Mud crusted under her fingernails.

Five years had passed since Freya walked away from the howling of her kin.

Five years of bleeding knuckles and stacking fieldstone.

She thought she was buried, forgotten.

Then the wind shifted, dragging the scent of pine, winter ash, and him across her porch.

Ice coated the water in the wooden bucket.

Freya stared at it for a long moment, her breath pluming white in the freezing morning air, before she drove the base of her iron ladle through the crust.

The ice shattered with a sharp, hollow crack.

She fished out the jagged shards with bare hands, ignoring the stinging ache in her fingers.

Numbness was familiar.

Numbness was safe.

She hauled the heavy bucket back toward the hearth, her boots crunching over the frost-hardened dirt floor of her cottage.

There was no grand masonry here, no roaring, cavernous fireplaces like the ones in the northern keeps.

Just a modest pile of river stones she had hauled from the creek bed herself, cemented with mud, clay, and horsehair.

It smoked terribly when the wind blew from the east, and the drafts were merciless.

But it belonged to her.

Setting the bucket down, Freya grabbed a rusted iron poker and stirred the dying embers.

A spark caught the dry birch bark.

Smoke curled upward, smelling bitter and clean.

She knelt there, a woman in a frayed wool tunic that scratched at her collarbones, letting the meager heat thaw her hands.

Five years.

It felt like a lifetime since she had slipped out of the alpha’s fortress in the dead of night.

She hadn’t left a note.

She hadn’t packed gold or fine furs.

She had taken a hunting knife, a flint striker, and the clothes on her back, running until her lungs burned and her paws bled, crossing three territorial rivers to wash her scent away.

She traded the brutal, blood-soaked politics of a werewolf court for calluses and utter silence.

She stood, grabbing her hand ax from the table.

It was time to split the morning wood.

Outside, the forest was a damp, gray expanse of towering pines and fog.

Freyja approached the oak stump she used as a chopping block.

She set a thick log upright, gripped the worn ash handle of her ax, and swung.

The iron bit into the wood with a satisfying thwack.

She pulled it free, adjusted her stance, and swung again.

Splinters flew.

Sweat beaded on the back of her neck, mixing with the grime of a life lived entirely off the land.

This was her rhythm.

Chop, stack, survive.

No bowing to dominant males.

No avoiding the sneers of purebred omegas who thought her too feral.

No suffocating under the heavy, possessive gaze of a king who looked at her like a prize he had won in a war.

She raised the ax for a third strike.

A crow screamed from the canopy.

Then, it went dead quiet.

Freyja froze.

The ax hovered in midair, her muscles locked tight, a jarring halt to her momentum.

Forests were never truly silent.

Even in the dead of winter, there was the rustle of dry leaves, the scurry of voles, the creak of branches.

When the woods went completely mute, it meant a predator had entered the perimeter.

A big one.

She slowly lowered the ax.

Her nostrils flared, drawing in the frigid air.

She sifted through the scents of decaying pine needles, wet bark, and wood smoke.

Then she caught it.

It didn’t hit her like a romantic wave of destiny.

It hit her like a punch to the gut.

Adrenaline flooded her veins, cold and metallic, instantly making her nauseous.

Beneath the smell of the damp earth was the heavy, suffocating scent of cedarwood, old leather, and a dark, rolling ozone that made the hairs on her arms stand up.

It was a scent that carried the weight of absolute authority.

Gideon, her inner wolf, didn’t whine in submission.

It didn’t wag its tail for its missing mate.

It snarled, backing into the darkest corner of her mind, cornered and furious.

She didn’t run.

Running triggered the chase instinct.

Instead, she tightened her grip on the axe handle until her knuckles turned white.

She planted her boots in the dirt and stared at the tree line.

Footsteps approached.

They were heavy, deliberate, crushing the frozen underbrush without a single attempt at stealth.

He wanted her to know he was coming.

A shadow detached itself from the thick gloom of the pines.

Freya kept her face entirely blank, though her heart hammered a frantic, bruising rhythm against her ribs.

She refused to drop her chin.

She refused to bare her neck.

Let him see her.

Let him see the dirt smeared across her cheek, the unkempt tangle of her dark hair, the broadness of her shoulders built by years of manual labor.

She was no longer the quiet, cornered girl in his opulent halls.

“You didn’t patch the roof on the north side,” a voice rasped from the shadows.

It was a ruined voice, scraped raw, lower than she remembered, devoid of the booming arrogance that usually commanded armies.

