Irina’s POV

I shouldn’t have been watching Maxim so closely.

That was the mistake.

Everyone else in that hall had their eyes on Nicolas. Three hundred people holding their breath, watching the alpha king deliver a verdict that was going to ripple through every pack on the continent. That was where you were supposed to look.

I was watching Maxim’s hands.

The cuffs. The way his wrists moved. Subtle—barely anything, just a micro-rotation every few seconds, like he was testing something. Like he’d been testing it for a long time and was waiting for the math to work out.

*He’s been working at them,* I thought.

And then Nicolas said *do you have anything to say* and Maxim looked past him—looked straight at me—and his face did that thing where the performance went away and there was nothing underneath but ugly.

*She’s going to ruin you.*

His voice was calm. Clear. Almost conversational.

*She ruins everything she touches.*

I stood there and felt my jaw tighten and thought: *I’ve heard this before. I’ve heard this exact speech. I don’t have to do anything with it.*

And then the cuffs came apart.

---

It happened in pieces that my brain couldn’t put together fast enough.

Maxim’s wrists. Free.

The first crack—his bones, the sound of a shift starting, that horrible wet pop that I’d heard exactly once before at a pack rally and never wanted to hear again. The sound of a body deciding to become something else.

Too fast. It was happening too fast.

He wasn’t even fully shifted when he was moving.

Something between man and wolf—that horrible in-between state that only lasted a second but looked like a nightmare—and then the wolf was there. Dark. Massive. The kind of wolf that came from an alpha who’d been training since he was twelve years old and had never once lost a fight he’d chosen on purpose.

Three hundred people exploded.

Screaming. Movement. The front rows folding backward like something had hit them. Guards scrambling. Andrei shouting something to Roman that got swallowed in the noise.

Maxim was locked onto Nicolas.

Not me. Not the room. Nicolas. The alpha king standing at the front of the hall who had just stripped him of everything.

*Move,* I told myself. *Get back. Get out of the way.*

My feet didn’t move.

I watched Maxim coil—that specific tightening before a wolf launches, the haunches dropping, the weight shifting back—and my brain was doing the math too slowly, the math that said *Nicolas is fast, Nicolas is always fast, he’ll shift in time, he doesn’t need—*

Maxim launched.

And I—

God.

I don’t know what I was thinking. I genuinely don’t know. Some part of me had apparently decided at some point, in the last three weeks, that Nicolas’s continued existence was something I had a personal stake in, because my body moved before the thought finished.

I stepped into the gap.

Not intentionally. Not heroically. Just—*moved.* Some stupid animal impulse that overrode every self-preservation instinct I’d spent a year cultivating.

The impact was—

A wall. It was like getting hit by a wall that was also moving at forty miles an hour.

The air left my body all at once. Not slowly. Not with any kind of dignity. Just—gone. Completely. My feet left the ground and the hall went sideways and I was flying, which was not a thing that was supposed to happen, and then I stopped flying because the floor found me and it found me hard.

The world went white.

Then gray.

Then something in my shoulder screamed and I understood that I was on the ground and I’d been on the ground for some period of time and breathing was currently a complicated process.

*Get up,* I thought. *Get up, get up, get—*

I pushed.

My arm buckled.

Wrong arm. Don’t use that arm.

I rolled. Found my hands. Found my knees. The hall was—loud. So loud. The sound hit me in waves, indistinct, like I was underwater and someone was shouting from above the surface. I could hear the snarling—both of them now, two wolves, the sound of it filling the high stone ceiling and bouncing back down.

*Nicolas.*

I got one knee under me and lifted my head.

They were in the middle of the hall.

The crowd had shoved itself to the walls, three hundred people pressed as far back as the stone allowed, and in the center there was just—space. And them. Two wolves, one dark and one—*Nicolas,* that was Nicolas, the alpha king had shifted and he was enormous, bigger than I’d understood from a distance, the kind of size that made you recalibrate everything.

Maxim was fast.

Nicolas was faster.

But Maxim was desperate, and desperate did things that fast didn’t account for. I could see it in the way he moved—not clean, not tactical, just *forward,* always forward, like he’d decided that stopping meant losing and he couldn’t afford to lose.

Nicolas caught him.

Straight on. The sound of the collision was—I couldn’t describe the sound. It was physical. You felt it in your sternum.

They went down together.

Teeth and claws and the specific, vicious efficiency of two alphas who had both been doing this their entire lives. Maxim got a grip on Nicolas’s shoulder—I saw it, saw the blood—and something clenched hard in my chest, something I didn’t have a name for, something that felt like *no.*

Nicolas shook him loose.

The way a dog shakes a toy, except the toy was a two-hundred-pound alpha wolf and the shake was calculated and brutal and—

Maxim hit the floor.

He didn’t get up right away.

He got up anyway. That was the thing about him. I should have known—I’d known him my whole life, I knew what he was made of—he got up anyway, bleeding from three places I could see and probably more I couldn’t, and he squared himself at Nicolas and I thought: *he’s going to die. Right here. He’s going to make Nicolas kill him in front of everyone.*

Nicolas was waiting.

Still. Absolutely still. The way a very large, very dangerous thing goes still when it’s already decided how this ends and is just letting the other party catch up.

Maxim looked at him.

Then—something changed.

Some calculation completed. Some survival instinct that had been buried under three years of never losing finally surfaced and said *not this one.* Not today. Not this fight.

He bolted.

Not toward the door. Toward the side wall—the narrow service passage that the guards used, the one that was currently unmanned because everyone who should have been standing there was pressed against the opposite wall trying not to be in the way of two alpha wolves.

A guard moved to block him.

Maxim went through him. Not around. Through. The guard hit the wall and didn’t get up.

And then he was gone.

Into the passage. Into the dark. Gone.

The hall was suddenly, completely silent.

Three hundred people. Not one sound.

Nicolas stood in the center of the hall and held the silence for exactly three seconds.

Then he shifted back.

It was—different, watching it from this direction. I’d never watched him shift before. The way it moved through him, that same horrible-beautiful fluidity going in reverse, man instead of wolf, and then he was standing there in what was left of his shirt and the blood on his shoulder was bright and real and he was looking at me.

Not at the passage where Maxim had disappeared.

At me.

Something happened in his face when our eyes met. Something that went through several things very fast—relief, maybe, or something that lived next to relief—and then he was moving.

I realized I was still on my knees.

I tried to stand up.

The room tilted.

*Oh,* I thought distantly. *That’s not great.*

My shoulder. Something about my shoulder was wrong. And my ribs—I did a quick inventory while the room kept tilting—my ribs were doing something that I was going to have to deal with at some point, just not right now, right now I needed to stand up.

I got one foot under me.

The world went sideways again. Not the room—inside. Like someone had turned off a light.

*Don’t,* I told myself. *Don’t you dare.*

My knee hit the floor.

And then the hall—the noise—the stone—all of it—

It went quiet.

Not loud-quiet. The other kind. The kind that meant something was shutting down.

The last thing I saw was Nicolas.

Running.

Not walking. Running. Across the hall with blood on his shoulder and what was left of his shirt and that expression—that specific, unmistakable expression that I had never seen on his face before, that I had not known his face could make.

*Terrified.*

The alpha king was terrified.

I thought: *I should tell him I’m fine.*

And then I stopped thinking at all.