Chapter 5 — First Blood

Alaric I don't know how long I stood there with my fingers on a stranger's chin before I remembered I was running a recruitment, not auditioning for whatever this was. Every instinct I owned should have told me something was wrong the second I caught his scent in that line. Instead it told me something was *right,* in a way that made no sense at all for a boy half my size wearing a dead enforcer's surname like armor he hadn't earned yet. I let go of his chin like it had cost me something. It had. "Reaper's kid," I said again, mostly to remind myself why my hand had been there in the first place. "You've got his stillness too. Or you're a very good liar." "Maybe I'm both," Finch said, flat, careful, giving me exactly as much as he'd decided to hand over and not one word more. Something about that — the sheer nerve of it — made my chest do that thing again. Twelve years dormant, and suddenly wide awake over a nineteen-year-old with a bad haircut and worse manners. I did not like it. I liked even less that I couldn't tell my wolf to stop. "Inside," I said, loud now, to the whole line, because I needed all seven of them to stop watching whatever had just crossed my face. "Trials start now." My eyes cut back to him before I could stop them. "Finch. You're up first." Beside him, the loud one — Bellamy — muttered something that sounded suspiciously like *of course he is,* and I decided I liked her instincts even if I didn't love her mouth. --- I squared off across from him in the ring myself, which wasn't my usual job. I told myself I wanted a closer look. That lie didn't survive the first exchange. He came in low and fast, favoring his left the way a smaller fighter does when he already knows he can't win a straight trade of power. I let one hit land — a solid crack across my ribs, more than any prospect had managed on me in two years — before I swept his legs and put him flat on his back in the dirt. I came down to pin him, forearm across his chest, and every plan I had for the morning evaporated at once. His pulse slammed under my arm. Not the ragged panic of someone who'd just lost a fight — something sharper, and the smell of him this close hit me like a hand closing around a rib I'd thought permanently broken twelve years ago. His eyes were wide, dark, furious, and something about the softness at the corner of his mouth even mid-snarl made every rational thought I owned go quiet at once. "Get off," he said, low, a crack running through his voice that didn't match the rest of him. "You lost." I made myself sound bored. I did not feel bored. "Lesson one. Bigger man wins the ground fight. Learn it fast, or learn it hard." I let him up. He got to his feet too quickly, one hand pressed briefly to his own ribs — pain, or something else, some instinct in me insisted, like he was checking that something was still exactly where he'd left it. I filed that away with everything else about him I didn't have a drawer for yet. "Again," I said, because it was easier than examining why my own hands weren't quite steady, and we went two more rounds — him losing both, getting smarter each time, reading my weight before I shifted it. Silas's instincts, dressed in a stranger's body. Under every exchange, that same low pull that made absolutely no sense. By the third round, I'd stopped pretending this was about testing him for the club. I had a fist in his collar, about to call the round, when the fabric shifted wrong under my knuckles — loose, gapped, one clean inch of skin at his throat that had no business looking the way it did on a boy who'd just spent a morning taking hits like a man twice his size. I went still. Something was wound tight underneath that collar. Careful. Deliberate. Nothing an injury explained, and nothing any prospect I'd ever trained had ever needed. Across the yard, Bear's head came up sharp, catching something in the air that made him take one step toward us without being told to. "What," I said slowly, my whole body going still in a way that had nothing left to do with discipline, "is that."