It sounded exhausted.

Gideon stepped into the pale morning light.

He looked awful.

Freya had spent half a decade convincing herself that the Alpha King was a towering monolith of polished brutality.

She remembered heavy velvet cloaks, gleaming silver pauldrons, and a face carved from arrogant, unyielding stone.

The man standing 20 paces away was a feral ghost of that memory.

He wore no crown, no armor.

His heavy dark coat was torn at the hem, missing buttons, and caked to the knees in dried gray mud.

His dark hair was overgrown, falling into his eyes, tangled with burrs and twigs.

A jagged, angry red scar cut a fresh line across his jaw, disappearing into the heavy scruff he hadn’t bothered to shave in weeks.

He smelled faintly of wet dog, copper, and profound, bone-deep exhaustion.

He didn’t bring his guard.

There were no beta enforcers flanking him, no royal retinue waiting to drag her back in chains.

He was completely alone.

He stood there, his chest heaving slightly, staring at her with pale, hawkish eyes that looked bruised with fatigue.

“The wind comes from the east,” Freya said.

Her voice cracked.

She hadn’t spoken out loud in two months.

It sounded harsh, defensive, entirely lacking in reverence.

“The north side doesn’t need patching.”

Gideon didn’t move.

His gaze dragged over her, slow [snorts] and heavy.

He took in the heavy sevvy iron axe in her hand, the calluses on her fingers, the coarse wool of her tunic, and finally, the small crooked cottage sitting stubbornly in the clearing.

He took a step forward.

Freya instantly raised the axe, lifting it just an inch off her thigh.

The implication was unmistakable.

Gideon stopped.

A muscle jumped in his jaw.

For a fraction of a second, the alpha flashed in his eyes, a ring of predatory gold expanding in his irises, demanding her obedience, demanding she drop her weapon and hit her knees.

The pressure in the air spiked, heavy and suffocating.

Freya met it head-on.

She didn’t blink.

She anchored her boots into the frost and stared right back into the gold, pushing her own meager will against his crushing aura.

Five years ago, that look would have had her suffocating on the floor.

Now, she just felt a bitter, hateful spark of defiance.

The gold receded, swallowed back by the dark, exhausted hollows of his eyes.

“You left,” he said.

It wasn’t a question.

It was a flat, heavy accusation.

“I walked out the front gates,” Freya shot back, her tone biting.

“In broad daylight.

You were busy executing the southern lords.

It took you five years to notice your bed was empty?”

“It took me five years to slaughter my way through the rebellion you left me in the middle of,” Gideon snapped.

A flare of genuine, raw anger cracked his stoic mask.

His voice rose, tearing through the quiet clearing.

“It took me five years to secure the borders so I could leave the territory without the pack being ripped to shreds by scavengers.

And it took me six months of tracking a ghost through the deadlands to find this.”

He gestured sharply at the cottage.

“What is this, Freya?

What are you doing out here?”

“I’m living,” she said coldly.

“You’re existing in a hovel.

You’re eating roots and sleeping on freezing dirt.”

“I have a bed,” she said, lifting her chin.

“I built the frame myself.

I cut the wood.

I hauled the stones for the hearth.

It’s mine.

And it’s quiet.

Nobody gets their throat torn out in my dining hall.

Nobody uses me as a political shield.”

Gideon scoffed, a dark, bitter sound that held no humor.

He took another step forward, completely ignoring the axe she still held.

He stopped just out of arms reach.

The sheer physical heat radiating off his large frame was immense, clashing with the bitter autumn chill.

It created a strange magnetic pressure between them.

Freya hated how her body reacted.

Her pulse fluttered.

Her lungs hitched.

She shoved the traitorous physical response down, burying it under years of hard-won isolation.

You smell like dirt and pine sap, Gideon murmured, leaning in just a fraction.

He closed his eyes, drawing in a long ragged breath.

He looked like a starving man inhaling the scent of bread.

You used to smell like lavender, like my keep.

Lavender is a luxury for queens, Freya rasped, gripping the axe tighter to hide the tremor in her hands.

And your keep smelled like treason and rotting meat.

He opened his eyes.

They locked onto hers, fierce and completely stripped of his usual political armor.

I didn’t take another mate.

The words hit her like a physical blow.

Freya’s breath snagged in her throat.

She hated herself for the tiny, pathetic jolt of relief that sparked in her chest.

