“Merric,” she says carefully. “Who—?”
“Later,” I say, because it’s the only word I’ve got.
Brenna straightens. Puts herself between Cameron and my pack, feet planted, hands loose at her sides, magic riding just under her skin. Not afraid of them. Measuring them. Deciding if they’re a threat to her boy.
She walked out of a grave, and the first thing she did was fight. The second thing she did was put her body between her son and the world.
And she’s alive.
I bleed into the grass and try to remember how to breathe.
Chapter 6
Brenna
My hands won’t stop shaking. They were steady during the fight. Steady when I came down the ridge, steady when I hit the first wolf, steady when I walked through Cameron’s fire and put my palm against his chest.
Now the job is done. And my hands are shaking so hard I have to press them against my thighs to keep them still.
Cameron is gripping my wrists. He hasn’t let go since I crouched in front of him, and his fingers are digging in hard enough to leave marks. I don’t care. He can break the bones if he needs to. I’ll take the pain as payment for what I put him through.
“Ma.” He says it again. Testing the word. Making sure it’s real. “Ma, what—? How—?”
“Not now,” I say. “I’ll explain everything. But not here. Not yet.”
His face crumples. Not into tears. Into something worse. Confusion layered on grief layered on relief, all of it competing for space on features that have aged five years since I last saw him. He was fifteen when I left. Tall for his age, still carrying puppy weight around his jaw, quick to laugh. The boy in front of me has a man’s eyes in a teenager’s face, and the laughter is nowhere.
That’s on me. Part of it, anyway. The Syndicate owns the rest.
“Can you stand?” I ask.
He nods. Gets to his feet, still holding one of my wrists. His legs are stable. The fire is gone, but I can feel the residual heat coming off his skin. His magic is running hotter than it should, hotter than anything I taught him. Something changed during his captivity. Something they did, or something they woke up.
I file that away. Later.
Right now, I need to deal with the man standing behind me.
I can feel Merric without turning around. Not the bond. I buried that years ago, whatever the hell it was. This is simpler. Wolf awareness. A large, wounded predator ten feet at my back, bleeding freely and not making a sound about it. My wolf registers him the way she registers any potential threat: size, position, injury level, combat capacity. And then, underneath the assessment, something else. His blood is in the air—I can smell it from here, copper-bright and warm—and my wolf goes very still. Not alert. Not wary. Still… the way she does when she catches a scent she’s been missing and doesn’t want to let go of.
I crush the response before it forms fully. I don’t have time for what my wolf wants. I’ve never had time for what my wolf wants.
He’s hurt. The flank wound is deep; I saw the gray wolf’s teeth go in during the fight. The leg is torn. He shifted back anyway, and he’s standing anyway because Merric Rourke would stand through an amputation before he’d show any kind of weakness.
That stubbornness used to make me feel safe. Now it just makes me tired.
I turn around.
He looks exactly like I expected and nothing like I remember. Bigger. Harder. The scar on his jaw that I used to trace with my fingertip has settled into a permanent silver line. His body is patterned with new marks I don’t know the stories behind: a thick ridge across his left shoulder, a scattering of small scars on his knuckles. The platinum hair is longer now, damp with sweat and stuck to his forehead.
He’s staring at me the way a man stares at something he’d given up any hope of seeing again.
I don’t have room for that look. I can’t afford it. So I do what I’ve been doing for years: I focus on what needs to happen next.
“How many in your pack?” I ask.
He blinks. Whatever he expected me to say, a logistical question wasn’t it. “Four. Plus me.”
“The scout. The dark-haired woman. She’s good.”
