Chapter 155

Elara’s POV

“Want to play?”

His breath was a wet fog against my face. Sour. Rotten. The kind of smell that clung to skin long after the source was gone.

His palm pressed flat against the brick beside my head. His other hand gripped my waist, fingers digging into the flesh above my hip bone. He squeezed. Not hard enough to bruise. Just hard enough to remind me he could.

My body locked. Every muscle. Every joint. Frozen solid, like the wall at my back had reached through my clothes and turned my blood to ice.

Move, I told myself. Move. Move. Move.

But the signal couldn’t reach my limbs. Fear had severed the connection somewhere between my brain and my body. I was a passenger inside my own skin. Watching. Waiting. Helpless.

His free hand came up and clamped over my mouth. Thick fingers. The taste of salt and grime pressed against my lips. His palm was damp with sweat.

“Shh.” He leaned closer. His stubbled jaw scraped the side of my temple. “Uncle Dave just wants to play a little. That’s all.”

The words rolled through me like poison.

Uncle Dave just wants to play.

Somewhere deep inside the frozen wreckage of my mind, something cracked. Not from fear. From something older. Harder. A voice that didn’t belong to the girl pressed against this wall.

Technique and surprise defeat strength.

Sir Marcus. The training yard. The sun on packed dirt. His voice cutting through the noise of sparring pairs.

When they think you’re done, that’s when you begin.

The memory surfaced with physical weight. I could feel the dry heat of the ring. The ache in my forearms after hours of blocking drills. Riley’s fist tapping my shoulder guard—again, again, from the top.

Go limp, Sir Marcus had said. Make them believe you’ve surrendered. Let them taste the victory. Then take it back.

So I went limp.

Every ounce of tension drained from my body. My shoulders dropped. My knees softened. My head tilted forward like a puppet whose strings had been cut.

Uncle Dave shifted his weight. I felt it—the slight redistribution of pressure. The hand on my waist loosened a fraction. The hand on my mouth adjusted.

“There we go,” he murmured. Satisfaction oozed through every syllable. “See? That’s not so—”

I drove my knee upward.

The angle was tight. The space was narrow. But I didn’t need distance. I needed force concentrated into a single point.

My kneecap connected with his groin. Hard. Direct. With every pound of desperate fury I could channel through one joint.

The sound he made wasn’t human. It was a high, thin wheeze—the noise of lungs emptying all at once. His hands flew off me. Both of them. He folded at the waist, mouth gaping, eyes bulging.

Don’t stop. Don’t think. Follow through.

Riley’s voice. The countless hours we’d drilled sequences in the dim training hall. Strike, follow, finish.

His head was bowed forward. Exposed. I grabbed the back of his skull with both hands—fingers sinking into greasy hair—and yanked downward. My knee came up again. This time it met his face.

The crunch was wet. Cartilage collapsing. His nose shattered under the impact like something brittle breaking inside a cloth sack.

Blood sprayed warm across my knee. Across my hands. Dark drops spattered the cobblestones.

He staggered sideways. His shoulder hit the alley wall. His boots tangled. I hooked my foot behind his ankle—a sweep, clean and low, exactly the way Riley and I had practiced until our shins were purple.

His legs went out from under him.

He fell. Not slowly. Not dramatically. He dropped like dead weight, and the back of his skull cracked against the cobblestones with a sound like a stone splitting.

He lay there. Curled on his side. Knees drawn to his chest. Blood poured from his ruined nose, pooling black in the weak light. His hands covered his face. Between his fingers, I could see his mouth working—opening and closing, opening and closing—but the only sound that came out was a thin, wet moan.

Then the crying started.

Actual crying. Sobs that shook his massive frame. His shoulders heaved. Tears cut tracks through the blood and grime on his cheeks.

“Please,” he blubbered. The word came out mangled through his broken nose. “Please, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

I stood over him. My chest heaved. Blood dripped from my knuckles. The canvas sack lay somewhere behind me—I’d heard it hit the ground during the struggle, heard the glass jar crack.

I looked down at this man. This predator who had chased me through dark streets. Who had cornered me. Who had put his hands on my throat. Who had told me to play.

He was crying like a child.

Something cold settled inside my chest. Not rage. Not fear. Something past both of those things. Something that lived in the space where Moonlight used to be—quiet and still and absolutely merciless.

“Get up.”

My voice didn’t shake. It didn’t waver. It came out flat. Level. The voice of someone who had been broken so many times that the pieces had fused back together wrong. Harder. Sharper.

He flinched. His sobs hitched.

“I said get up.”

He scrambled. Tried to push himself upright and slipped in his own blood. His palms skidded on the wet stones. He made it to his knees, swaying, one hand still pressed to his face. Blood streamed between his fingers and dripped off his chin.

I stepped closer. He cringed backward. The wall caught him. Now he was the one with nowhere to go.

“Look at me.”

His hand dropped. His eyes—bloodshot, swimming with tears, wide with animal terror—found mine.

“If you ever touch another woman,” I said, “I will find you. And I will kill you. Do you understand?”

He nodded. Frantic. Fast. His head bobbed like something mechanical.

“Say it.”

“I understand.” The words tumbled out in a wet rush. “I understand, I swear, I understand, please, please—”

“Run.”

He ran. On hands and knees first, scrambling like a dog, then hauling himself upright against the wall and lurching toward the mouth of the alley. He bounced off one wall, then the other, then he was gone. His footsteps faded—frantic, stumbling, receding into the night.

Silence rushed in to fill the space he left behind.

I stood in it for a few heavy heartbeats. Then my legs gave out.

I slid down the wall. The cold brick dragged at my jacket, at my hair. I hit the ground. My hands fell into my lap. They were trembling. Both of them. Shaking so hard the blood on my knuckles caught the faint light and shimmered.

My breath came in short, sharp gasps. The adrenaline was draining out of me like water from a cracked vessel, and what it left behind was hollow. Empty. A ringing numbness that started in my fingertips and spread inward.

I turned my head. The canvas sack lay a short distance away. The bread was crushed flat. The jam jar had cracked open, its dark contents leaking across the cobblestones in a thick, slow river that looked too much like blood.

My dinner. Gone.

A strange, broken laugh escaped my throat. I pressed my hand over my mouth to stop it.

My eyes dropped to my other hand. To the communication stone resting against my palm, still warm from my body heat. Finnian’s sigil glowed faintly on its surface. I’d been reaching for it when the man grabbed me. I’d been about to call for help.

But I hadn’t.

I’d handled it. Alone. With my own hands. My own training. My own body—this fragile, wolfless, ordinary body that everyone kept telling me was weak.

I stared at the stone. At Finnian’s sigil. At the call I never made.

The laugh died in my throat. I was still staring at the stone when a sudden sound cut through the night.

Clap.

Slow.

Clap.

Deliberate.

Clap.

Mocking.

The sound echoed off the alley walls—off the brick, off the cobblestones, off the dead-end wall behind me. Unhurried. Rhythmic. Each clap placed with surgical precision into the silence.

Someone was applauding.

I jerked my head up. My eyes scanned the mouth of the alley. The shadows there had thickened. The faint light from the distant street barely reached this deep.

But someone was standing there. A silhouette. Still. Watching.

They had been watching the entire time.