She ruthlessly snuffed it out.

That sounds like a failure of state, your grace, she said, coating her words in ice.

A king needs heirs.

He needs alliances, not a runaway omega who despises the court.

A king needs his mate, Gideon growled.

He stepped into her space, closing the distance completely.

The flat, dull edge of her axe head bumped against his stomach.

He didn’t even flinch.

He looked down at the iron resting against his coat, then back up to her face.

Go ahead, he said softly.

The anger was gone, replaced by a ruinous, hollow vulnerability that terrified her far more than his rage ever could.

Swing it, if it gets you to stop looking at me like I’m a monster, bury it in my ribs, Freya.

Don’t tempt me, she whispered, her voice shaking.

She wanted to push him away.

She wanted to scream at him for ruining her peace, for finding her, for dragging the chaos of his world back to her doorstep.

But her hands wouldn’t move.

She stared at the new scar on his jaw, at the heavy lines of exhaustion carved around his eyes.

He wasn’t the tyrant she had built up in her mind for half a decade.

He was just a man who had walked through hell to stand in her muddy front yard.

I brought nothing, Gideon said, his voice a low vibration that she felt in her own chest.

No chains, no guards, no royal edicts, just me.

Why?

Freya asked, the word tearing out of her throat against her will.

Because you built a house out of mud to escape my crown, he said, holding her gaze with terrifying intensity.

So I left the crown behind.

Words like that belonged in songs, not in the frozen mud of the bordering wilds.

Freya let out a harsh, barking laugh that scraped her dry throat.

It was a jagged sound, entirely devoid of amusement.

You are the crown, Gideon.

She lowered the axe, but she didn’t drop it.

The heavy iron head rested against her thigh.

You don’t get to leave it behind.

It’s stitched into your skin.

It’s in the way you walk, the way you look at my roof and decide it needs fixing.

You didn’t come here to be a man.

You came here to claim a runaway asset.

Gideon didn’t flinch at the venom in her voice.

He just looked at her, his broad shoulders slumping a fraction of an inch.

Up close, the damage of the last five years was violently apparent.

There were gray hairs threading through his dark beard.

The skin around his eyes was bruised with a chronic punishing lack of sleep.

“I came here because my chest has felt empty for five winters,” he said.

His voice was a low rough scrape of sound.

“I came because I couldn’t remember what quiet sounded like.

I came because you are my mate, Freya, not my asset.”

She hated the way her pulse jumped.

She hated the treacherous instinctual whine of her inner wolf, desperately wanting to close the final foot of distance between them and press her nose against his scent gland.

She clamped down on the feeling, burying it under a thick layer of cynical preservation.

“If you’re not a king right now, then you’re just a stranger on my land,” Freya said coldly.

She pointed the handle of her axe toward the massive oak block.

“And strangers don’t eat for free.

Finish splitting the wood.

If you bleed out from exhaustion before you finish, I’ll drag your carcass into the trees for the scavengers.”

She turned her back on him.

It was the most dangerous thing she could do around an alpha, a deliberate blatant display of disrespect that would have earned a lesser wolf a broken neck.

Her spine tingled, every nerve ending screaming at her to face the predator.

Gideon didn’t snap.

He didn’t growl.

Behind her, she heard the heavy wet drag of his coat being pulled off.

Then, the dull thud of the axe biting into the oak stump.

Freya walked into her cottage and shut the heavy wooden door.

Her hands were shaking so violently she could barely slide the iron bolt into place.

She pressed her forehead against the rough-hewn planks, squeezing her eyes shut.

She dragged in a ragged breath, the smell of his dark ozone and cedar scent clinging to her clothes, overpowering the smell of the wood smoke.

Outside, the steady rhythm of the axe echoed through the clearing.

Thwack.

Thwack.

Thwack.

It wasn’t the powerful, machine-like rhythm of the warrior she remembered.

The strikes were uneven.

Sometimes the axe caught in the grain, and she could hear him grunting, forcing the blade free with sheer stubborn leverage.

He was struggling.

The great Alpha King, conqueror of the southern territories, was struggling to split wet pine.

She busied herself.

She refused to look out the single cloudy glass window.

She threw a handful of dried root vegetables and a tough piece of salted venison into the iron pot swinging over the hearth.

The water began to boil, sending up a starchy, earthy steam.

She swept the dirt floor with a bound bundle of birch twigs.

She wiped down the scarred wooden table.

