The stone window sill felt like ice beneath Eris's palms as she pressed her weight against it, peering down at the trail that wound like a serpent toward the Shrine's sacred perimeter. The healers around her were whispering in frantic, hushed tones, their breath misting in the frigid air.
Eris didn't hear them, nor the gossip they were partaking in. Her vision had narrowed to a single point in the distance, her heart hammering a rhythm of pure, unadulterated terror.
She wasn't one of them. She wasn't a healer bound by sacred oaths or gifted with the power to knit flesh back together. She was a fraud who just got lucky to possess the slightest healing ability, a trickster who lied in the face of her enemy, a Princess of the Margay who had used a desperate trick to buy herself an impenetrable safe haven.
Every moment she spent within these walls was a gamble, a performance she played with shaking hands even though her lies had unraveled ages ago. The largest lie in her life to buy time and safety for herself, her family and her kin.
There, standing just beyond the walls of her sanctuary, was Roy. He looked like a shadow, a statue, carved from the night itself, his massive predatory frame draped in heavy furs that caught the last golden rays of the setting sun. Why did that blasted male have to be so handsome?
He wasn't alone; a small detachment of soldiers clad in Claw Kingdom's colours stood just slightly behind his back. They were few enough to have moved through the forest with the stealth of ghosts, yet their posture, blades at their hips, eyes scanning the treeline, signalled a unit built for a lethal strike.
But it wasn't the threat of steel that made the blood turn to lead in Eris's veins. It was the bundle, the oddly shaped, squirming item that Roy held against his chest.
Wrapped in a blanket of soft, thick blanket was a small, pale shape. A tiny hand, unmistakably human looking, reached out from the bundle to tug at the dark fur of Roy's collar.
Eris felt like the very ground she was standind on, had disappeared beneath her feet. Uri had shifted. He had undergone his first transformation from the spotted Margay cub into his "soft form", a milestone that should have been celebrated with the inner circle of their tribe. Instead, he was being cradled by the very male who had shattered their lineage.
The sight of the Black Panther holding her defenceless nephew, the last untainted piece of her heart, was the final spark that set off an explosion of grief and rage in her ever alert mind.
A bellow, raw and primal, ripped from Eris's throat. It was a sound that didn't belong to a delicate, well-bred princess; it was the war cry of a female, a huntress who had seen enough of her world burn. She turned and bolted from the window, her steps heavy, thundering against the once quiet stone stairs.
She didn't grab a cloak. She didn't stop at the frantic calls of the healers, who surely wondered why the ever polite and well mannered princess was screaming like an enraged banshee.
She burst through the heavy oak doors of the Shrine, hitting the freezing night air like a physical blow. The frost crunched beneath her thin fur clad slippers as she sprinted across the courtyard and straight through the open gates, heedless of the sanctuary she was surrendering with every step.
The moment her feet crossed that threshold, her lie no longer mattered—she was back in Roy's world. Unprotected from the forces awaiting to claim her.
Roy heard her long before she reached him. The soldiers behind him shifted, hands moving to their sword hilts, but Roy raised a single, commanding hand to still them. His expression remained unreadable, a mask of obsidian calm.
As Eris barrelled toward them through the snow, Roy looked down at the fussing bundle in his arms. With a tenderness that seemed entirely at odds with his lethal reputation, he tucked the blanket more securely around the baby's head to shield him from the wind and hummed a low, vibrating note against the child's crown.
He didn't move an inch. He simply waited for the storm to arrive. The storm named Eris.
Eris reached him in a blur of emerald green cloth and tangled hair, despite Alina's previous efforts. She didn't stop to breathe; she didn't stop to think. She launched herself at him, her hands coming up to strike with all the fury of a woman who had nothing left to lose.
"Give him to me!" she screamed, her voice cracking with a desperate, jagged agony.
She lashed out, her palms slapping hard against the thick leather covering and solid muscle of his arms. It was like striking a mountain. Roy didn't flinch, nor did he let go. He simply absorbed her fury, his feet planted firmly in the frozen earth.
"You monster! You thieving, feral beast!" Eris cried, her breath coming in white plumes. She reached for the bundle, her fingers clawing at the blanket to get a grip on her nephew. "How dare you touch him? How dare you bring him here?"
Roy used his superior height and strength to pivot slightly, keeping Uri shielded between his chest and his massive arms, effectively blocking her reach without hurting her, nor the cub.
"Careful, Princess," Roy said, his voice a deep, resonant rumble. The word felt like a deliberate strike, a sign that he knew exactly what she was. "The air is too cold for his new skin. You'll chill him to the bone with your hysterics if you take the coverings from me. Relax."
Hell hath no fury like a woman told to relax.
The flames of her temper fueled even further.
"He is mine!" she shrieked, striking his chest again, her eyes red, stinging with tears of pure rage. "Give him to me!"
Roy's eyes suddenly sharpened, the purple depths turning into two points of cold, calculating fire. He caught her wrists in one of his hands, pinning them against his chest—just inches above where the baby lay tucked against his heart. The proximity was suffocating; she could smell the scent of woodsmoke, rain from the strong male and the sweet, milky aroma of the infant.
He leaned down, his face mere inches from hers, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous whisper that cut through the whistling wind. "Yours?" he asked, his gaze searching her face with a terrifying intensity.
He looked at her bruised eye and then back to her desperate, tear-streaked face. "You played the healer to hide from me. You abandoned your title and your keep to play saint in a temple, yet you run out of your sanctuary and into the arms of your enemy, the invader of your entire tribe, for one single male cub."
He pressed her hands harder against the warmth of his furs, his eyes locking onto hers, demanding the truth. "Tell me, Eris. Is this why you lied to get away from me? Is this why you fight so hard? Does this cub belong to you?"
The hunter wanted answers and he was prepared to go through hell or high water to get them.