“Brenna’s magic is defensive. Protective. She can set wards and throw fire, but she can’t mend a wound any more than a sword can stitch a cut.” Greta pauses. “Cameron, though…”
“What about him?”
“Yesterday, after the fight. I was bandaging the burns on the prisoner—the young one, the female. Cameron came in to help. He put his hand near the burn, and I watched the skin ease. Just a fraction. He didn’t even know he was doing it.”
I think about Cameron’s magic—the uncontrolled fire, the copper light. Dangerous on the surface. But he calmed whenBrenna put her hand on his chest. I calmed him with the anchor sense. And now Greta is telling me there’s a healing thread buried in all that raw power.
“Cormac had the same instinct,” Greta says. “When he was young. Didn’t know what it was at first. Thought he was imagining things.” She looks at me over her bowl of beans. “That boy has more in him than fire, Alpha Rourke. Someone just needs to help him find it.”
She goes back to her beans. Conversation over.
I sit on the porch and think about Cameron’s magic and Cormac’s death and a pack that lost its healer right after it lost its alpha and somehow kept breathing. I think about Greta, who buried her mate and kept shelling beans and kept feeding people and kept going because someone had to.
I think about Brenna in the kitchen, almost smiling, and the way she said“I factored in everything”while looking at me like the words hadn’t come out the way she expected.
The day stretches ahead… wards to reinforce, a parley to prepare for, a ranch full of wolves to feed and secure. The captured purists on a twenty-four-hour clock. Bern’s silence on the other end of an unanswered message. Pressure coming from every direction.
And I realize that this is what I was born for. To take the pressure so others don’t have to.
The kitchen is empty when I return to it. I fill the canteens. Pack food—real food, not protein bars. Then find Brenna at the north boundary, already working, white fire sinking into the earth.
I set the supplies beside her without a word. She picks up a canteen without looking at me. Drinks. Keeps working.
But when I turn to go, she says, “Merric.”
I stop.
“Thank you.” Two words. Almost lost in the wind.
I nod and walk back to the ranch. And I carry those two words with me like they’re worth more than everything else combined.
Chapter 13
Brenna
The preparation meeting happens in the kitchen because it’s the only room big enough to fit everyone and still close a door.
Willow sits at the head of the table because I put her there. This is her pack—and the purist delegation needs to see her as authority, not as someone’s niece holding a seat warm. She didn’t argue when I told her. Just nodded, squared her shoulders, and sat down like she’d been born to it.
She might have been. The Corvus women have never lacked for spine.
Greta takes the chair to Willow’s right. Arlen stands behind them, his one good hand resting on the back of Greta’s chair. The three of them form the Ravenclaw side of the table—elder, leader, fighter. Thin ranks, but the optics are solid.
Merric’s people fill the other side. Rook leans against the counter with a cup of coffee and that watchful air I’m learningto respect, even though it makes me uneasy. Dane stands by the door because Dane apparently doesn’t sit. And Sienna is at the table, directly across from Willow, with a notepad and a pen and the focused competence of a woman who walked into someone else’s crisis and started taking minutes.
She’s wearing a green flannel shirt that makes her eyes vivid. Her hair is braided back, and she looks rested, which is an achievement in a house where nobody sleeps properly. When Merric comes in, she slides a coffee toward him without looking up from her notes. He takes it. Routine. Seamless.
I watch this from the doorway and feel something small and hot flare behind my ribs. I’m not going to examine it.
“Everyone’s here,” Willow says. “Brenna.”
I step into the room and take the chair at the opposite end of the table from Willow. Between us: the map, the plan, and the man I kissed by the river eighteen hours ago, who is now sitting at my right with his face freshly shaved and his scent filling my side of the table like he’s doing it on purpose.
He’s not doing it on purpose. Scent isn’t something wolves can turn off. I know that.
It doesn’t help.
“Cade Hatchett runs Ashfall Pack out of the Mark Twain National Forest, southeastern Missouri.” I keep my voice level. Operational. “Sixty fighting wolves, give or take. Old-fashioned alpha, dominance hierarchy, no tolerance for magic-blooded wolves, runs his territory like a feudal estate. He’s been aligned with the purist movement for at least a decade, but until recently, he was more talk than action.”
