Reject me twice (Kira and Theron) novel Chapter 86

The question follows me through the corridors, through the empty training yard, through the study where maps blur into meaningless lines.

By the time dawn breaks over Shadowpine, I’ve walked enough miles inside these walls to have reached the capital and back.

Marcus finds me on the eastern rampart, watching the sun bleed gold across the pines.

He doesn’t speak, just stands beside me the way he has for years, a silent presence that has anchored me through every storm I’ve weathered since I was old enough to understand what storms were.

I think about the first time he pulled me out of my own wreckage.

I was seventeen, drunk on rage and my father’s cruelty, ready to challenge a wolf twice my size over an insult I can’t even remember now.

Marcus stepped between us, took the hit meant for my face, and dragged me to the training yard where he beat me bloody for an hour straight.

“Pain is a teacher,” he’d said, standing over me while I spat blood onto the dirt. “But only if you’re smart enough to learn the lesson. Are you smart, boy?”

I learned. Not that day, not even that year… But eventually, I learned.

I think about the night my mother died. How Marcus sat outside my door until morning, never knocking, never speaking, just there.

A presence in the darkness that asked for nothing and offered everything. I never thanked him for that.

Never found words big enough to hold what it meant to a boy who had just lost the only person in the world who loved him without conditions.

The years that followed: the training sessions that were really lessons in patience, the strategic meetings that were really lessons in thinking before acting, the quiet conversations that were really lessons in being human when the world wanted to make me a monster.

Marcus never lectured. He just was, and somehow that was enough to show me what I could become if I fought hard enough for it.

“It’s time,” he says to me now.

This phrase settles between us, heavy and final. I’ve known this moment was coming since our last conversation. He’d told me everything back then.

I’d wanted to argue and tell him this pack needs him, that I need him, that the thought of facing what comes next without his counsel makes me feel like I’m standing on the edge of something I can’t see the bottom of.

But I looked at his face — the deep lines, the grey at his temples, the shoulders carrying weight that has nothing to do with the physical — and I understood. This is a man who has spent his entire life in service.

He is a guardian, a soldier, a keeper of secrets. He gave everything to people who needed him and never once asked for anything in return.

He’s earned the right to stop carrying the world.

“Then I’ll be in the study when you’re done bleeding on things.” She pauses at the gate. “He was the best man I ever served under, Theron. Whatever you’re feeling right now, you’re entitled to every bit of it.”

She leaves before I can respond, which is a mercy, because I don’t have words for what I’m feeling. Only fists, and a post that doesn’t hit back, and the clarifying pain of skin splitting open against wood.

Afterward, I sit in my study and stare at maps I can’t focus on. Supply routes blur into patrol schedules. The keep feels emptier — not louder, not quieter, just emptier, as if the stone itself has registered the absence.

That evening, I walk the corridors without destination. Past the training grounds, past the kitchens, past Senna’s quarters.

I pass the servants’ wing where Ciri is quartered. Through the door — nothing. She’s either asleep or sitting in silence, which are very different things in a woman whose composure still bothers me.

Marcus would have known what to make of her. Could read a person in three minutes flat and deliver a verdict so precise it felt surgical. He would have sat across from Ciri, watched her with those steady eyes, and told me exactly which pieces didn’t fit.

But he is gone, and now she is mine to figure out alone.

I keep walking. The torches burn low around me, and Shadowpine settles into the kind of quiet that used to feel like peace and now just feels like absence wearing a different name.