Chapter 46: A Secret

They started moving again while the tension was still raw enough to taste.

Asher walked with his shoulders tight and his eyes fixed on the path ahead, he was still mad at Adrian, and he made sure that was very obvious.

"You’re here for one reason," he said. "Mai’s hurt, and this forest already tried to kill us once. You help us reach beastkin territory in one piece. That’s it. The moment she’s safe and the ring is off, you leave. You don’t report to Marcel, and you don’t decide my next step.."

Adrian’s mouth twitched, but he didn’t argue. "Understood."

Mai set the rest of the terms without raising her voice. Her ears remained half-angled toward the vampire even as she kept pace.

"You walk ahead or behind, never between us. You do not touch him. You do not offer advice, or help I have not requested. If another threat appears, you deal with it only if I cannot. Clear?"

"Crystal," Adrian said. He moved to the front of the group without further comment, torn sleeve still dark with his own blood, posture loose in the way that meant he was paying attention to everything.

They made steady progress for another hour before it became obvious Mai had been understating her condition.

Her steps shortened. When she finally stopped and braced one hand against a tree, the gashes across her shoulder and side had soaked through the makeshift binding she had applied on the move. Silver fur along the injury was matted and dark, and her breathing had gone shallow.

"We halt," she said, and the admission cost her.

Asher helped her sit against the trunk. Adrian scanned the perimeter once, then crouched a short distance away, giving them space while still close enough to react. Mai’s wounds were deep. Without proper treatment or time, she would not make the remaining distance in any useful condition.

Asher looked at the blood still drying on his own wrist from the earlier cut, then at Mai’s paling face. The decision formed before he could talk himself out of it.

Adrian was on his feet and at Asher’s side in two quiet steps. He pulled him a few paces further from Mai and spoke low.

"Showing a stranger what your blood can do is a risk. Once she knows, that knowledge doesn’t stay in this clearing. You already have enough people interested in the rest of you."

Asher met his eyes without flinching. "She’s the only person who’s offered a way to get this ring off without taking the finger or crawling back to Aaron. If she dies on the road, that option dies with her. I need her alive more than I need the secret kept for one more day."

Adrian held his gaze for a long moment. Something complicated moved behind his expression. He understood what was at risk, but he still wasn’t comfortable with the idea.

"Minuscule," he said. "Enough to close the worst of it and get her on her feet. Not enough to announce what you are to every sense in a mile radius."

Asher nodded. He returned to Mai, scored a shallow line across his palm with the edge of a clean knife, and held the hand out without ceremony.

"Drink. A little. Then we’re moving again."

Mai hesitated, ears flattening with instinctive distrust of vampire-adjacent offerings. Pain and necessity won. She took only what was offered — a few swallows at most — and the effect hit almost immediately. Color returned to her face. The deepest edges of the claw wounds began to knit with a speed that had nothing to do with ordinary beastkin recovery. She stared at her own shoulder, then at Asher, dark eyes wide with a shock she did not bother to hide.

Asher closed his fist and wiped the rest of the blood on a scrap of cloth.

"This stays between us," he said, voice flat. "You don’t report it, and tou don’t offer it to your people as a resource. You don’t decide it’s more useful than my gift. Your faction wanted a fortune teller. Not this. If that changes the value of our agreement, say so now."

Mai was still staring at the rapidly improving wounds. When she finally looked up, her expression had shifted into something more careful.

"It does not change the agreement," she said. "The ring removal and the terms you set still stand. This... will not be shared."

Adrian watched the exchange from a few steps away and said nothing. The look he gave Asher, however, carried a clear warning: secrets like this had a way of escaping no matter how firmly they were locked down.

They moved on as soon as Mai could walk without leaning.

The forest changed as they approached the border. Markers appeared — carved bone and bound feathers hung from branches, scent posts that even Asher’s human nose could almost detect. The air felt watched in a different way. When the patrol finally stepped out of the trees, it was with the coordinated silence of people who had been tracking them for some time.

Six beastkin with mixed traits, wolfish builds, one with avian eyes, another with scaled forearms. They were all armed, all focused. Their attention locked first on Mai, then on Asher, and then, with a sharp collective shift, on Adrian.

Mai raised an empty hand and spoke quickly in a language Asher did not know. The patrol leader answered in the same tongue, voice hard. Mai switched to the common speech for Asher’s benefit, though the tension in her ears remained.

"They want to know why a Vampire Lord is on our border," she said. "And why I brought him."

Every eye in the patrol was on Adrian now. The political weight of the moment settled over the clearing like a change in weather. A Thorne did not cross into beastkin territory unnoticed or unchallenged. Asher felt the hostility happening in real time.

He stepped forward before Mai had to carry the entire explanation alone.

"He’s temporary escort," Asher said clearly. "I’m here by invitation to have a claim ring removed. He’s leaving once I’m across the border and Mai is no longer at risk on the road. That’s the entire arrangement."

The patrol leader’s gaze moved from Asher’s face to the dark ring on his finger, then back to Adrian’s still-bloody sleeve. The silence that followed was long enough to make the previous fight with the lion Feral feel simple by comparison.

Beastkin territory had just acquired a Vampire Lord on its doorstep, a human fortune teller with a royal claim ring, and a set of bargains that were about to be tested under official eyes.

The next words out of the patrol leader’s mouth would decide whether they walked in — or whether the border became another battlefield.