“One more thing.” She folds the paper back into her pocket. “The boy. Cameron.”
“What about him?”
“He asked me about you last night. While we were eating.”
I keep my face level. “What’d he ask?”
“How long I’d known you. What kind of alpha you are. Whether you keep your promises.” She pauses. “And whether you’d ever been mated.”
The morning air feels thinner. “What’d you tell him?”
“The truth. That you’re stubborn, honest, and you’d walk through fire for your pack. And that the mating question wasn’t mine to answer.” She holds my eyes. “He’s a smart kid.”
“I know he’s smart.”
“Then you know he’s going to start asking questions we all want the answers to.”
She’s right. I know she’s right. But the confirmation—yeah, this is my kid—opens a door I can’t close, and behind it is every failure I’ve been trying to bury.
“I’ll handle it,” I say.
Sienna nods and pushes off the rail. She’s halfway across the yard before she turns back. “For what it’s worth? He’s a good wolf. Just like his mother.”
She walks toward the main house, toward Greta and the census work and the business of holding a broken pack together. I watch her go and think, not for the first time, that Sienna sees people more clearly than anyone I’ve ever known. Always has.
The morning gets busy. I organize a work detail with the able-bodied Ravenclaw wolves, fixing the south fence line, clearing deadfall from the main approach road, repairing the generators. Willow shadows the operation, not helping my crew directly but directing her own people alongside them. Parallel chains of command. She won’t give up authority, and I don’t push. Her wolves need to see her leading, not deferring.
We settle into a rhythm. It’s rough-edged and full of tension, my wolves and hers circling the same tasks without quite merging, but the work gets done. The fence goes up. The generators hum to life. The bunkhouse roof gets its first real repair in what looks like a decade.
Cameron pitches in, hauling lumber for Dane’s barn project. The boy’s stronger than yesterday, color coming back into his face, the food and the familiar ground doing their work. He carries boards alongside one of the Ravenclaw teens, and for a few minutes, he looks like any other kid doing chores on a family property.
Then he picks up a crossbeam that’s too heavy for one person, and his magic decides to help.
The wood goes light in his hands. Not floating, just suddenly weightless, like gravity forgot about it. Cameron lifts it onto his shoulder with one arm, and a glow traces up his forearms, faint but visible. A couple of the younger Ravenclaw wolves gawk. An elder near the garden straightens up, watching.
Cameron doesn’t notice until he does. The beam drops. Hits the dirt with a crack that makes everyone flinch. The glow dies, and Cameron stands there staring at his hands with an expression I recognize from every wolf I’ve ever seen lose control of a shift, shame and fear twisting together so tight you can’t tell where one stops and the other starts.
Willow is there in three strides. She doesn’t touch him, just moves close enough that he can feel her presence and speaks low enough that I only catch it because of wolf hearing.
“It’s alright. You’re alright. We’ve done this before. Breathe out, count to five, let it settle.”
Practiced. Calm. A routine they’ve built together. Cameron’s hands stop glowing. His breathing evens. Willow picks up the beam herself—she’s strong for her size, farm-work strong—and carries it to where it needs to go as if nothing happened.
But her eyes find mine across the yard, and the message is clear:“This is what I’ve been managing. Alone. Every day.”
I give her a nod. Not sympathy. She’d spit on sympathy. Acknowledgment.
Afternoon brings heat and the misery of manual labor in humidity that could drown a fish. I’m helping dig postholes along the west fence when my phone buzzes. I haven’t checked it since we got here.
Fourteen messages.
Fuck.
I scroll through them with dirt-caked fingers, standing in a half-dug hole with sweat rolling down my back.
The first seven are from Frostbourne. Pack members left behind at the stronghold asking when I’m coming back, what’s happening, why they’ve heard rumors I went to Ravenclaw instead of home. Confused. Worried. Not angry yet, but the tone shifts as the messages progress.
The eighth is from Jonas, my third-in-command back at the stronghold. Short and tense:Bern’s people contacted us. Requesting your immediate attendance at a territorial review. What do I tell them?
