The walk back to her quarters barely registered as movement.
Stone, shadow, corridor.
Lyra passed through it like someone already half gone.
The sound still lived in her ears.
That low, wrong growl.
It didn't feel like something she had chosen to make.
It felt borrowed. Dragged up from somewhere deeper than thought and pushed through her throat.
The guards kept pace beside her.
They did not touch her. They did not speak.
But the silence between them had shifted.
It carried assessment now.
They had seen it. Whatever had cracked inside her back in the hall, they had witnessed it happen.
The door shut behind her. The lock clicked.
Too loud. Too final.
The room received her in silence, but not the same kind as before.
Before, the quiet pressed down.
Now it observed. Waiting.
As if the walls expected an explanation for what she had brought back with her.
The distress came first, steady and unrelenting.
She was trapped.
Not only by stone and wood, but by a shape she was being pushed into, by a future Sion seemed to read with unnerving clarity.
His aura returned in flashes.
Focused dominance. The animal edge to his scent.
The pressure that had gone straight through muscle and into bone.
She had stepped back. She had been afraid.
That part was simple.
What followed was not.
Anger.
Her hand rose to the scar without permission.
The skin there was warm.
Not pain. Heat, low and constant, like something that refused to cool.
But even that wasn't the worst of it.
Loneliness arrived after.
Not the quiet solitude she knew how to survive.
This was something wider, deeper.
The understanding that a part of her no longer belonged solely to her.
The wolf. The thing bound to the scar.
And that part had recognized him.
Had answered him without hesitation.
Worse still was the knowledge that Kael existed now behind an uncrossable distance.
That the winter garden belonged to a different life.
That every minute tightened the thread binding her to Sion, to the Black Moon, to a future that no longer asked her consent.
She moved away from the door.
The black dress dragged at her shoulders, heavy as if it had been cast rather than sewn.
The arched window offered its wide emptiness.
The forest beyond stretched on, vast and indifferent.
The space outside mirrored the hollow opening in her chest.
She tried the edge of the bed.
The stillness closed in.
She stood in the center of the room and felt too visible.
In the end, she sank to the floor between the bed and the wall, where the shadows gathered more thickly.
A place meant for hiding.
It did nothing.
The pressure built again.
Not like Sion's presence. This came from within.
A weight on her chest, firm and unyielding.
Her throat tightened, as if something were pressing upward.
Words, maybe. Or that sound again.
She held it back with everything she had.
Her knees came up. Her face pressed into them.
Not now. Not here.
The memory of the dojo burned close, sharp with shame.
If she lost control again, alone, what would be left of her?
An animal pacing inside velvet walls.
Loneliness wore her down.
Memory and isolation tangled until fear slid into despair.
She wasn't strong. She wasn't some scar-forged warrior.
She was a frightened girl dressed in her captor's colors, sinking into a reality she neither understood nor wanted.
A sob shook her, short and ugly.
She buried it in the fabric at her knees.
Another followed, stronger.
The tears returned, hot and quiet, darkening the black cloth.
She fought for breath.
Tried to reach that quiet place inside her, the one that loved books, roots, stillness.
It felt buried under too much weight to reach.
The pressure in her chest intensified.
Her throat burned.
The scar pulsed, not with anger now, but with something raw and aching, like a heart beating where it did not belong.
I can't, she thought.
The idea barely held its shape.
I can't do this alone.
That was where she failed.
There was no scream. No violent release.
Just an inward collapse.
Something gave way that she hadn't realized she was bracing.
A single sound slipped free.
Hoarse. Torn. Low.
It carried everything she had swallowed since the morning bell of the day before.
It did not disappear.
It expanded.
From her, something moved outward.
Nothing visible. Everything felt.
The air warped, like heat over stone, except it was cold. Bitter.
It wasn't light or sound.
It was emotion stripped bare and given force.
Bottomless loneliness. Desperation.
The terror of being known by something you do not understand.
The wave reached the walls.
Not with impact, but with a smothering exhale.
The oil lamps in their niches faltered and died, not blown out but emptied, as if the desire to burn had been taken from them.
Then it reached the windows.
The tall panes of glass did not explode.
They mourned.
A thin, crystalline sound, and then they shattered inward.
Shards scattered across the rugs like fallen stars.
Cold mountain air rushed in, sharp with pine and earth, violently alive against the sudden deadness of the room.
Lyra did not see it.
She was folded into herself, the world reduced to the pain in her chest and the shame of breaking.
Across the room, something happened that no one had planned for.
The door did not open.
Sion was simply there.
Perhaps he had felt the glass break. Perhaps the surge itself had reached him.
He stood in the doorway, braced for force, for violence, for something he knew how to counter.
Instead, the Fang of Loneliness struck him.
He stepped back.
Just one step. Sharp. Unbalanced.
A movement no one ever saw from him.
His hand went to his chest, above the heart.
His face twisted, not in physical pain, but in something deeper. Rougher.
It was emotional agony. Immediate. Total.
For a breath, his golden eyes lost focus.
Went wide, empty.
In them was not an Alpha's fury, but the raw helplessness of a lost boy.
Her loneliness found an echo.
Her fear settled into something old and locked away.
The weight of the gilded cage.
The horror of memory not your own.
The knowledge of being alone in a world that demands strength.
An instant.
Then his will came down hard.
The pain vanished beneath it.
His eyes sharpened.
His face set into something dangerous, disbelieving.
He took in the broken glass, the dead lamps, the girl curled on the floor.
Lyra lifted her head.
Her face was wet, her eyes hollow.
She saw the damage. She saw him.
The last trace of pain still trembling at the corners of his mouth before it disappeared.
There was no triumph in her.
Only violation.
Something intimate had escaped her.
Something fragile and exposed.
And he had felt it. He had known her loneliness.
Worse than being stripped bare.
This power was not force.
It was exposure.
Sion remained silent for a moment.
Then he drew a long, controlled breath, like a man steadying himself after a blow.
"Have someone clean this," he said finally, voice rough but even.
"And repair the window."
A pause.
His gaze returned to her, changed now.
This was no longer only possession, or potential.
It was danger. The kind he had not anticipated.
"No one needs to know what caused it."
Then he left.
The door closed.
Lyra stayed where she was, cold wind spilling through the broken window, the silence heavy with the echo of her despair made real.
The Fang of Loneliness had pierced more than glass.
It had cut through the illusion of control they both carried.
What remained was fragile.
And far more frightening.