Reject me twice (Kira and Theron) novel Chapter 99

[Ciri’s POV]

The days before the battle are the most honest of my life. I exist in Shadowpine as exactly what I am — a woman who betrayed her brother and is preparing to fight against her own blood.

The pack’s reception is mixed. Some wolves refuse to speak to me, while others, having watched Cyrus’s advance scouts intercepted exactly where I predicted, offer cautious nods.

Not warmth — the grudging acknowledgment that accurate intelligence matters regardless of the source.

Senna treats me the way you treat a wound that’s healing — necessary attention, minimal contact, no particular interest in how it feels.

“The eastern fortifications need a supply assessment,” she tells me on the fourth morning, handing over inventory sheets without meeting my eyes. “Have it on my desk by midday.”

“It’ll be there.”

“You’re efficient. I’d compliment that if circumstances were different.”

“You don’t owe me anything, Senna.”

“Good. Then we understand each other.”

She turns back to her work. I respect her for it — the anger beneath her discipline is earned, and channeling it into professionalism instead of sabotage tells me why Theron chose her as his Beta.

I train with Shadowpine’s fighters every afternoon — no calibrated performance, no cover to protect. I’m fast, technical, and I fight with the controlled fury of a lifetime of frustration channeled into combat.

“You’re fast,” a young wolf named Haden says after I put him down for the third consecutive round. “Where did you actually train?”

“Ashenmoor military academy. Unofficially — my family didn’t consider me worth the enrollment. I watched drills from behind the kennels and practiced alone before dawn.”

“You learned academy technique by watching?”

“By mimicking and getting it wrong a thousand times. Self-taught fighters develop instincts academy wolves don’t — you learn to read your body instead of following instruction.”

“So what are your gaps?”

“My left guard drops on overhead strikes. Fifteen years of compensating and it’s still there. If you’d gone left instead of right on that last exchange, you’d have put me down.”

“You just told me how to beat you.”

“If we’re fighting side by side when Cyrus arrives, I’d rather you know my weaknesses. We don’t have time for ego.”

“Fair enough,” he takes my hand up. “Again?”

“Again.”

We drill until our arms shake. By the third day, he stops treating me like a curiosity and starts treating me like a fighter. The distinction means everything.

The quiet moment comes in a week.

I sit on the battlements at dusk, watching the horizon where my brother’s army will appear. The sky is copper and violet, the pines dark silhouettes, and the eastern pass stretches below like an open mouth.

I think about Celeste. Not the schemer who died on Theron’s blade, but the sister who would slip into my bed during thunderstorms because she knew I was. She’d whisper stories about two sisters who escaped their father’s house and built their own pack where no Alpha could tell them what to do.

She began as a neglected girl too, so the difference between us is trajectory. Celeste let bitterness dictate her choices, and the road carried her so far from who she started as that by the end, the girl on the kitchen steps was buried beneath something unrecognizable.

I was standing on the same path when I arrived at Shadowpine — carrying a mission built from someone else’s rage, willing to destroy a man I’d never met. If Theron had been the monster Cyrus described, I would have become another version of Celeste.

The only difference is that someone showed me a different direction. That someone finds me on the battlements.

Theron sits beside me without speaking. He settles onto the stone with the ease of a man who has spent many nights up here — looking out, calculating distances that have nothing to do with geography.

He takes my hand. His palm is warm, rough with calluses, fingers closing around mine with deliberate gentleness. I curl my fingers into his and hold on, and the warmth spreads through my chest until the cold feels irrelevant.

We sit on the battlements of a keep preparing for war, holding hands like two people who have run out of reasons to pretend.

“Malik’s reinforcements should arrive in three days,” he says. “Magnus Ironridge’s wolves a day after that. By the time your brother reaches the pass, we’ll have the numbers to hold.”

“Cyrus won’t expect reinforcements. His intelligence assumed Shadowpine was isolated — that was the whole point of sending me. He planned to hit a lone pack with overwhelming force.”

“Then he’s going to be disappointed.”

“It makes him dangerous, Theron. When his plans fail, he escalates.”

“Then we’ll be ready for that too.”

Below us, the valley darkens. The pines lose their detail, becoming a solid wall of black against the dimming sky.

And then the torches appear.

A line of fire at the tree line — distant, flickering, stretching across the mouth of the eastern pass. Dozens of them, then more, the line extending and multiplying until the dark forest glows with a constellation of flame that can only mean one thing.

Theron’s hand tightens around mine.

“He’s early,” I say, and my voice holds steady because the woman who would have wavered died somewhere between a dead drop and a confession in the dark.

My brother stands at the edge of the trees with an army at his back, and the sister he sent to open the gates sits on the walls beside the man she chose, her hand in his, exactly where she belongs.