After His Rejection, the Lycan Prince Claimed Me

Training started six weeks after Milo could sleep through the night without waking every two hours.

Cassius didn't suggest it. He waited until I asked. That was the first thing I noticed about him—he had an unusual talent for waiting. Not the waiting of someone who is being patient with you. The waiting of someone who already knows what's coming and sees no reason to rush it.

I asked on a Tuesday morning, standing in the doorway of his study with Milo on my hip and my voice completely flat. "When do we start?"

He looked up from his desk. "Tomorrow."

That was it.

The training ground was a stretch of open field at the territory's northern edge, backed by tree line, far enough from the main house that noise didn't carry. Cassius showed up the first morning in worn training clothes with no ceremony and no speech. He shifted, waited for me to do the same, and then he ran.

I ran after him.

My Lycan wolf was enormous and still half-stranger to me. She moved differently than a standard wolf—heavier through the shoulders, longer stride, her paws leaving deeper prints in the frost-hardened ground. I kept miscalculating my own reach. I kept overshooting turns. The first week I fell down more than I care to admit.

Cassius never commented on the falls. He just circled back and waited for me to get up.

By the third month, I stopped falling.

By the sixth month, I started winning.

Not often. Not easily. But the wins came, and each one felt less like luck and more like understanding—like learning the grammar of a language I'd been born speaking but never taught to read.

The sparring session that changed something happened on a grey morning in early spring, frost still on the grass, sky the color of old pewter. We'd been at it for forty minutes. Cassius was faster than his size suggested, and he had twenty years of Lycan training on me, and he did not go easy. He pushed until I was breathing in ragged pulls and my muscles burned and my wolf was furious.

She stopped being furious and became something else.

I don't know exactly when it happened. One moment I was reacting—blocking, retreating, calculating—and the next I simply moved. No thought. No strategy. Just the weight of my body and the reach of my claws and the particular angle of his shoulder that left him open for exactly half a second.

I took it.

I hit him low and hard and drove him into the ground, and then I was standing over him, all four paws planted, my aura radiating outward without any intention on my part—just blazing, silver-white and enormous, filling the clearing like a second sun.

Cassius lay flat on his back in the frost-flattened grass. He looked up at me.

"There she is," he said. Completely composed. Like he'd been waiting for this exact moment and was simply noting its arrival.

I held the pin for two full seconds before I shifted back.

I was on my hands and knees in the grass, breathing hard, heart slamming against my ribs. The cold air hit my skin and I became aware, slowly, that I was grinning. Not performing a smile. Not calculating whether it was appropriate. Just—grinning, with my hands in the frost and my lungs burning and something loose and real moving through my chest.

I laughed.

It came out rough and surprised and completely unguarded, and I couldn't have stopped it if I'd tried.

Cassius sat up. He brushed frost off his sleeve. He looked at me for a moment with an expression I couldn't fully read—something careful and quiet in it—and then he looked back at his sleeve.

"Good session," he said.

He pulled out the small training log he kept in his jacket pocket and made a note. Then he stood, offered me a hand up, and we walked back toward the house.

He didn't mention the laugh. He didn't make it a moment. He just let it be what it was and moved on.

I thought about that for a long time afterward. The particular mercy of someone who sees you unguarded and simply doesn't weaponize it.

It was such a small thing.

It shouldn't have meant as much as it did.

---

Back in Nightshade, I heard nothing. I chose to hear nothing. I had no pack link anymore—the bond was ash, the connection severed—and I did not reach for information about a place I had decided was behind me.

But Cassius's territory had ears, and occasionally things filtered through whether I sought them or not.

Asher's wolf was struggling. That was the word his people used. Struggling. His aura was inconsistent, his shifts incomplete. His Beta Roland Voss had begun managing an increasing share of pack business.

I filed it away.

I did not feel satisfaction. I did not feel grief. I felt the particular coolness of a woman who has stopped waiting for an apology and started building something that doesn't require one.

Milo was learning to walk. He took his first steps toward Cassius, which made Cassius go very still and look slightly away for a moment before he crouched down and held out his hands.

I watched from the doorway and said nothing.

Some things didn't need words.