Nicholas’s POV

The sun was already brutal by eight in the morning.

I stood at the edge of the field and watched them size each other up from opposite ends of the field.

*Good.* Tension was productive. Tension meant they were paying attention.

Roman appeared at my shoulder around nine. He always did that — materialized without a sound, like he’d been standing there for ten minutes already.

"One of the Iron Stone men filed for sick leave this morning," he said. "Claims his old injury flared up."

I didn’t look at him.

"Which injury?"

"His file says a shoulder wound. Combat-related. Two years ago."

I watched a pair of my soldiers attempt a takedown drill on two Iron Stone fighters. The Iron Stone men reversed it in about four seconds. My men hit the dirt.

"Roman." I stopped him before he turned away. "The sick leave soldier. See if he’s actually in his quarters."

Roman left without another word. I turned back to the field.

I made a decision, right there in the sun, watching my men dust themselves off and line up to go again.

---

The morning stretched long and merciless.

I ran the drills myself. Not because I needed to — my captains were more than capable of running this integration exercise without me standing over them — but because standing still had never agreed with me, and because the movement kept my head clear.

Or it was supposed to.

By the time the sun had climbed fully overhead, something was starting to feel off.

I noticed it the way you notice a sound you can’t immediately place — the faintest wrongness at the edge of your awareness. A heaviness behind my eyes. A lag between thought and reaction that I wasn’t used to.

I ignored it.

I called the next rotation. Demonstrated a block sequence. Corrected a soldier’s footwork with one hand on his shoulder, adjusted his stance, sent him back in.

The heaviness got worse.

The sun pressed down on the top of my head like something physical, like a hand pushing. The dust kicked up from the field sat hot in my throat every time I breathed in. I blinked once. Twice. The edges of the training ground blurred for a moment, then sharpened again.

*Fine. I’m fine.*

I set my jaw and kept moving.

"Alpha." One of my senior fighters — Dmitri, who’d been with me for six years and earned the right to say things other people didn’t dare — came up beside me during a water break. He kept his voice low. "You eating today?"

"Why."

"Because you look like you’re about to go down."

"I’m not."

He let it go. He was smart enough to let it go.

I walked to the far end of the field, away from the main body of the training exercise, and stood for a moment with my back to the group. The world tilted slightly to the left. I planted my feet wider and waited for it to pass.

It passed. Mostly.

I turned around and went back to work.

---

By the time early afternoon rolled around, the ground had started doing something wrong.

It wasn’t moving — I knew that. I knew it was stationary. But my eyes were sending a different message, telling me the packed dirt was rising and falling in a slow, lazy wave that made me want to put a hand out and brace against something.

I didn’t. I kept my arms at my sides and my face blank and I stood at the edge of a sparring circle and watched two men go at it and I told myself it was the heat.

It was probably the heat.

*It’s just the heat. You’ve trained in worse.* 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

The back of my neck was soaked. That was normal. My heartbeat was a little uneven — that was less normal. I could feel it misfiring in my chest, out of rhythm, like something had gotten its timing wrong.

I breathed out slowly through my nose.

One of the Iron Stone fighters landed a solid hit on my man and the sound of it — fist connecting with jaw — cracked through the thick afternoon air. My man stumbled back two steps. Caught himself.

Good recovery. I should say something. I should—

The world lurched.

Not dramatically. Not enough for anyone watching to notice. Just a slow, nauseating tilt that moved through my skull like water sloshing in a sealed container. I locked my knees and stood through it.

"Alpha."

I recognized the voice. Young soldier. Mine. He’d been on training rotations for about three months.

"What." My voice came out fine. Steady. That much I could still manage.

"Are you — is everything okay?"

I turned my head to look at him. He was standing a few feet away with his water canteen in his hands and his face doing something careful and worried that he was clearly trying to hide.

I didn’t have the patience to reassure him.

"Run the next set," I said. "You’re leading."

He hesitated for exactly one second too long.

I looked at him.

He went.

I turned back to face the field and let out a slow breath through my teeth. The pressure behind my eyes had become something close to pain — not sharp, not acute, but constant and grinding, like something was slowly closing a fist around the inside of my skull.

I hadn’t eaten since yesterday morning.

That was probably relevant.

I hadn’t slept. That was also relevant.

Neither of those things were new. Neither of those things had ever put me down before.

But my body felt foreign to me right now in a way I didn’t have words for. Like I was operating it from a slight distance. Like the connection between intention and action had developed a delay I couldn’t correct for.

I needed to get through the afternoon. That was all. Get through the afternoon, find out what Roman had learned about the missing soldier, and then deal with everything else.

*One thing at a time.*

---

Roman’s voice hit me before I saw him.

"Alpha—"

I turned toward the sound. He was jogging across the field toward me, cutting between clusters of soldiers, moving with enough urgency that a few of the men near him tracked him with their eyes.

The world was doing the tilt again. I stood very still and waited for him to reach me.

He came to a stop three feet away. He was breathing a little hard. His expression was doing something I didn’t have the processing power right now to read correctly.

"The Iron Stone soldier," he said. "The one on sick leave."

"And?"

"He’s not in his quarters."

The words landed somewhere in the back of my skull. I heard them. I understood them. But the translation between understanding and response took longer than it should have.

The pain behind my eyes detonated.

Roman said something. His mouth was moving. I couldn’t hear it correctly — his voice was reaching me through something thick and muffled, like he was speaking from the other side of a wall.

He took a step toward me.

I opened my mouth.

What came out wasn’t words.

It was blood.

It hit the dust at my feet before I’d even processed what had happened — dark, immediate, wrong — and then the ground came up to meet me, and then there was nothing at all.