“I did.”
“Before I was born.”
“Yeah. Before.”
He doesn’t speak for a few paces. “Sienna wouldn’t tell me if you’d been mated. Said it wasn’t her place.”
Smart answer from Sienna. True answer, too. But the silence it left is louder than any words would have been, and Cameron is plenty smart enough to hear it.
“Your mother was important to me,” I say. It’s the truest thing I can give him that doesn’t blow the door wide open. “What happened between us… That’s a long story, and parts of it are mine to tell and parts of it were hers. I’m trying to figure out which is which.”
He stops walking. I stop too.
The last of the daylight catches his face. He looks older than seventeen in this moment, carrying questions that shouldn’t belong to a kid his age, wearing grief that’s been complicated by six months of horror and a lifetime of gaps where a father should have been.
“She told me my father was a good man who made a bad choice,” he says. “She said he loved us, but he couldn’t stay.”
The words suck the air from my lungs.
“She was telling the truth,” I manage.
Cameron watches me. I can see him weighing it, what I’ve said, what I haven’t. Then, he nods once, slow, and starts walking again. I walk beside him. The silence between us is different now. Heavier. Closer to honest.
We finish without another word. At the porch, he stops and turns.
“Thanks for bringing me home,” he says.
“Don’t thank me yet. The hard part hasn’t started.”
He almost smiles. That almost-smile has her in it. My chest tightens, but I let the ache sit where it is without trying to bury it.
Cameron goes inside. I sit on the porch steps and listen to the Ozark night… frogs, crickets, the river running low and even. My phone sits in my pocket, loaded with messages I haven’t answered and a threat that’s only going to grow.
Bern is circling. The council will follow. The Syndicate is watching. And these outcast wolves are sleeping in a broken ranch with a new fence, a half-built barn, and an alpha who showed up too late.
I pull out the phone. Dial Jonas.
“It’s me,” I say. “I need you to listen, because this is going to sound crazy. And then I need you to tell the pack exactly what I tell you. Word for word.”
The conversation lasts forty minutes. When it’s done, I sit in the dark for a while longer, thinking about Nathan Bern’s polite message and the boot prints on the ridge and a woman who died believing I’d come through for her people.
Then I go inside. Because tomorrow the real work starts, and I’ve already wasted enough years standing still.
Chapter 4
Brenna
My son is alive. I’ve been watching for two days, and I still need to see it again. Every few hours, I lift the binoculars and find him—hauling lumber, sitting on the porch steps, eating at the communal table. He’s thinner than the last time I saw him. The way he moves has changed. There’s a guardedness to it, a constant scanning of his surroundings, that tells me more about what the Syndicate did to him than any report could.
But he’s walking. Talking. Eating. Working alongside a big blond Frostbourne wolf who speaks entirely in grunts, like he’s remembering how to be part of something.
My boy is alive, and he’s home, and I am three hundred yards above him on a limestone shelf watching through stolen binoculars because I can’t go down there.
Word reached me five days ago through the network, fragments passed between scattered contacts, coded messages routed through dead drops I set up across three states. A Corvuswolf, male, teenage, recovered from a Syndicate facility in the Cascades by an Aurora strike team. Alive. Injured. Being treated at the Aurora compound.
I dropped everything to find him. Five days of running south on almost no sleep, checking contacts, calling in favors with the few trusted people who know I’m not dead. Five days of not knowing if the report was accurate, if it was really Cameron, if he’d survive his injuries. I’ve tracked Syndicate supply convoys through freezing rain without flinching, but those five days nearly put me in the ground.
When I finally picked up the convoy’s scent trail heading south through Oregon—three trucks, multiple wolves, Frostbourne pack signatures—I almost broke cover right there. I followed them from the ridgelines instead, staying upwind, moving fast. Confirmed Cameron was in the lead vehicle. Confirmed he was conscious, moving under his own power.
