“Where did you find this?” I ask the Master of the Red, who stands there watching me with a strange intensity I cannot define.

No one should have known. The only one who knew… was the Purple Master.

She shrugs, as if the item isn’t of importance. “It came from the agent spying on Purple before she was disposed of.”

I clench my fist, careful to keep my hand from shaking and betraying how much this has become a nightmare. “Where did she find this?”

“Said it came from some boy living in the city. Purple kept it close at hand.”

Seems we trusted the wrong Master after all, Cynic says, his voice soft.

You believe her?

She’s honourable in her own strange way. She respects you as her Alpha and, weird as you wolves are, that means she’s loyal to you.

Still, it is best to remain cautious. These are the Masters of the underworld.

I glance back down at the finger in my hand that smells of death. It's slightly mummified, meaning it was treated to create a trophy.

Jace makes a sound in the back of his throat, as if choking down bile. “She’s sick.”

“In the head,” Flash agrees, looking a bit pale at the pale finger on my palm.

“I can hear you, pretties,” she says with an impish smile.

Jace gulps.

She tosses a knife my way, a note on its tip.

A note I did not need to realize that indeed I’ve been betrayed. This seals it. A note from Princess Lyra to her father, the Emperor, asking about her maid who he took. But it also gives where Frida likely is.

But I am still unsure if Red has betrayed the Black or if she is merely another tempting worm dangling on a hook. In this world, black is white and white is black with innumerous shades of gray in between.

The last time I saw Red, she challenged me. And I won. Which means I am technically Red's Master, and as such, either she will need to challenge me or another Master can challenge in her stead to rest control back from me. Only the Black Master can strip rank, but he seems to have left me as the Gray for some unforeseen reason that makes my skin crawl.

I thought I had escaped this world long ago. Now I wonder if I will.

And this brings me to the now. The Black is a puppet-master with many strings. It seems he tried to get his hook in the Emperor, but it seems Purple has now declared war and leads the Empire. It makes me wonder where Yellow fits in. Anger curdles deep in my gut, and I know I will face him at some point. Despite myself, anticipation of the hunt hums through my veins at the thought. His death, whether slow or swift, is inevitable.

And Frida. Had I known, I would've taken her kicking and screaming from the palace when I snuck inside. I would not have left her in the clutches of my enemy. But I respected her decision... because what else could I do? I know what it is to have the choices taken from you until you are left with broken pieces where your brain once made decisions. I refuse to take that from others. Freedom to choose is a Gift oft taken for granted.

“What do you want for this information?” I ask, my voice seeming to come from someone else.

“By way of the Guild, you are my Master until someone defeats you or you die. It seemed a fancy tidbit of information. Thought it might prove useful.” She shrugs, studying her black painted fingernails.

“You would not come here without a request. Ask,” I command.

She sighs, as if boring of this conversation. But her posture is rigid, and the scent on the air… I would almost call it fear. “So be it, Master. They say you can smuggle children into homes. They say you have given them new lives cut from the old.” I raise a brow, unsure where this conversation is going. “Is this true?”

“Ask what you want,” I say instead. Purple was once my means of smuggling children from the Masters before they ever arrived to the training grounds. I wonder if I made a gross miscalculation. But I still have my contacts, not to mention friends who can help should a child be in need.

She looks back over her shoulder and I see something in her eyes that I never expected. A glimmer of tears. She nods to someone behind her.

A dark-cloaked individual steps forward and hands her a lump of fabric shaped like a potato. She looks at the lump with a gentle smile on her face that seems to leave bare what was beneath her stern exterior into something softer. Something protective. Fierce. But also tender.

She bends down to kiss the face of the sleeping babe, then walks over to me without faltering.

“See to it she has a better life than we. Promise me this on the death of your father,” she says, glaring into my eyes with a tight jaw as her dark eyes spark with the might of her Alpha heritage.

My wolf balks at the challenge, but I work to shove him down so he doesn’t attack a mother trying to find safety for her child.

I look down, seeing angelic pale features and a tiny mop of golden hair on the otherwise bald head. It smells… like a baby that needs a diaper change. She seems under a year old with pudgy cheeks and thick fingers.

I touch her cheek, and the little eyes pop open, a startling blue so much like my brother that I am taken back in time to when I first met my brother by blood. A tiny coo and a giggle emits from the toothless mouth. She wiggles in her swaddled blanket.

I look up at her mother. “I promise as your Alpha,” I say, accepting her and the child into my pack in that moment, as well as extending my protection as her leader.

She deflates, wilting beneath a weariness that was hidden behind faux strength. She bows her head, breathes deeply for one last scent of her babe, and puts the child into my waiting arms.

Something in me softens to her, seeing a side of her I thought nonexistent.

“If you hold to your promise, I will hold to granting you information from within. You know how to contact me should you need me,” she says softly, meeting my eyes one last time with a plea for her child. She steps back and the shadows embrace her as if she were a long awaited friend.

“Well… didn’t see that coming,” Jace says after a few moments, still staring into the blackness where she disappeared.

“What are we going to do with a baby?” Flash asks, looking down at the child with something akin to horror in his eyes.

