Tomorrow
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© DeeJaeWrites. All rights reserved.
This work is an original piece of fiction created by the author. All characters, settings, and events are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real persons or events is coincidental.
This story is intended for adult readers only (18+) and contains mature themes, including but not limited to power dynamics, sexual content, and emotional intensity.
This work may not be copied, reproduced, redistributed, translated, uploaded, or used in any form, in whole or in part, without the express written permission of the author.
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Chapter 1
Kaelira
The bread is already cooling when I reach the lower kitchens.
Steam from the ovens clings to the stone ceiling, heavy with the aroma of salt and yeast. It’s still dark outside. Above the yard, Stormreach’s steel-grey banner hangs motionless against the old iron brackets. The morning is ice-cold. There is no wind yet. It will come. It always does.
This is the hour the keep belongs to the working wolves. Bakers and runners and the ones who keep everything going without ever lining up like we do.
I pause at the long table and press my palms to the wood. The warmth is fading. I leave my hands there a moment too long. The nearest baker doesn’t look up.
“You’re late, Beta.”
“Barely,” I say, and take the second slice too.
He snorts. He’s heard that line since I was sixteen and already too fast on my feet for my own good.
I eat standing against the stone wall, so fast that I don’t taste it. I set the bread down half-finished. He doesn’t comment.
I wipe my hands and go.
The cold air meets me as I step into the courtyard. Sharp and familiar. It cuts straight off the mountain pass with an edge. This place is built for endurance rather than comfort and it doesn’t apologise for that. Stormreach has never pretended to be anything other than what it is. High stone and cold air and wolves who were made harder and stronger by both.
I grew up on this stone. I know every crack in the courtyard mortar, every place the floor dips where centuries of boots walking have worn it down, every corridor where the winter blue of our pack colours runs through the keep’s bones so deep it has become part of us. My father called it the pack’s patience once. Steel-grey for what we show the world. Winter blue for what holds us together underneath.
I look at the silver wolf above the eastern gate as it catches the first morning light. A lone wolf against a snow-covered peak. The Stormreach emblem doesn’t want to impress. When you see it, you already know what it is.
Our enforcers are already in the training yard, formation lines precise and clean, their spacing tight.
I pass them without slowing. Space opens as I approach. Wolves shift without being asked, the whole line reconfiguring around me before I’ve said a word.
I cross to the far end and check the spacing on the right flank.
They step into readiness before the order comes. The discipline doesn’t start because I’m watching. It doesn’t stop either.
My father built this alongside Corvin Ridgeborne. Twenty years as Stormreach’s Beta, holding the line between the Alpha’s vision and the pack’s limits. Never the name on the banner. Always the reason the banner held.
They called him the Unmoving Shield.
I used to think I understood what that meant. I do now.
Tomorrow I ride to Obsidian Fang. Three months of rotation training under Ronan Blackmoor’s command. Formal and agreed and politically clean. As decided at the Convergence.
The same Convergence that left a feeling in my chest that I have been trying to manage with great difficulty. Difficulty which I refuse to show on my face.
Rotation training. That is what I am going for. That is all that it is. That is the way I will be received, I am sure.
I pass the correspondence table on my way through the eastern corridor. My eyes go to it every morning, for longer than I want anyone to notice.
Patrol logs. Supply requests. Updates sealed with the Obsidian Fang crest.
Three months of standing at the same table,looking at the same stack, seeing the same black wax pressed with fang and moon. I have stood here every morning since Ironholt and told myself I was doing inventory and checking on our alliances.
Three months of telling myself it was duty.
Tracking political correspondence the way a Beta should track it.
Three months of not being able to pick up a single one.
Today I pick one up.
I don’t decide to. My hand is just there, the letter between my fingers, the seal already warmed from where my thumb pressed too long without my permission.
Pine resin. Rain. Something darker underneath.
His scent comes off the paper and I forget to breathe.
I set the letter down as if it burned me.
My hands are shaking. I press them flat to the table and look at them and wait. The stone is cold under my palms. I count the seconds until my breathing evens. It has to even. I just need to stand here until it does.
It takes longer than it should.
He writes to everyone.
He has said nothing to me.
I tell myself I don’t miss him. Most days I almost believe it.
What I miss is the version of myself I was when his eyes were on me. Not Stormreach’s Blade. Not Stormreach’s Beta. Not Kaelen Thornfell’s daughter or Eryx Ridgeborne’s Second or any of the other things I have spent my whole life being without choosing. Just me.
He looked at me like I was the only thing in the room worth looking at.
No one has ever looked at me like that.
I cut it off before it goes further.
I leave the table exactly as I found it and I don’t look back.
Eryx leans in the archway ahead like the corridor already belongs to him.
Alpha.
The title sits naturally on him. It fits him. Fifteen years of training together and I still catch myself looking at him sometimes and seeing the boy who bled beside me on this stone and called it preparation.
His gaze finds me and stays a beat longer than it needs to.
“Kae,” he says.
I don’t slow. I give him a nod in passing. “Alpha.”
He falls into step beside me without asking. “Don’t start with me.”
“I didn’t start anything.”
“You called me Alpha like I’m going to bite you.”
“You know you want to.” I smirk.
He huffs something that might be a laugh. “Not before sunrise. I have standards, Beta.”
My mouth twitches. Not quite a smile. Eryx notices anyway, because he always notices. He’s always been better at understanding me than I am at understanding myself.
We walk in silence. The training yard comes into view ahead. Weapons racked in order, wolves already moving through morning drills in the cold.
Eryx stops walking.
“Tomorrow,” he says.
“Tomorrow.”
He nods once, looking out at the yard. Quiet, deciding how much of what he’s already said in his head he’ll actually say out loud.
“I’ll write,” he says finally. “Just so you don’t miss me too much.”
“I’m sure I’ll manage.”
“You’ll be very determined to prove you can manage,” he says, glancing at me sideways. “I’ll write anyway.”
I recognise the pattern of this conversation. He has already made a decision and he is telling me as a courtesy.
“At least Nale will keep you in line,” he says. Back to easy. Almost.
“Nale will try.”
“Good enough for me.” He turns then, fully, and looks at me openly now. “Take care of yourself, Kae. I hate that I won’t be there to.”
His hand lifts and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. His fingers find my jaw and rest there for a moment, the way they have a hundred times before. In sparring. In the quiet after difficult things.
Then he drops his hand and walks toward the training yard without looking back.
I stand alone in the courtyard.
I know what I’m riding toward. I’ve known it since the Convergence, since I stood in Ashclaw’s hall and watched him walk through a door I should have crossed.
I made a choice before dawn at Ironholt and I have spent three months understanding exactly what that choice took from me.
He doesn’t know that I know that.
He has had no reason to wait.
I ball my hands into fists and walk into the training yard. The cold hits my face and I let it. I take my place at the front of the line. The wolves settle into formation around me. Steel on steel. I shout a correction to my left and my voice comes out steady and I am grateful for that at least.
The bond pulses once. Low and dense, settled somewhere between my chest and my throat. Ninety days of not answering it. Ninety days since waking up before the fires were lit with the smell of him surrounding me. Of pine and rain sitting on me like a second skin.
Tomorrow I leave.
I don’t answer it.
