which was the point.

I was about three minutes into the session when I became aware that Aiden was watching with a quality of attention that was different from casual observation.

I finished the session, sent both warriors off with specific notes on their footwork, and went for water. When I looked back, Aiden was looking at Eren, who had come to stand beside him at some point during the last few minutes.

Luckily I listened on time to hear the tail end of what Aiden was saying.

"She’s real," he said. Not as a compliment, exactly, more as the completion of an assessment. The specific tone of someone who had been given a dossier and was now confirming the dossier matched the subject.

"Yes," Eren said.

Aiden was quiet for a moment. "And the Shadowfang Alpha is stuck in a ghost dimension."

"Also yes."

Another pause. Aiden looked back at where I’d been sparring. "Fine," he said. He had the tone of someone who had made a decision to stop pursuing a line of inquiry that wasn’t going to resolve to his satisfaction regardless of how long he pursued it. "I’ll stop trying to understand the theology and just kill whoever needs killing."

Eren looked at him. "That would be useful."

"It’s what I do," Aiden said, as if this were a straightforward and reasonable resolution to a complex theological situation, and turned back to watch the rest of the training session with the focused attention of someone doing preliminary combat assessments.

I turned away before he could see me fighting the smile.

I needed that. I hadn’t known I needed it until it happened, something small and specific and human, a person in a strange situation deciding to deal with the strangeness by simply doing what they were good at and not requiring anything more from the moment than that. It cut through the accumulated weight of the last few days in a way that nothing more significant had managed to.

Sometimes that was what you needed. Something small to hold onto.

I held onto it for the rest of the morning.

—

The body was found at the northern border early in the afternoon.

The runner who brought the report to me had the look of someone who had been maintaining control of their face with visible effort for the duration of the trip, and the look said something about what was waiting at the other end of it before any words were exchanged.

It wasn’t a warrior.

That was the first thing I registered when we arrived. The body was small. I registered small before I registered anything else, before the wound, before the location, before the context, I registered that what was on the ground in front of me was small, and then I registered twelve years old, and then I registered the wound in the centre of the chest.

Same shape. Same size. Same wolfsbane sealing. The same clean, precise, deliberate technique.

Ryland had come with me. He stood slightly to the side and slightly behind me, in the particular position of someone who was there for both operational and personal reasons and was tracking both simultaneously.

His name was Orren, one of the guards told me. A pack member’s son from the outer village. Newly shifted, apparently just past his first shift, still learning to control it, still figuring out what he was. He’d been collecting firewood in the northern border’s outer edge. Wrong time. Wrong place. No indication he’d been targeted specifically.

I stood over him in the rain that had started coming in from the north an hour ago, and I looked at him, and I didn’t say anything.

My hands went incandescent. freёwebnovel.com

Not deliberately. Not controlled. The white light flooded my hands the way it flooded when something in me responded to something external before the deliberate part of my mind caught up, the way it had in the clearing against Selara, the way it had on the night of the blood moon. Not the gentle warmth of the Luna mark or the training exercises. The full Moonborn light, blazing white and hot in my open palms. freewēbnoveℓ.com

I pulled it back.

It took three seconds and most of what I had in terms of deliberate control, and it went back in, and my hands were hands again, wet from the rain.

I looked at Orren.

Ryland was watching my face.

I knew without looking at him that he was watching my face because I could feel it, the particular quality of his attention when he was concerned rather than simply present, the specific awareness of someone tracking something he hadn’t seen before in the person he knew best.

I hadn’t made any decision out loud. I hadn’t said anything at all since we arrived.

But something had made a decision in me when I looked at the body of a twelve-year-old who had been collecting firewood.

Something that was not going to be unmade.