[POV: Draven]
I didn't sleep. Not after Dominic left my war room.
His words followed me like ghosts—soft, honeyed things that clung to the walls of my mind, dripping with concern laced in poison.
"He's unpredictable… He has emotional volatility… His magic is unstable. There's a prophecy, Draven… He might be the one destined to bring ruin…"
I hadn't believed him, at least not truly. But doubt has a way of growing in silence. And silence was all I had that night.
I stood in my office long after Dominic was gone, staring down at the maps he'd interrupted, fingers pressed flat against the oak to keep them from curling into fists.
Not just for what he'd said—but because of how easily those words had nestled into the cracks of my own fears, angled perfectly toward everything I'd already been turning over in the dark hours before dawn.
Because the truth was, Dominic hadn't told me anything new. He'd just dressed it in prettier words.
I'd seen Atlas's shadows flare out of control. Felt his panic vibrate beneath my hands when I held him steady through the worst of it.
I'd watched him tremble in the grip of nightmares that left the sheets damp with sweat, his wolf retreating into long, wounded silences.
I'd seen the fury behind his pale eyes when something triggered the memories he fought to bury—dark energy crackling along his skin like static before a storm, shadow tendrils curling from his fingertips unbidden.
I'd seen all of it. Every fractured, dangerous, and beautiful piece of him.
But I'd also seen him rise.
I'd watched him stand in front of a pack that didn't trust him—wolves who'd whispered behind his back, who'd questioned why their Alpha kept a stray from a rival territory—and earn their respect through grit and refusal to break.
He'd taken every hit, every sideways glance, every muttered insult about his late-blooming wolf, and swallowed it without once asking for pity.
I'd seen him bleed to protect others during border patrols, throwing himself between younger wolves and threats twice his size.
Watched him lose sparring matches against Ava and Kobe and drag himself back to his feet before the dust settled, jaw clenched, hands shaking, refusing to stay down.
He was mine. My mate. The bond between us hummed constantly now, a low vibration beneath my sternum that I couldn't silence even if I'd wanted to.
And yet.
I couldn't ignore what Dominic had said entirely—not because I believed it, but because others might. That was the danger. Not Atlas. Never Atlas.
The danger was the whisper, the rumor, the slow poison of doubt dripping into ears already inclined to distrust anything unfamiliar.
If word of that prophecy spread—if it reached the council, the elders, the patrol leaders who still watched Atlas with wary eyes—it would become something larger than words. A weapon.
Would the pack begin to look at Atlas differently? Would they see his shadow magic and feel fear instead of awe? Would they turn on him the way Midnight Crest had—quietly, slowly, until the cruelty became routine? And what if they didn't just fear him—but decided to remove him?
The thought made something feral and violent rise in my chest.
Sirius surged forward, snarling low and savage in my mind. "He is ours. You know it. You chose him. I chose him. Why are you still standing here like a coward?"
I didn't answer him. I just left.
The night wrapped around me as I moved silently through the trees, following the pull that had haunted my every step since I'd first caught his scent, sharp and clean and unlike anything I'd encountered in all my years as Alpha.
My bare feet pressed into cool earth, each stride carrying me deeper into the forest with quiet purpose. No twig snapped and no leaf stirred. The darkness parted for me like something alive.
He didn't know I was watching. I'd masked my scent downwind, kept my heartbeat deliberately slow. But I needed to see him. Not as a mate. Not as the man whose mouth had tasted like certainty and ruin all at once.
I needed to see him through the eyes of the Alpha of Crimson Fang—to assess him the way I'd assess any wolf whose place in my pack was being questioned.
I found him in the training clearing, alone beneath the open sky.
He was sparring with one of the wooden practice dummies, shirtless despite the night air, the lean musculature of his back shifting with each movement.
His strikes were sharp—fists connecting with the padded post in rhythmic, controlled bursts. He ducked an imaginary counter, spun low, and launched a side kick that cracked against the wood hard enough to splinter it. The post shuddered but held.
His breathing was steady, all focused. There was no trembling tonight, no shadow magic bleeding from his palms. Just a young man training alone in the dark because he'd learned long ago that no one else would make him stronger.
The moonlight caught in his silver-white hair, slicked back with sweat, and painted his shoulders and the line of his spine in pale silver. His chest rose and fell with each measured breath, the flat ridges of his abdomen glistening where perspiration tracked down his skin.
Scars I'd memorized with my fingertips—the thin white line across his left shoulder blade, the faded burn mark at his hip—caught the light and disappeared as he moved.
Goddess help me. I'd never seen anything more infuriatingly beautiful.
He was no longer the broken, half-starved boy I'd found stumbling across my borders. The hollows beneath his cheekbones had filled.
Muscle had replaced the gauntness in his arms and chest. His stance was wider, grounded—the stance of someone who'd learned he had the right to take up space.
He was becoming something extraordinary. And he didn't even know it.
Sirius rumbled deep in my chest, a sound of raw, possessive satisfaction. "Look at him. That is strength. Strength meant to build, not to ruin."
And he was right.
Everything Atlas had survived—every beating at Midnight Crest, every betrayal by the family that should have protected him, every night spent believing he was worthless—he'd forged into armor.
It hadn't destroyed him. It had refined him into something harder and brighter than Dominic could ever become.
The idea that anyone—any council member, any pack elder, any whispering fool—might try to brand him as a threat made my blood run hot enough to scald.
To call my mate a danger? No.
I wouldn't allow it. Even if that prophecy were real—even if fate itself conspired to drag him from me—it would have to come through me first.
I stayed in the shadows a while longer, watching him train, watching the controlled violence of his body as he struck and spun and struck again. My chest ached with something that went beyond desire, beyond the pull of the mate bond. It was conviction. Absolute and unshakeable.
Dominic could plant all the seeds he wanted. Let them take root. Let them try to grow. I'd burn every last one to ash before they ever touched him.