And they’ll see a dead woman who isn’t dead, and the whole game changes.
I finish the apple. Check the ward line one more time—holding, bright, solid. Not perfect, but enough to make a statement.
Tomorrow.
I walk back to the ranch as the sun drops behind the western ridge, and I’m halfway across the pasture when I hear it. Laughter from the yard. Multiple voices. I come around the barn and see Dane—silent, granite-faced Dane—teaching some of the Ravenclaw kids to build a sawhorse. Cameron sits on a fence rail watching with something on his face I haven’t seen since before my “death.”
He’s smiling.
Not the careful almost-smile from the first days. An actual smile, unreserved, brought on by the sight of a giant blond wolf communicating an entire carpentry lesson through grunts and gestures while a boy tries to copy his technique and keeps putting the nails in crooked.
Sienna is nearby, sitting on the porch with Greta, helping shell beans. They’re talking in the low, comfortable way of women who’ve found common ground across a generational divide.Greta says something, and Sienna laughs—warm, full, the laugh of someone who’s genuinely enjoying herself.
I stop at the edge of the yard. This scene—the kids learning, Cameron smiling, Sienna and Greta working together in the fading light—is exactly what this ranch has been missing. Life. Not just survival. The messy, noisy, imperfect business of people building something together.
Merric’s people did this. In less than a week, they’ve put cracks in the isolation that’s been suffocating Ravenclaw. Not through force or strategy. Through showing up. Hauling lumber. Shelling beans. Teaching a kid to build a sawhorse.
I watch Cameron laugh at something Dane says, and for one unguarded moment, the anger I’ve been carrying since I came down that hillside loosens its grip.
Maybe I was wrong about Merric Rourke.
Not about everything. Not about the choice he made, not about the years of silence.
But maybe about what he’s capable of now.
The thought sits uncomfortable and warm in my chest, and I carry it into the house without looking at the bunkhouse steps where a man might or might not be sitting in the last of the evening light.
Chapter 14
Merric
Brenna Corvus cleans up good enough to eat. I shouldn’t be noticing. I should be focused on the trees where Hatchett’s delegation is about to emerge, running scenarios, checking sight lines. Instead, I’m standing at her left shoulder watching her adjust the cuffs of her jacket—black, borrowed from Willow, fitted close enough to show the lean muscle underneath—and thinking about how the last time I stood this close to her, we were by a river, and her mouth was on mine.
For fuck’s sake, quit it!
The north boundary stretches before us in the afternoon light. Open meadow, waist-high grass, the trees fifty yards beyond the ward line that pulses faint blue in the soil. Brenna reinforced this section yesterday, and the wards are strong; not a wall, but a statement. Cross this line, and you’ll feel it.
Willow stands to Brenna’s right. She’s dressed sharp. Clean clothes, hair pulled back, the hunting knives at her belt the onlyconcession to the fact that this is a meeting that might become a fight. Her face is composed, alert, giving nothing away. She looks like a woman who runs a pack, because she is, and that’s exactly the message.
Rook is behind us. Solid presence, arms loose, positioned where he can move in any direction if things go wrong. Arlen and one of the other pack fighters are holding the flanks, visible but not aggressive—two large, capable men standing at ease with the stillness of people who can become very not-still very quickly.
Sienna is back at the ward line with eight Ravenclaw wolves. A show of numbers. They’re not fighters—some of them are barely adults—but from fifty yards out, a line of wolves is a line of wolves. Hatchett doesn’t need to know that half of them have never been in a real fight. Not a fight they won, at any rate.
Briar is on the ridge. I can’t see her. That’s the point.
Greta chose to stand slightly apart from the main group, positioned near a fence post like she wandered over by accident. She’s wearing her house dress and carrying nothing. She looks like someone’s grandmother who got lost on a walk. Anyone who underestimates her based on that deserves what they get.
The three captured purist wolves stand between the groups, unbound but guarded. Harlan, the gray leader, holds his broken arm against his chest. The other two keep their heads down. They ooze shame and the lingering chemical scent of burn salve.
“Movement,” Rook says behind me.
The trees shift. Wolves in human form, walking out of the timber in a loose V formation. I count fast. Seven. Hatchett brought his second, four fighters, and one extra—a wiry man in a gray coat who hangs back from the group and watches everything with the detached attention of someone who’s here to observe, not participate.
That one. I mark him instantly. He’s not Ashfall. His body language is wrong; no deference to the alpha leading the V,no pack positioning. He’s a guest. An outsider with a seat at someone else’s table.
Hatchett is easy to identify. He walks at the point of the V with the rolling, territorial stride of a man who believes every piece of ground he stands on belongs to him by right. Big. Not as tall as me, but thicker through the chest and gut. Late fifties, iron-gray hair cropped military-short, a face that’s been weathered by decades of outdoor living into something that looks carved from wood. He wears flannel and work boots and the look of a man who’s already decided how this meeting will go.
He crosses the meadow at a measured pace. His wolves fan out behind him. The wiry observer trails at the rear.
