Cameron said so, and I watched the grief in the boy’s eyes when he said it, and grief like that doesn’t lie.
But the fire—
She takes the first purist wolf through the throat before he sees her coming. The second flanker turns, and she hits him low, takes his legs. He goes down, and she’s already past, already moving, the white flame trailing clean behind her.
Two down in four seconds.
The wolves on me hesitate. I lunge at the nearest one, catch him off balance, drive him into the dirt. My jaws close on his shoulder, and I hear the crunch of separating cartilage. He howls and goes limp. Submitting. The last attacker runs—full retreat into the trees, tail down—and the silver wolf doesn’t give chase. She’s already turning toward Cameron.
I shift back. My body screams as I do it, the flank wound, the torn hind leg, everything that got shredded in the fight reasserting itself in human form. I’m standing in a burned pasture, naked, bleeding, and I can’t take my eyes off her.
She approaches the fire ring without flinching. The flames part around her—just open, like a door standing wide—and she walks through to the boy. She shifts as she moves. Bones reforming, fur receding, a woman coming through in a transition so fluid it looks like a homecoming rather than a transformation.
She puts her hand on Cameron’s chest.
The fire dies. Not gradually; cut off clean, like a switch thrown. Cameron’s eyes clear. He peers at the woman crouched in front of him, face inches from his, palm flat over his heart.
I already know. Before she straightens. Before she turns. The fire told me. The way she moves told me. My wolf told me thirty seconds ago when I refused to listen.
She turns around anyway.
Brenna Corvus looks nothing like the girl I left in that field.
She’s leaner. Harder. Her black hair is short and ragged, hacked with a knife. Scars I’ve never seen across her collarbone, along her ribs, down her left forearm. Her eyes are the same, but everything behind them has changed. Whatever softness I remember is gone, replaced by something forged by running and fighting and sleeping alone.
We’re both naked. Both standing in a burned field with blood drying on our skin and nothing between us but smoke and ten feet of scorched earth. I shouldn’t be noticing anything except the impossible fact that she’s alive. But my body has its own priorities and its own memory, and before my mind catches up, I’ve registered the curve of her shoulders, the line of her throat, the way she holds her weight: left foot slightly forward, hip cocked. I knew that stance at twenty-one. I traced the shape of that hip in the dark with my hands. My wolf knows her body the way he knows his own heartbeat, and he is howling inside my skull.
She looks at me. Assesses me the way she assessed the battlefield: quick, thorough, clinical. If she notices anything else about the man standing bare in front of her, she doesn’t show it.
The first words out of her mouth are not relief. Not love. Not anything close.
“You brought him out here without a full guard detail?” The question grinds out, rough with fury. “Open ground, minimal cover, no escape route, and you walked him right into a kill zone. What the hell kind of alpha are you?”
I open my mouth.
“Don’t answer that. I already know.” She turns back to Cameron. Crouches in front of him. Her hand goes to his face, rough and fast and shaking slightly, the only tell that anything other than anger is happening inside her. “You’re okay. You’re okay. Let me see you.”
Cameron stares at her with an expression that defies description. Not joy. Not shock. The face of a boy who buried his mother and is watching the grave open.
“Ma?” His voice is so soft that I almost don’t hear him.
“I’m here.” She cups his face in both hands. Her lips are pinched. Her eyes are dry. She won’t cry. Of course she won’t. Not here. Not in front of me. “I’m here. I promise.”
Cameron’s hands come up and grip her wrists, and he holds on with a strength that should be impossible from a boy who was kneeling in his own fire thirty seconds ago.
From the ranch, I hear howling. Rook. Coming fast. Too late for the fight, but coming.
I stand in the aftermath of the south pasture, exposed and bleeding, watching a dead woman, and the only thought my brain will produce is:I knew. The second I saw the fire, I knew. And I still wasn’t ready.
Brenna looks up from Cameron. Meets my eyes. Whatever she sees in my face, it doesn’t soften her. If anything, it hardens her further. The anger isn’t a mask; it’s the foundation. Everything else is built on top of it.
“We need to talk,” she says. “But first we secure this property, because whoever sent these wolves knows exactly where Cameron sleeps.”
Notour boy.Notyour son.Cameron. His name and nothing else. She’s giving me nothing. Not a single thread to pull.
And she knows the question is right there between us, naked as the rest of me. She’s choosing not to answer it. Choosing to let me hold it.
Rook breaks through the treeline with Dane and Sienna at his heels, all three shifted, all three ready for a fight that’s already over. They skid to a halt. Sienna shifts back first. Her eyes go wide. She looks at me. Looks at Brenna. Looks back at me.
