Chapter 113: Sapphire Wasn’t A Mistake

Celeste stepped back. The appropriate amount. Chin still lifted.

The head changed direction. The jaw-crawl technique was slow but effective and it was heading towards the cluster of omegas behind the fountain.

Sierra stopped screaming.

Something in her face changed. The panic left and what replaced it was the expression of a woman who had just watched thirty people run from a head the size of a melon and the head was winning. She had screamed. The scream was valid. The scream was over. Now she was looking at the problem the way her great-grandfather would have looked at it, which was the way a Gamma looks at a threat that has been identified and downgraded from terrifying to manageable.

She scanned the courtyard. A metal wash basin sat against the fountain wall, oversized, the kind used for cooling drinks during events. Heavy. Empty. Upside down, it was a dome with enough clearance for a head.

Sierra grabbed it. The metal was cold against her palms and heavier than she expected and she carried it anyway because the alternative was a severed head reaching the omegas and their pups and that alternative was unacceptable.

She crossed the courtyard at a run. The head was still jaw-crawling, ten feet from the fountain, making progress that should have been impossible. Its mouth was snapping with every push, teeth clicking against cobblestone, the rhythm of it steady and horrible.

Sierra reached it, inverted the basin, and slammed it down over the head with enough force that the cobblestones cracked underneath.

CLANG.

The basin rang like a bell. Muffled snapping came from inside, the head thrashing against the metal, and the basin bucked under her hands. She dropped her full weight onto it, knees on either side, both palms flat on the metal surface, riding it like a woman who had made her decision and the decision was this head was staying under this basin until the sun burned out or she did.

It thrashed harder. The basin lifted a half-inch on one side. She shifted her weight. It dropped back down.

"WARRIOR." Sierra’s voice carried across the courtyard with an authority that surprised everyone within earshot, including Sierra. She pointed at a massive stone planter sitting at the base of the keep’s entrance steps, decorative, ancient, and weighing approximately the same as a small transport pod. "Get me that. Now."

The warrior looked at the planter. Looked at Sierra. Looked at the planter again, recalculating the request against the laws of physics.

"I SAID NOW."

Two warriors grabbed it. A third joined because the first two were losing the argument with gravity. They hauled the planter across the courtyard, stone grinding against cobblestone, and Sierra rolled off the basin just as they dropped it on top.

THOOM.

The planter landed on the basin with enough force to rattle the fountain. The thrashing stopped. A muffled clicking continued for three more seconds, then silence. Total. Final. The kind of silence that said the head had reconsidered its options under several hundred pounds of decorative stonework and decided to table the discussion.

Sierra stood up. Her robe was muddy. Her slippers were soaked. Snow was melting in her hair. She was breathing hard and her hands were trembling and she looked like a woman who had just done the bravest thing of her life and hadn’t realized it was brave until it was over.

The courtyard was quiet for a full second.

Then the applause started.

It began at the fountain, where the omegas she had been protecting started clapping with the fervor of women who had watched a stranger throw herself between their children and a nightmare. It spread to the warriors who had carried the planter. Then to the wolves who had been running and stopped to watch. Then to the entire courtyard, hundreds of hands hitting cold air in unison, the sound building and climbing until it echoed off the keep’s walls and came back louder.

Sierra pressed her hand to her chest, visibly overwhelmed. Her chin trembled once. She swallowed it down and gave a single nod, the kind that costs you something when your eyes are burning and your throat is tight and three hundred strangers are telling you that what you just did mattered.

Sebastian watched his mate from across the courtyard. His jaw was tight. His eyes were glassy. The Gamma of Thunderfang, a man who had trained for combat his entire life, was standing in the snow watching a woman who had screamed thirty seconds before the act and fought anyway, and the distance between the scream and the fight was the distance between fear and courage and his mate had crossed it without stopping.

Her great-grandfather had been a Gamma. But her grandfather was the second son, therefore did not inherit the position. Her father’s second cousin was the current Gamma of her old pack.

That placed her squarely in ruby flame territory. Noble families. Descendants of Gammas, Betas, and elders who no longer held titles but came from dynasties.

When she bled in the sacred flame, she wasn’t expecting a color. She had gone well after Nova, deep in the five hundreds, where flames didn’t come and women walked home in the dark. If by some miracle she had drawn one, it should have burned ruby, placing her with a ranked house in another pack.

But instead, the sacred fire had burned sapphire for her. The flame of the wise. It had looked at a woman who came from a Gamma bloodline at some point and had matched her with the Gamma of the largest pack in Helix, a position more powerful than the majority of Betas on the continent, and the Goddess had made that choice before Sierra had done a single thing to prove it right.

She had just proved it right so completely that three hundred wolves were clapping and every one of them would remember the Gamma’s mate who trapped a severed head in a wash basin while princesses stood and watched.

Celeste’s expression soured. The shift was fast, a storm front moving across a face that had been engineered for sunshine. She crossed her arms against the cold and watched the applause continue with the specific displeasure of a woman watching an unranked nobody receive a standing ovation that should have been hers.

"How dramatic. Really? She put a bucket over it. That’s all," she snapped.

Nobody responded. Nobody looked at her. Nobody even turned their heads. The applause continued, three hundred wolves clapping for a woman who was Sierra Stormholt now and the Gamma Luna title fit.

Celeste’s jaw tightened. Her arms crossed tighter. The snow fell around her in a silk robe that was getting wetter by the minute and the cold was doing what the courtyard wouldn’t, which was to acknowledge her.