18. Aslan
EIGHTEEN
ASLAN
Cleanup takes the better part of an hour.
Wolves securing prisoners, Torin directing the wounded to Anouk, Rhodes barking about chain of custody like paperwork still matters in the middle of a battlefield.
Leire stays close, steadying a shaking Network recruit, checking the wards that held—present in a way that lets my guard ease for the first time in days.
I let it ease. That’s my mistake.
I know the moment she’s taken.
Not through any magical awareness, but through instinct honed over years of hunting, of protecting, of being the predator in any given room. One second the pulse of her presence is steady in my awareness, that compass pointing north. The next—
Gone.
I spin away from the Preserver I’ve been interrogating, leaving Caius to handle the cleanup. The wolf alpha calls after me, but I’m already moving, already shifting, clothes shredding as the tiger tears free and hits the ground running.
She was right there. Right there, in the aftermath of battle, surrounded by Network fighters. Safe.
But safety is an illusion when ancient conspiracies are involved.
I run.
The second wave hit during the chaos.
I reconstruct the trail as I hunt—scattered scents, disturbed mist, the metallic tang of fresh blood that isn’t Leire’s but belongs to two of our wolves who tried to stop them.
The scent trail paints a picture: they came from the east, from a position we hadn’t scouted, moving with military precision while the Network was focused on securing Iskra and cataloging the fallen.
They planned this. The first attack was the distraction. The real objective was extraction.
Contingency protocol. The kind of operational thinking that comes from centuries of practice.
They’d known a frontal assault might fail—had positioned a second group with extraction orders before the first ever moved.
Which meant someone with command authority had been watching Mistvale’s response patterns long enough to predict exactly how we’d organize during cleanup.
Someone who’d been here, or had contacts here, feeding information back. Another loose thread Caius would need to find and pull.
Clever.
My tiger snarls appreciation for their tactics even as he vows to tear out their throats. We respect intelligent prey. We respect them right up until the moment we catch them.
And we catch them.
The trail leads toward the Warding Line. Of course, it does. Past the boundary, Mistvale’s protections end. Past the boundary, I’m just a tiger and she’s just a witch and whatever help might be coming won’t arrive in time.
The mist thickens as I run, pooling around my paws, golden where it catches the fading light. Evening is settling over the town. Somewhere behind me, I hear Torin roaring orders, organizing pursuit. Caius will have the wolves fanning out.
None of them will reach her in time.
This is mine to do.
The first Preserver dies without knowing I’m there.
He’s positioned as a rear guard, watching the trail behind him while his companions drag my witch toward the boundary. Sloppy. A real predator watches everything.
I come out of the mist like a freight train made of fur and fury. My jaws close around his throat before he can scream. Cartilage crunches. Blood sprays hot across my muzzle. He goes down, and I don’t slow.
One.
My tiger counts. Keep track. We’ve done this before—hunted, eliminated, protected. But never with this fire burning in my chest. Never with my mate’s life hanging in the balance.
I catch her scent on the wind. Sage and lavender and fear—sharp, acrid fear that makes my lips peel back from bloody fangs. She’s afraid. They’ve hurt her or scared her badly enough that I can smell it from half a mile away.
Someone is going to pay for that.
The second Preserver sees me coming.
She spins, hands raised, dark magic crackling at her fingertips. The spell hits my shoulder like a brand, searing through fur to the muscle beneath. I don’t stop. Pain is information. Pain tells me she’s dangerous, needs to be eliminated fast, can’t be given time to cast again.
I barrel into her at full speed.
We hit the ground hard, her nails raking for my eyes, my jaws closing on empty air where her throat was a half-second ago. She’s quick—magically enhanced, probably trained—but she’s not a shifter. She doesn’t understand that once a tiger’s committed to a kill, nothing short of death will stop him.
Her arm snaps under my paw. She screams. I silence her with a swipe that opens her throat, and then I’m running again.
Two.
Behind me, voices shout. Reinforcements arriving, but I can’t tell if they’re ours or theirs. Doesn’t matter. They’ll deal with each other. My focus narrows to a single point.
Leire.
The awareness sharpens. Closer.
She’s still alive.
I find them at the edge.
The Warding Line shimmers in the evening air, barely visible—a suggestion of boundary more than a barrier.
The mist stops here, piling up against the invisible wall like waves against a breakwater.
