CHAPTER SIXTY- FIVE

CHAPTER SIXTY- FIVE
THIRD PERSON POV

The training grounds smelled of blood before the sun had fully risen.

Blake had been at it since dawn. Longer than any of the guardsmen or volunteer warriors assigned to spar with him that morning had expected.

And longer than any of them wanted to admit out loud.

He shifted between his wolf and human form the way lightening moves through the sky.

Ninety nine percent sheer unrelenting force and one percent strategy. The men who stepped into the ring with him one after another were starting to understand that today was not a day for technique.

The fifth person to face him was a broad-shouldered wolf named Corbin. Easily twice the size of most who'd gone before him. He had been chosen deliberately by the rest of the team in the hope that size might finally slow the next alpha down.

It didn't.

Blake met him at the center of the ring with a demonic speed that shouldn't have belonged to something his size, ducked beneath the first strike, and drove his shoulder into Corbin's ribs with enough force to send him skidding sideways through the dirt.

Corbin rose slower than he should have. He limped back toward the sidelines with his right hand hanging awkwardly at his shoulders, and the training master called the next name before Blake had even finished shaking the dust from his coat.

"Enough!"

The voice cut through the ring before the sixth guard had taken two steps toward the center.

Blake’s mother stood at the edge of the training grounds, still in the pale morning robes she'd clearly thrown on the moment word reached her. Her expression was far colder than her usual composure.

Blake shifted back to his human form slowly. His chest heaving, knuckles scraped raw from a fight that had never actually called for hands and with the guilt of a child who had been caught in the wrong, he didn't meet her eyes right away.

"Look at him." She wasn't looking at Blake. Her gaze had gone to Corbin being helped out of the area with two other guards under each arm. His sides were already blooming a deep, ugly purple beneath the skin. "Look at what you've done to that boy. And the one before him. And the one before that."

"It's training." Came Blake’s defense. "This is what training grounds are for."

"Training is not what I just watched." She stepped past the ring's boundary without hesitation and stopped directly in front of him. Up close, the fury in her eyes had something else tangled through it. It was closer to worry than anger. "I've watched you train since you were a child I could still cradle. I know what discipline looks like on you. I know what focus looks like on you. What I just watched for the better part of an hour was neither of those things."

Blake said nothing. His jaw taut like he was grinding his teeth underneath those closed lips. He looked past her toward the rest of the men.

"Six of my best guardsmen," she continued, "One with what I suspect is a fractured rib and another who couldn't put weight on his ankle when he walked off this field. You are meant to be leading these men into your coronation as an example of what strength looks like, not proving how much damage you can inflict on people who are contractually obligated not to fight back at full force against their future king."

"I had it under control."

"You did not." She said it with a plain confidence. “Currently, you’re fighting like you are grieving.”

“I have nothing to grieve.”

“I have seen you grieve before, when your father passed. I know the difference between a son working through something and a son trying to beat something out of himself that won't leave no matter how hard he swings. This was the clearest picture of the latter."

His hands curled into fists at his sides, and for a moment he looked like he might argue but something in his mother's face made the argument die before it reached his mouth.

The truth was he hadn't been thinking about Corbin at all when his shoulder connected with those ribs. He hadn't been thinking about technique his training master had spent years drilling into him. He'd been thinking, as he had been thinking every hour of every day for longer than he wanted to count, about Athena’s face that night he had rejected her. Barely minutes after kissing her. The best kiss of his life.

He'd thought that exhausting his body might finally quiet his mind. It hadn't worked with the first guard, or the third, or the fifth. Somewhere in the space between one strike and the next, he'd simply kept hoping the next hit might be the one that finally drowned it out.

It never was.

"I had to do it" Blake said finally. More to himself than to his mother. "It wasn't cruelty. It was honesty. A matrix was a bad choice by the moon."

"I'm not here to scold you for your actions." His mother's voice softened only slightly. "I'm here because my son has spent the last hour turning his own guards into a casualty list and I want to understand why, but I guess you’ve already confessed to it."

He didn't answer. The silence between them stretched long enough that the remaining guards had quietly begun making themselves useful elsewhere, sensing correctly that whatever came next wasn't meant for their ears.

"You rejected your mate…" she continued, "and now you are unraveling in front of an entire training field because some part of you understood the cost of that decision the moment you'd already made it. I'm not telling you this because I enjoy this conversation, I'm telling you because I refuse to watch you do this to yourself, and to the men under your command indefinitely. You have a coronation approaching, Blake. You have a pack that will be looking to you as their king, and you cannot lead them from inside whatever this is."

"What would you have me do?" His voice cracked slightly, more than he wanted it to.

"Get her back if there's still a way to. If there's still anything left to salvage of your bond. Or make your peace with what you did and stop bleeding it out onto every man foolish enough to step into a ring with you." She turned, robes catching the early light as she walked back toward the palace. "But you will choose one or the other Blake. Because this…" she gestured, without turning back, toward the blood-churned dirt behind her "is not a third option. And it will not continue."