She did everything she could to ignore the gasping, uneven breaths drifting through the cracks in the walls.

Two hours later, the chopping stopped.

A heavy knock rattled the door.

Freya unbolted it and pulled it open.

Gideon stood on the threshold, his arms loaded with a massive stack of split firewood.

His thin linen shirt was soaked in sweat and clinging to his torso.

He was shivering.

It wasn’t a subtle tremor.

His large frame was shaking violently against the biting autumn chill.

He didn’t ask for permission.

He stepped past her, bringing the overwhelming scent of exertion, cold air, and sharp pine into the claustrophobic space of her home.

He dumped the wood into the stone bin beside the hearth.

When he turned around, the cramped reality of the cottage settled over them.

Gideon was too large for the space.

His head nearly brushed the low rafters.

His shoulders blocked the meager light from the window.

The cottage had been Freya’s sanctuary, perfectly sized for one ghost.

Now, it felt like a cage with a bear trapped inside.

He looked around.

He took in the single chair, the small table, the meager pot of thin stew bubbling over the fire.

His eyes finally landed on her bed in the corner, a rough wooden frame strung with rope topped with a canvas sack stuffed with dry straw and two scratchy wool blankets.

His jaw tightened.

A muscle leaped in his cheek.

“Don’t.”

Freya warned, her voice sharp.

“Don’t look at it like it’s a tragedy.

I sleep better on that straw than I ever did on your silk sheets.”

Gideon tore his gaze away from the bed.

He looked at her hands, taking in the cracked cuticles, the calluses, the dirt embedded deep in her skin.

“You shouldn’t have had to choose between silk and a dirt floor, Freya.

That was my failure.”

He swayed, just slightly.

His knees buckled for a fraction of a second before he caught himself, bracing a heavy hand against the stone mantle of the hearth.

Freya frowned.

The smell of the cottage shifted.

The heavy scent of wet wool and wood smoke was suddenly pierced by something sharp, metallic, and sweet.

“Rot.

You’re bleeding.”

She said, her voice dropping its defensive edge.

“It’s old.”

Gideon muttered, keeping his face turned toward the fire.

His knuckles were white against the stone.

“Wolves heal.

If it’s old, it shouldn’t smell like a slaughterhouse.”

Freya crossed the small room.

Survival instincts overrode her anger.

Sickness in the dead of winter was a death sentence, and a rotting corpse in her living room was a liability.

“Take the shirt off.

Freya, leave it.

Take it off, Gideon, or get out of my house.”

He didn’t argue.

He lacked the strength for it.

Gideon reached for the hem of his ruined linen shirt and pulled it over his head.

The fabric peeled away from his skin with a sickening wet tearing sound.

Fraya sucked in a sharp breath.

His torso was a map of brutal violence.

Faded silver burn scars crisscrossed his chest and shoulders, remnants of old wars.

But that wasn’t what made the bile rise in her throat.

On his right side, just below his ribs, was a jagged ragged tear the size of her hand.

The flesh around it was an angry purplish black radiating a vicious heat.

Yellowish fluid seeped from the edges mixing with fresh bright red blood.

“Silver weapons.”

Gideon rasped swaying on his feet.

He leaned his shoulder against the chimney to stay upright.

“Rebel ambush near the border 2 weeks ago.

The silver shards are still in the muscle.

My healing factor is trying to close the wound over the metal but it keeps tearing open.”

“You rode for 2 weeks with silver rotting in your gut.”

Fraya stared at him appalled.

The sheer agonizing pain of it should have put him in a coma.

“You’re an idiot.

Sit down before you fall and crack your skull on my hearth.”

She shoved the single wooden chair toward him.

He collapsed into it, his head dropping back, his eyes sliding shut.

Fraya moved quickly.

Panic was a useless emotion out here.

She grabbed a small wooden box from a shelf.

Inside was her meager medical supply.

Needles carved from bone, thick linen thread, dried yarrow, and a small jar of raw alcohol she had distilled from potatoes.

She poured water from the boiling pot into a clay basin, grabbed a clean scrap of linen, and knelt beside the chair.

“This is going to hurt.”

She said, her voice flat.

“I deserve it.”

He whispered not opening his eyes.

“Yes, you do.”

She pressed the hot wet cloth against the festering wound.

Gideon’s entire body went rigid.

A low, guttural snarl rattled in his chest, a purely instinctual reaction to the agony, but he didn’t pull away.

