Irina’s POV

“I’ll go, too.”

"You’re not coming."

Roman said it like it was already decided. He didn’t even look at me — he was already moving down the hallway, jacket half-buttoned, jaw set hard.

"Roman—"

"You’re pregnant." He threw it over his shoulder. "End of discussion."

Andrei was right behind him, and he at least had the decency to look apologetic. He gave me a quick, tight smile — the kind that meant *I agree with him but I feel bad about it* — and kept walking.

I fell into step behind them anyway.

"I said—" Roman started.

"I heard you." I kept my voice steady. "I heard both of you. And I’m still coming."

Roman stopped walking. He turned around slowly, and his eyes dropped to my stomach for exactly one second before coming back up to my face. That one second said everything he wasn’t saying out loud.

I met his gaze head-on.

"If you want me to call myself the future luna," I said, "then you have to let me act like one."

Silence.

Andrei looked at Roman. Roman looked at me. Something shifted in his expression — not softened, exactly, but recalculated. He pressed his mouth into a thin line.

"You stay on the upper level," he said finally. "You don’t come down. You don’t engage. You stand back and you watch."

"Fine."

"I mean it, Irina."

"I said fine."

He held my gaze for another beat. Then he turned and kept walking, faster now. I followed.

——

We heard it before we saw it.

The noise hit us from two corridors away — something between a roar and a crash, the kind of sound that made your spine go rigid before your brain even caught up with what it meant. Metal against metal. Bodies hitting ground. And under all of it, low and animal, the unmistakable sound of wolves.

I pushed through the door to the upper walkway and my stomach dropped.

The training ground below looked like it had been torn apart.

The torches along the perimeter walls were still burning, throwing orange light across everything — the overturned equipment racks, the cracked stone flooring, the bodies of our soldiers scattered across the ground in ways that made me look away fast. The air was thick with something sharp and metallic. I gripped the railing.

Wolves. Everywhere. They had shifted — the Iron Stone warriors, dozens of them — and they were moving through the training ground like a pack on a hunt, not like soldiers caught in a brawl. This was organized. Or as organized as violence ever gets.

Our people had been caught completely off guard. I could see it in the gaps — the ones who’d been taken down before they’d even had the chance to shift, the ones clutching wounds, the ones still trying to regroup and finding no ground to stand on. The Iron Stone wolves were bigger than I remembered. Or maybe it was just the numbers. Maybe it was just the darkness making everything worse.

Roman came up beside me for half a second.

"Stay here." It wasn’t a request.

I barely had time to say anything before he was already gone.

Both of them moved to the stairwell at the end of the walkway. I watched Roman strip off his jacket in one motion — watched the shift ripple through him, fast and brutal, the way it always looks from a distance, like something breaking — and then a massive grey wolf hit the bottom of the stairs and launched himself into the chaos without slowing down.

Andrei was two seconds behind him. His wolf was leaner, darker, but just as fast.

And then the noise swallowed them both.

I stood at the railing with my hands locked around the iron bar and watched.

Below me, the fight reorganized itself around two new points. Roman’s wolf crashed through the outer edge of the Iron Stone group like something thrown from a great height, and three of them peeled away to meet him. Andrei went left, cutting toward a cluster of our soldiers who were being pushed back against the wall, and the sound he made — low and warning and enormous — actually made some of the Iron Stone wolves flinch back.

But there were so many of them.

I counted. I couldn’t help it. My eyes kept moving, kept tallying, kept trying to make the numbers add up to something manageable.

They didn’t.

One of our soldiers went down hard near the center of the ground. Another was dragged back behind an overturned rack. Someone was shouting orders that no one could hear over the noise.

My knuckles had gone white on the railing.

*Nicholas should be here.* The thought was involuntary and it hurt, the same way touching a bruise hurts — familiar and immediate and not surprising at all. *If Nicholas were here this would already be over. If Nicholas were here they wouldn’t have dared.*

But Nicholas was lying in a bed upstairs with his lips the color of ash.

And the people doing this — the Iron Stone wolves going through our soldiers like a tide going through sand — they knew that. That was the point. That was exactly the point.

They’d been waiting for this.

My throat was tight. I forced myself to keep watching, because there was nothing else I could do and looking away felt like a betrayal of everyone down there.

Roman’s wolf had pinned one of them. Andrei had two off their feet. The tide was slowing — barely, fractionally, but it was slowing — and some of our soldiers had found their footing and were pushing back.

But in the center of the ground, the largest of the Iron Stone wolves hadn’t moved.

It was just standing there.

I’d noticed it before, half-consciously — the way the others kept moving around it, moving *with* it, the way every attack seemed to flow outward from where it stood. It wasn’t fighting. It was directing. And it was holding the center of the training ground like it owned it, like it had already decided the outcome and was just waiting for everyone else to catch up.

A big wolf. Pale grey, almost white in the torchlight, with a dark patch across one shoulder.

I knew that wolf. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

The shape of it. The way it held itself — that particular stillness that was never actually still, the coiled readiness underneath it, the thing that had always made the hair on the back of my neck stand up even when he was in human form.

My breath stopped somewhere in my chest.

The wolf turned its head.

Slowly. Almost casually. Like it could feel someone watching from above.

It looked up.

Those eyes — pale and cold and sharper than they had any right to be — found me on the walkway like I was the only thing in the room.

It was Alexei.