Brenna takes a half step forward. Not aggressive… commanding. She moves into the space between the groups, and the meadow narrows around her.
“Your wolves are returned, Cade. All three, treated and fed, as the accords require.” She gestures, and Harlan leads the othertwo prisoners forward. They cross the ward line—I see Harlan flinch slightly as it passes over his skin—and rejoin their pack. Hatchett’s second pulls them in without ceremony.
“Ravenclaw honors the old laws,” Brenna continues. “We always have. But I want you to hear something clearly, and I want your associate to carry it to whoever sent him.”
The observer’s eyes sharpen. She’s talking to him directly. He knows it. She knows he knows it.
“Ravenclaw territory is sovereign ground. The wolves on this land are under my protection and the protection of our allies.” She doesn’t look at me when she says it, but I feel the significance of what she’s saying. Allies. Not mates. Not partners. Allies. The politically correct term that gives nothing away and commits to nothing personal.
It still makes my wolf want to howl.
“Any further incursion will be met with the full response allowed under the accords. Not a parley. Not a negotiation. A response.”
Hatchett holds her stare. His mouth is set, but I can see the calculation happening behind his eyes. He came expecting a refugee camp begging for mercy. He found something else entirely. The intelligence he walked in with is worthless.
“The accords are satisfied,” he says. Formal. Stiff. “We’ll take our people and go.”
“Cade.” Brenna’s voice drops, and what comes through is not the commander or the tactician. It’s something older. “I know what’s happening to my people. The scattered families. The ones who’ve gone silent. I know, and I’m not going to stop knowing.”
For the first time, something like unease passes through Hatchett’s composure. Not guilt; he’s a true believer, and true believers don’t feel guilt about the cause. But the discomfort of a man who’s just learned that the woman he thought was dead has been watching him work.
“You should be careful, Corvus. The world’s changing. Magic-blooded wolves aren’t—”
“Finish that sentence and see what happens.”
The white fire is there. Not visible—not yet—but I can feel the heat radiating off her skin, even over the distance between us. Hatchett feels it too. His wolf reads it, and whatever his ideology tells him, the beast knows a superior predator when it stands three feet away.
He steps back. Just one step. But it’s enough.
“We’re done here,” he says. He turns to his delegation. “We’re leaving.”
They reform. The V walks back toward the tree line. Hatchett doesn’t look back. His second does. A long, measuring look that takes in our numbers, our positioning, the ward line glowing in the grass. Gathering intelligence of his own.
The observer is the last to turn. He looks at Brenna, then at me, then at the space between us. His face gives nothing away, but the deliberateness of his attention tells me he’s noted everything.
Then he follows his delegation into the trees, and they’re gone.
The meadow exhales. Willow’s shoulders drop half an inch. Rook steps forward to stand beside me.
“The one in the gray coat,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“He’s not Ashfall.”
“No.”
“He’ll report to someone. Today.”
“Yep. We need to find out who.”
Rook nods and heads back toward the boundary.
The Ravenclaw wolves are breaking formation, the tension seeping out of them in stages. The youngsters are talking fast and low, jittery with adrenaline. Arlen is watching the trees withthe focus of a man who won’t relax until the last scent has faded. Greta hasn’t moved from her fence post. She’s watching Brenna.
Brenna hasn’t moved either. She’s standing in the meadow where the parley happened, facing the forest, and the late afternoon sun is catching the angles of her face and making the copper in her eyes burn.
She’s magnificent.