His hands gripped the edges of the wooden chair so hard the timber groaned and splintered.

Freya worked with ruthless efficiency.

She ignored the trembling of his muscles.

She ignored the suffocating heat radiating off his feverish skin.

She cleaned away the corrupted blood and pus until she could see the raw, torn muscle fibers beneath.

Using a pair of iron tongs she normally used for the fire, she sterilized the tips in the flames.

“Hold still,” she commanded.

She dug the blunt iron tips into the open wound.

Gideon choked on a gasp, his spine arching violently.

Freya pinned his hip down with her free hand, pressing her weight against him, and fished blindly in the hot, slick muscle.

Metal scraped against metal.

She clamped down and pulled.

A jagged, twisted piece of silver shrapnel, black with corrupted blood, dropped clattering onto the dirt floor.

Gideon’s head dropped to his chest.

He was panting, his breath hitching irregularly.

“Two more,” Freya said softly.

The anger had drained out of her, replaced by a heavy, hollow ache.

She dug in again.

He didn’t make a sound this time, just weathered the torture in silent, crushing agony.

When the final piece of silver hit the floor, the tension in his body broke.

He slumped forward, his forehead resting heavily against Freya’s shoulder.

She froze.

His skin was burning up.

The smell of his sweat and blood was overwhelming.

Her hands, covered to the wrists in his blood, hovered awkwardly in the air.

“You caged me,” she whispered into the quiet room, her voice trembling.

The words she had swallowed for five years finally spilled out.

“You put me in a tower.

You dressed me in silk and expected me to sit perfectly still while you killed people.

I couldn’t breathe in that keep, Gideon.

You looked at me like I was a porcelain vase you were terrified of breaking.”

He didn’t move his head from her shoulder.

His breathing was shallow.

“I thought I was protecting you,” he rasped, his voice barely audible.

“The court was full of vipers.

I thought if I put you high enough, they couldn’t bite you.”

“Safe is just another word for buried,” she said, threading the bone needle with steady, blood-slicked fingers.

“I am a wolf, not a doll.

I would rather freeze out here than suffocate in there.”

“I know,” he breathed.

“I realized it the day I broke down the door to your chambers and found them empty.

The air in the room was completely stale.

It felt like a tomb.”

He slowly turned his head, his rough cheek brushing against the scratchy wool of her tunic.

“I built a kingdom, Freya, and I lost the only thing that made it worth ruling.”

Freya swallowed hard.

She pushed him back firmly, breaking the contact.

“Sit up.

I have to stitch this before you bleed out on my floor.”

He complied, leaning back in the chair.

His eyes remained locked on her face as she worked.

She poured the raw potato alcohol directly over the cleaned wound.

He hissed, his jaw clenching tightly, but he didn’t look away from her.

She pierced his skin with the bone needle, pull, tie, cut, pull, tie, cut.

The brutal, rhythmic work grounded her.

It kept her from looking into his exhausted, bruised eyes.

“I’m not going back, Gideon,” she said quietly as she tied off the final knot.

She wiped the excess blood away with a damp cloth.

“I won’t wear those dresses.

I won’t sit at those tables.

I don’t want you to.

She finally looked up.

He was watching her.

His golden eyes stripped of all their usual arrogance.

There was no alpha dominance pressing down on her.

Just a man entirely exposed asking for mercy from the woman he had wronged.

I told you, he said softly, his heavy hand slowly lifting.

His knuckles brushed against her cheek smudging a streak of his own blood across her dirt smudged skin.

His thumb traced the sharp line of her jaw.

I left the crown behind.

I don’t know how to be just a man.

But I want to learn.

If you’ll let me stay.

Freya stared at him.

The wind howled furiously outside rattling the heavy wooden shutters threatening to tear the roof off the little cottage she had built with her bare hands.

The fire popped and hissed in the hearth.

She didn’t lean away from his touch.

She closed her eyes letting out a long shaky breath and leaned into the rough calloused warmth of his palm.

It wasn’t a surrender.

It wasn’t a fairy tale forgiveness.

It was messy, painful and terrifying.

You’re sleeping on the floor, she whispered.

The ghost of a smile touched his cracked lips.

Yes, my mate.

The storm outside raged but the war inside the cottage had finally found a fragile messy truce.

Gideon and Freya’s journey is just beginning and surviving the wild might be harder than surviving the court.

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Do you think the rebel wolves will track Gideon to Freya’s door?

Stay tuned.