In the training ground, a flash of copper.
Cameron.
He’s already up. Already dressed and moving, which means the boy has inherited his mother’s internal clock and my inability to lie around when my mind is working. He’s standing at the fence rail with Lena, who’s showing him something—a grip, a stance. She adjusts his hand on an invisible weapon, and he mirrors the correction with the quick precision of someone who’s been learning to fight since he could walk.
They spar. Lena’s fast. Petra’s training shows in every movement. Cameron is faster, but raw. Dealing with the Syndicate taught him survival fighting: dirty, desperate, effective. Lena’s teaching him something different. Discipline. Structure. The patience to wait for an opening instead of creating one through force.
He’s laughing. My son is laughing in a training yard, with a girl his age, learning to fight for reasons other than staying alive. The morning sun is on his face, and his eyes are bright and for a moment—one clean, undamaged moment—he looks like what seventeen is supposed to look like.
Then the sparring ends. Lena heads for the lodge, tossing a wave of hair over her shoulder. Cameron stands at the fence rail alone.
He looks south.
Not casually. Not the idle look of a boy taking in the view. His whole body turns toward it: shoulders, weight, attention. South, where the mountains flatten into hills, and the hills give way to the green Ozark valleys. The direction of Ravenclaw. The direction of Willow and Greta and Arlen and a pack of wolves who sleep behind thinning wards.
He stands there for a long time. Long enough that the morning light shifts and the shadows shorten and the compound comes fully alive around him, and still he’s looking south with an expression that I can read even from this distance because I saw the same expression on his mother’s face last night at the kitchen window.
Homesick. Both of them. Homesick for a valley they left two weeks ago and are carrying in their bodies like a wound.
I watch my son look toward home, and the decision I’ve been circling lands.
Not with weight. With lightness. The relief of finally stopping the negotiation between what you want and what you should want, and admitting they’re the same thing.
I find Sienna at the south gate.
She’s checking the new timber, running her hands along the joints the way she checks everything: thoroughly, patiently, with the attention of a woman who believes the details matter because they do. She looks up when I approach. Reads my face in the way she’s been reading me for years.
“Walk with me,” I say.
We take the border path. The long route, circling the compound through old-growth forest that smells like it has since before either of us was born. Our boots crunch on frost and fallen needles. A hawk circles overhead, riding a thermal.
“You’re leaving,” she says. A quarter mile in. Not a question.
I look at her. “How long have you known?”
“A while. There’ve been signs.” She steps over a root. “Brenna’s face at dinner. Cameron asking me this morning if Ravenclaw should have a training ground.” She pauses. “And you. The way you’ve been walking the compound. You’re not inspecting. You’re saying goodbye.”
She sees too much, this woman. But that’s not a bad thing.
“The wards at Ravenclaw are failing,” I say. “South and east boundaries. Willow’s holding it together, but she can’t hold against what Bern might send. If Brenna goes back alone—”
“She’s vulnerable. So is Cameron. And you’ll be here, running a pack that Jonas has been running perfectly well without you for weeks.” She says it without judgment. Just the facts.
“I can’t ask the pack to relocate.”
“Of course you can’t. And nobody’s suggesting that.”
“Then what—?”
“Merric.” She stops walking. Turns to face me. The morning light catches the auburn in her hair and the steadiness in her expression. “Jonas has this,” she says. “He’s had it for weeks. The compound is secure. The pack is stable. Edda is on board. The political situation is complicated, but it’s not a crisis. It’s a campaign, and campaigns run on time and patience, not on their alpha standing in the lodge looking worried.”
“You’re telling me to go.”
“I’m telling you what you already know and are too stubborn to say out loud.” She tilts her head. “Ravenclaw needs wolves. Real fighters, not a skeleton crew. The wards need a magic-user to sustain them. Cameron needs to be somewhere that feels like home. And Brenna…” She pauses. “Brenna needs her pack. She’s been holding herself together at Frostbourne because that’s what she does, but this isn’t her ground. I know you can feel it. She’s stretched too thin.”
She’s right. I can feel it. The bond carries Brenna’s constant, low-frequency tension. The exhaustion of a woman operating outside her element, using energy to maintain balance that she should be spending on the fight ahead.
“What about you?” I ask. Because I owe her the question. Because our friendship means I don’t get to make this decision without looking at what it costs the people who’ve stood beside me.
