“Well,” she says, and her voice is stable even if her hand isn’t. “You certainly took your time.”
My throat closes. I blink hard and hold my ground.
“I need to talk to everyone,” I say. “All of us. Inside.”
Greta nods. Drops her hand. Turns to the watching wolves with the authority of a woman who’s been feeding and fixing and holding this pack together emotionally since before I was born.
“You heard her. Inside. All of you.”
The wolves move, some staring at me, some unable to look. Cameron stays pressed against my side. Willow walks ahead, already organizing, already leading, because stopping isn’t something she knows how to do.
Merric’s pack lingers in the yard, the prisoners secured against the porch rail. Merric stands apart from them. Someone has thrown him a pair of jeans, and he’s pulled them on, but the flank wound is still open, bleeding in a slow, stubborn seep down his ribs. He’s watching me walk into the house with his pack’s eyes on my back, the questions unspoken.
I don’t look back.
I’ll face him. I’ll face all of it. But I’m going to hold my people first.
Everything else comes after.
Chapter 7
Brenna
The house smells wrong. Not bad, just different. Greta’s cedar oil is here, and woodsmoke, and the iron tang of a stove that’s been burning hard all winter. But underneath it, something is missing. A layer that belonged to my mother and was maintained by her. That faded after she died. The sweetgrass she used to hang from the kitchen beams, the warmth of a house held together by magic that ran through the walls.
The warmth is gone. What’s left is the shell of it.
Wolves file past me into the front room. Some of them touch my arm as they go; quick, confirming, as if checking I’m solid. Others can’t look at me at all. A woman I don’t recognize herds two children toward the stairs, angling them away from the blood on my clothes with the care of a mother who’s gotten used to shielding her kids from things they shouldn’t see.
I step into the kitchen while the front room fills. I need sixty seconds before I stand in front of them. Sixty seconds to be a person instead of a commander.
The kitchen hasn’t changed much. Same scarred pine table where I ate every meal of my childhood. Same cast-iron hooks on the ceiling beam. Same window over the sink that looks south toward the herb garden and the hills beyond. But the table has a new gouge down the center—deep, deliberate… a mark made by a knife driven hard into wood during a bad night. The hooks are bare. The ceiling beam has a water stain spreading from the corner where the roof leaked, and nobody had the materials or the time to fix it.
I was gone for two years, and the house didn’t stop needing things just because I wasn’t here to give them.
I put my hands on the table. Feel the wood grain under my palms. The same table where Cameron took his first solid food. Where my mother spread her maps and planned ward rotations. Where Cormac would sit after a long day of tending, his sleeves rolled to the elbows, the smell of rosemary and earth on his hands, telling Greta about the progress of some herb he was coaxing through a stubborn growing season.
My head comes up.
I look through the kitchen doorway into the front room, where wolves are settling onto the floor, the stairs, against the walls. I count faces. Some I know: Arlen near the back, leaning on his cane. The Dunbar boys, taller than I remember. A woman named Rose, who used to tend the chickens. Others I don’t know… newer arrivals who came after I left.
I count again. More carefully this time.
Cormac isn’t here.
He wouldn’t miss this. Cormac, who was at every pack meeting I ever called, who sat in the same chair by the window and listened with that careful attention of his, weighing each wordbefore he spoke. Cormac, who held the pack’s health in his hands for years. Who could diagnose a sick wolf by the way they carried their weight and could ease a difficult shift with nothing but his voice and a hand on the wolf’s shoulder.
He wouldn’t be somewhere else. Not for this.
“Greta.”
She’s at the stove, already moving a kettle to the heat because Greta’s response to a crisis is to make sure there’s tea. She turns at my voice, and the look on her face tells me she’s been waiting for this question. Maybe since the moment I walked through the gate.
“Where’s Cormac?”
The kitchen goes quiet. Not the front room—just this small space between the stove and the table where Greta stands with the kettle in her hand, me at the counter, and the answer hanging between us.
She sets the kettle down. Carefully. The way she does everything now—measured, deliberate, conserving energy.