Beyond it, the forest stretches dark and unwelcoming.
The Thornback Mountains loom in the distance, their peaks catching the last copper light of sunset.
Three Preservers remain. Two flanking, one holding a knife to Leire’s throat.
And I know that face. Iskra’s second—I recognize her from the battle, the one who escaped when the smoke cleared. Younger than Iskra, with sharp features and colder eyes. The kind of cold that comes from believing utterly in a cause.
“Stop right there.” Her voice carries clearly across the distance. The blade presses closer to Leire’s skin. “One more step and she dies.”
I shift.
The transformation rips through me—bones cracking, muscles reforming, fur receding into skin. I emerge human and naked and breathing hard, blood still wet on my face. Not my blood. Not Leire’s blood. Good enough.
“Let her go.”
My voice comes out wrong. Too low. Too rough. The tiger is still there, riding just beneath the surface, and he doesn’t use human words.
The Preserver laughs. It’s a brittle sound, nothing like Iskra’s calculated performance.
This one is a true believer. “Do you have any idea what you’re interfering with?
Centuries of work. The stability of the entire magical world.
And for what?” She yanks Leire’s head back, exposing more of her throat.
“One witch with an anomalous signature?”
Leire’s eyes meet mine.
She’s terrified—I can see it in the tight set of her jaw, the rapid flutter of pulse.
But underneath the fear, there’s fury. Defiance.
The same stubbornness that made her rebuild her life after exile, that made her open a shop in a strange town, that made her fight Preservers in her own shop with nothing but crystals and spite.
My witch doesn’t surrender.
“You would sacrifice everything for this?” The Preserver sounds genuinely confused. “Your position, your pride, your life—all for a witch you’ve known a few weeks?”
“She is not just a witch.”
The words tear out of me. Not planned. Not calculated. Just truth, raw and bloody as the violence I’ve carved through this forest.
“She is my witch.”
Silence.
The evening wind stirs the mist, sending tendrils curling around our ankles.
Somewhere in the forest, an owl calls—and for one breathless moment, I’m caught between past and present, between the woman I lost and the woman I’m claiming.
The Warding Line hums with ancient power, responding to the words I’ve just spoken. To the claim I’ve just made.
My witch.
Not protector and assignment. Not reluctant allies forced into proximity by circumstance. Not even friends who’d found an unexpected attraction.
Dorothea wasn’t my fated mate—I’d spent five years convincing myself I’d used that up on a woman who was simply right, good, easy to love.
Leire is none of those things: she’s sharp edges and soft heart, crystals she talks to like old friends, a familiar she refused to stop loving even when she thought he’d betrayed her. And I’m done running from it.
“Touching.” The Preserver’s lip curls. “But sentiment doesn’t change facts. She has mate potential. Left unchecked, she could pair with a shifter. Could produce offspring with capabilities we haven’t seen in centuries. We can’t allow that.”
“You can’t stop it.”
“We’ve been stopping it for a thousand years.” Her knife hand is steady. Professional. “A few deaths here and there, a few exiles, a few witches who simply... disappeared. The Severing was supposed to be permanent, but magic finds ways to rebel. So we became the correction.”
“Correction.” The word tastes like ash. “You murdered people. Destroyed families. Enslaved a familiar for years to isolate one woman from everyone who loved her.”
“Necessary measures for the greater good.”
I shake my head slowly. Blood drips from my chin onto my bare chest. The evening air is cold against my skin, but I barely feel it. “There is no greater good that justifies this.”
“Spoken like a man blinded by hormones.” Her voice sharpens.
“Do you know what happens when witch-shifter pairings form? The power they generate? It destabilized entire regions before the Severing. Wars were fought. Populations decimated. The Preservers aren’t the villains here—we’re the guardians. Keeping the world safe from chaos.”
“By deciding who lives and dies.”
“By making hard choices.” Her eyes are flat. Certain. “Someone has to.”
Time stretches.
I feel the other two Preservers tensing. Ready to fight if I charge. Ready to run if the situation deteriorates. They’re scared—I smell it under their training, the primal recognition that they’re facing a predator who’s already killed two of their friends tonight.
Good. They should be scared.
But fear makes people do stupid things. And the blade against Leire’s throat is a very stupid thing.
I need to end this. Now. Before someone gets twitchy and my witch bleeds out in enemy hands.