His Beast's Bride

[Amber’s POV]

"You missed one." Jonah points with the hand not holding his gathering basket—the one I gave him an hour ago, still swinging empty from two fingers like a prop he hasn't figured out the purpose of. "Right there. No—there. Gods, Amber, do you actually need glasses, or is this just what happens when your bloodline bottoms out?"

He's ten. He delivers this the way other children deliver knock-knock jokes—with bright-eyed enthusiasm and total confidence in the punchline.

I find the cluster he's pointing at and add the berries to my basket. My fingers are stiff with cold, the skin across my knuckles cracked and dry, and the thorns have opened three small cuts along my palm that I've stopped noticing. "Got it. Anything else, or are you done supervising?"

"I'm not supervising." He kicks at a root, hands shoved into his pockets now that the basket has been demoted to elbow cargo. "I'm waiting. Mother said midday. That was two hours ago, and she's going to take it out on me, even though you're the one picking berries like it's your first day with fingers."

The forest edge catches the last of the afternoon light in long amber bars across the undergrowth. Pine air, cold earth, the faint wet-rot smell of leaves breaking down beneath frost.

I catalog all of it—a technique I have been perfecting since I was old enough to understand that the alternative was cataloging every small, precise way this household reminds me I am borrowed goods.

"Did you see Mira yesterday?" he says, not waiting for an answer, because Jonah has never once in his life waited for an answer. "Full shift. Clean run. No stumbling, no half-forms. Mother actually smiled."

He lets that land, then glances sideways at me with the particular generosity of a child twisting a wing off a butterfly. "Mira's two years younger than you. Just—you know. In case you weren't keeping track."

My teeth find the inside of my cheek. I bite down and hold it. "I'm keeping track."

"Mother told her some wolves just never shift. That your blood was thin before your parents—" He shrugs, an ugly little adult gesture on a ten-year-old frame. "Well. You know."

"I know." My hands keep moving. Thorns, berries, basket. The rhythm of it is the only thing keeping the rest of me locked down, because what lives beneath the rhythm is a hot, compressed thing I have spent years learning not to show him. My jaw aches from clenching. "Your mother has a lot of theories about my blood."

"They're not theories." He sounds genuinely offended. "Your father ran with the Crestfall pack. That's barely a pack—second-tier, maybe third. And your mother was—what was the word she used?" He screws up his face in imitation of someone thinking. "Deficient. That was it. Deficient stock."

Something behind my ribs goes tight and hard, like a fist closing. I set the basket down carefully, because if I don't put it down I am going to grip the handle until it snaps. My breath comes out slow through my nose. "Jonah. Pick up your basket and actually put something in it, or I'm telling Isolde you spent the whole afternoon doing nothing."

"Go ahead. Mother will believe me over you." He says this without malice, which is the entire problem—it's not a threat, it's a weather report. Accurate, impersonal, impossible to argue with. "She didn't even want to keep you. Did you know that? After your parents died, it was just the kin-claim law. She told Mira if she'd had a real choice—"

He leaves the sentence right there, like a door held open onto a room I've already spent years living in.

I know how it ends. I have always known how it ends. What I have never been able to figure out is why it still makes my throat close up like this—this sharp, involuntary constriction, as if my body hasn't gotten the message that we stopped expecting anything from these people a long time ago.

I pick up the basket. "Four more clusters. Then we go back."

"Fine." He wanders toward the tree line, dragging his boots through the underbrush with the bored entitlement of someone who has never once been asked to hurry. "Just—faster, maybe? Some of us have actual lives to—"

The wolf comes through the trees like a detonation. No sound first—no warning growl, no crack of underbrush. Just sudden mass and velocity, a dark-pelted shape clearing the ground between the tree line and Jonah in a single explosive stride.

It is enormous. It is faster than anything I have ever seen move. And it is aimed directly at the boy who is standing six feet away from me with his mouth still open around a sentence he will never finish.

My body moves before my brain catches up. I throw myself sideways into its path, basket gone, knife already in my hand—the small gathering blade, not a weapon, barely enough to gut a fish—and the collision hits me center-mass like a falling wall.

I lose my footing. Don't care. The wolf pivots toward me and I am already scrambling upright, blood singing in my ears, every nerve I have alive and screaming the same thing: keep its eyes on you, keep its teeth off him, do not stop moving.

I have no shifted form. I have no training worth the name. What I have is a berry knife and twelve years of learning exactly how little it takes to be disposable, and the furious, irrational refusal to let that be true right now.

The wolf feints left. I read it wrong. Jaws close on my shoulder and the world whites out—a pain so total it has no edges, no shape, just blinding noise in every nerve. I drive the blade at its flank and miss. It shakes me like something already dead and I go down hard, one knee cracking against a root, vision swimming.