She ran as fast as she could. The dream stole her feet and pushed them faster. Dirt slapped under paws that were not paw anymore. Moonlight cut the trees into knives. There was a wrongness to the air, a metallic tang that made her teeth ache.
Something howled behind her and it sounded like her name.
She twisted her head, and the world snapped. She was tall and heavy and fur prickled along her spine. Her lungs burned. Breath came as steam. She tasted iron on her tongue.
A shape moved through the moonlight. Kael. Bigger than the trees. His shadow filled the clearing and then he was close enough that smoke and pine filled her head. He did not speak. He moved like he belonged to that wild place in a way she did not.
His hand closed on her shoulder and the dream broke like glass.
She woke with her own scream, half animal, half human and the room roared back into shape. Stone walls. A narrow bed. A single guttering candle. Her heart hammered like a bell.
For a second she could not tell where dream ended and real began. Her hands remembered claws. They remembered the weight of fur and the way her legs had eaten distance.
She swung her feet to the floor. Cold hit her ankles. The room felt too small, like a throat that could close. She should have breathed slow, told herself it was only a dream, that her life had not become a forest. She tried to tell herself that.
Then she saw the marks.
Four long gouges sliced through the plaster above her bed. The plaster dust lay in thin ridges on the floor. The claw marks cut clean down to the stone. They were fresh. They smelled faintly of damp earth.
Her stomach dropped hard. Fingers that had fumbled in sleep trembled now. Her nails were longer at the tips. Not fully claws. Not yet. But sharper than they had been at sunset.
She reached and touched the nearest gouge. The stone was cool under her palm. Tiny grains flaked. Her skin prickled like a warning.
A knock came at her door. A single, steady knock. Someone else was awake. Of course. Night at Kael's house was never private.
"Lyria," came Kael's voice. Close. Too close. He had no business being awake, but then he had not been sleeping either.
She pulled a loose shawl over her bare shoulders and moved to the door. Her legs wanted to wobble. She pushed the door open a fraction.
Kael stood in the corridor like a carved thing. He had not bothered with a shirt. The candlelight painted his shoulders bronze. His jaw was tight. He looked like a man who had cut his own sleep into pieces.
"You heard me," she said.
He did not answer right away. His eyes dropped to the marks then back to her. "I did," he said finally. His voice was low, guarded. "You screamed."
She wanted to say she did not mean to. That the dream had not been a dream. That whatever had touched her in the night had been wrong and had not belonged to her. Instead she said, "I dreamt I shifted."
His lips tightened. His fingers flexed at his side. "And?"
"And I woke up with these," she said. She pointed to the gouges.
He moved past her and laid his palm flat against the scored wall. He did not touch her. His body heat warmed the stone where the marks cut. He closed his eyes for half a breath like he could feel the echo of claws.
"Have you told anyone?" he asked.
"No." The answer came out quick and stubborn. She had not told anyone. Who would she tell? The servants would gossip and make her a spectacle. Kael's mother would use it as proof of the mate's curse. Ronan might watch and smile in a way that did not help. She could not trust the world with that.
Kael turned and looked at her properly then. Up close she could see the shadows under his eyes and the small scars at the edge of his lips. He had been fighting something long before she came. The bond had not just started with her. It had always been a wound inside him.
"You should not go anywhere alone today," he said. It sounded like an order. It sounded like worry wrapped in steel.
She wanted to argue. She wanted to say she could handle being watched, that she had survived worse, that claw marks and strange dreams were a new kind of fear she could swallow. But there was a thin line in his voice that cut through her bravado. She swallowed.
"All right," she said.
He watched her for a long time, like he was memorizing the small movements of her face. Then he reached into the small pouch at his belt and produced a thin strip of leather. He came close enough that his breath touched her ear. He tied the leather around her wrist without ceremony. It was simple, unadorned.
"For you," he said. "So I know where you are if you vanish."
It felt like a strange, clumsy promise. She held his glance for a heartbeat and then nodded.
He straightened and took one step back. The corridor seemed too bright and too small. She had expected something fierce after the kiss last night. She had expected more possessive words, more anger in him. Instead there was a softness that confused her more than any outright cruelty ever had.
"Sleep," he said. "I will have someone check on you." He did not leave then. He stood in the doorway like a guard waiting for a command.
She lay back down and did not sleep. The dream kept circling like a hungry animal. The marks on the wall moved like a memory. Something alive inside her had shifted. Something old and raw had stirred.
When dawn leaked into her room and made the marl plaster look less like open wounds, she forced herself to get up. She dressed in a rough tunic and stepped toward the small mirror over her washbasin.
The glass was streaked. The light was thin. Her reflection looked like a woman who had been pulled through a storm. Her hair was knotty. Her lips were pale. Her eyes were ringed dark. She should have felt tired and empty and small.
Instead she felt an unfamiliar prickling at the back of her eyes. A pressure. A pull.
She leaned closer to the mirror and blinked.
Something moved in her face that was not under her control. Her pupils widened. The light in the room flickered. For a second she saw herself not as human but as a shape made of moonlight. Her eyes changed color.
Silver moved across her irises like quicksilver spilled in a cup. The silver spread, not fully filling but lighting the edges of her pupils. It glowed faint and cold, like the inside of a knife.
Lyria froze. Her breath left in a small hiss.
The mirror held her there. Her own face looked back at her with that impossible glow. She tried to blink it away. She tried to touch her cheek and feel normal skin.
Her fingers trembled.
The silver did not go.
She heard the corridor door creak. Footsteps. Kael's voice. He called for Ronan then paused. His tone shifted. He said her name softly. He moved nearer.
She did not turn away from the glass. Her reflection would not be the same. She was no longer sure whether the marks on the wall had been made by claws in a dream or by something waking inside her.
Her heart thudded like something too big for her ribs.
She thought of the ledger that might burn. She thought of Ronan's voice in the dark, and of men plotting to trade her. She thought of Kael refusing to bargain over her like she was paper to fold.
Her eyes in the mirror glowed colder.
She reached up and touched the glass with a finger. The cold bit through skin.
Outside, Kael's steps slowed. He asked again, near the door, "Are you all right?"
Lyria said nothing.
The silver in her eyes pulsed like a distant moon. It felt like the first honest thing about her.
Someone knocked from the other side of the house. A servant called for breakfast. Life kept moving in rooms that did not know about dreams.
She kept looking. The silver held. The mirror held her and did not blink back.
She heard Kael step away, then return. He was close now, just outside the small doorway. His voice was a whisper that trembled a little.
"If that is happening," he said, "tell me."
Her reflection looked at him as if it could see more truth than he could. She did not answer yet.
She touched her eyes.
They were warm under her finger.
They did not look like human eyes anymore.
They looked like the moon.