The child looks up at me, and her wide eyes show the beginning of fear. She cries, as if sensing her mother leaving. She is alone in the hands of strangers.

I try to rock her, but her little cries only grow more piercing, causing a few windows to open and people to see what is happening.

"Shhh. It's alright, little one. We'll care for you now," I say gently, and she quiets, tears leaking from the corners of her eyes.

Tim takes a little wooden necklace from his neck and hangs it over the child’s head. The cries begin to abate, and she coos, trying to grab it with grubby hands that just won’t cooperate.

“We find someone who will care for her as if she were their own child,” I say in response to Flash's question, smiling down at the little creature who now giggles because Tim put the bauble in her hands.

Then she puts it up to her mouth to chew on it, and I panic, pulling it from her tiny mouth. Her face scrunches up, making her appear more like a prune than a baby, and she wails with a sharp cry that pierces my ears.

I immediately give her the bauble back and she releases a gurgling laugh.

We breathe a sigh of relief.

“You found a baby?” Zephora asks, looking at me dubiously, as if knowing that isn’t the entire truth. Then she glares at the three at my back, who shuffle their feet and won’t meet her eyes.

“It’s a long story. Do you know someone who will look after her and take her to safety?”

She crosses her arms, but a cry from the baby softens her a minuscule amount.

Heather comes around Zephora and smoothes the hair from the babe’s forehead and plays peekaboo with the child, making her laugh. For having a mother like Master Red, she is a happy child who didn’t put up much of a fuss the entire way back to the inn... so long as she had the wooden trinket.

“Is she yours?” David asks.

I jerk in surprise. Flash laughs. He stifles it with a cough at my glare.

“No,” I reply, as if tasting something bitter.

“No need to be offended, son. I am merely asking. I will send her with the refugees leaving this night.”

I hesitate in handing the child over, seeing again the desperation and fear in her mother’s eyes and unwilling to unburden the responsibility. Curse my soft heart.

“She will be looked after?” I ask softly.

Heather gives her goat milk to sip until we either find a nursemaid or a home for the child. “I will ensure it,” she says, giving me a smile as she watches the baby slurp the milk. “There is a family who recently miscarried. They have been trying for years to have a child of their own… but it was not to be. The mother keeps Shasta when I am gone, so they will hold no aversion to having a Shifter child.”

I hand the girl over to Heather, and she gives me a gentle smile. “What is her name?”

“I don’t…” but I feel something in my hand that was between me and the child I held. “Her name is Iolana.”

“Hi, Iolana. Let’s get you to meet your new family, huh?” she says, cooing at the baby and eliciting another wet gurgle.

The finger I couldn’t bring myself to leave behind is pocketed in my cloak. The one it belonged to… the poor boy. I can only imagine the pain he must have gone through before his death if an assassin took his finger as a trophy.

It would have been kinder to have given him a clean death and killed his mother while I was at it. Curse my soft heart.

You know you did what was right. You gave him and his mother a chance, but you cannot take the blame for what became of them.

Can I not? She earned a promise from me I have broken many times over and she is likely dead because I trusted the wrong person.

You learned the sacredness of life, Roland. You learned to see what was beneath the surface and not take death as the only option. Her promise served its purpose, forced you to seek other options instead of reverting back to the killer you'd become. Change is necessary. Death is necessary. Change is Life, and Life is Death.

What?

He grumbles something about idiots, but continues, Change means you live, means you accept that with the ebbs and flow of time one must move forward or one will be stuck in the mire of one's own making. Life means one must accept death for ideals once held and hopes unrealized while giving wings to new things to come. That is life.

You once believed you would be king of the Shifters. You once hoped for your father's acceptance and your brother's freedom. You once hoped to be a mighty warrior for those in your pack and for a quiet place to study. All those hopes held changed when the boy became a man and life did what it often does to throw you deep into the unexpected. You are a mighty warrior, a King becoming known to many, just not in the ways expected.

I hold in a sigh.

If only I had known then what I know now, I say, a wistful note entering my voice.

Don't look so far back you miss what is now.

When did you become the philosopher?

When you forced me to grow a heart and actually care about a pack of rabid animals, he says, something akin to amusement lightening his voice and my heart, even while the pain remains.

I don't agree with him. The promise I made... it was to be kept, no matter what came my way. I broke it, and now I must face that the boy I promised to protect is likely dead.

Promises are sacred. And I have broken more than my fair share. I am unsure what to think about that. And with a battle coming... will I kill to protect? Or do I risk more lives by leaving soldiers and mages alive while trying to hold to a promise I have already broken? I don't know the answer to that. I only know more death is not the answer.

“You be looking like the hind end of a donkey. You ok?” Tim asks, his hazel eyes regarding me calmly and drawing me from my thoughts.

I shrug, trying to hide the pain in my heart with a fake smile and force my eyes into a squint to make it more believable. “I’m fine, Tim.”

His eyes narrow, but I walk away before he has the chance to ask the question I see behind his eyes.

I don’t wish to be interrogated at this time.

I don’t wish to think about those things that I’ve lost. Those things I’ve chosen which have only led to death on all sides.

It makes me wonder if all my striving is for nothing.