The word arrives in my head without permission and stays there.
Willow touches Brenna’s arm. Says something low. Brenna nods, blinks, comes back from wherever she was. They walk toward the ranch together, aunt and niece, shoulder to shoulder, and for a moment they look so alike in posture and purpose that the family resemblance isn’t in the face but in the spine.
Sienna falls into step with me as I head back. “That went better than it could have.”
“Low bar.”
“The observer. You saw him.”
“I saw him.”
“He looked at you and Brenna like he was filing a report.” She pauses. “You standing at the mate point wasn’t exactly subtle, Merric.”
“It was tactical positioning.” I’ve said it so many times I’m almost starting to believe it.
“Right.” Her voice is dry. “Greta said the same thing. She also said Cormac stood at her left for forty-three years, so you might want to workshop that excuse.”
I look at Sienna. She looks back with amusement and something more careful… the look of a friend who sees you walking toward a cliff and is trying to decide whether to warn you or hand you a parachute.
“What?” I say.
“Nothing. Just glad to see you positioningtactically.” She pats my arm and walks ahead, and I hear her laughing to herself as she goes.
I stand in the meadow for a moment longer. The tree line is empty now, but the significance of what just happened feels like the pressure before a storm.
Brenna called me an ally. Stood me at her left shoulder. Let me speak with her authority at my back.
She’s not there yet. I know she’s not there yet. But she put me beside her in front of an enemy and didn’t flinch, and my wolf is rumbling in my chest with a satisfaction that has nothing to do with tactics and everything to do with the woman who smells like white fire and walks like she owns the earth.
The sun drops toward the ridge. I turn and follow my team toward the ranch, and I carry the wordalliesin my chest and try not to think about all the other words it could become.
Chapter 15
Brenna
I hear Cameron before I see him. We’re halfway across the pasture, the parley group strung out in a loose line heading back to the ranch, when the shouting starts. Not words at first; just a voice, high and cracked with fury, carrying across the cleared ground from the direction of the house.
Then the heat.
It rolls toward us like a wave, dry and scorching, carrying the distinct signature I’d know from a thousand miles away. My son’s magic, breaking its banks.
I run.
The yard comes into view. Cameron is on the porch, squared off against Dane, and the air around him is shimmering. His hands are balled into fists at his sides. Light is crawling up his forearms in erratic pulses. Dane stands in the doorway with his arms crossed, face unchanged, a cliff face weathering a storm because that’s what cliff faces do.
Greta heads to the kitchen porch, one hand on the rail, watching with the focused calm of a woman who’s seen this before.
“You can’t keep me locked in a house!” Cameron is shouting at Dane. His voice has the ragged, over-wound quality of someone who’s been arguing for too long and has run out of words and is now operating on pure, distilled fury. “She’s out there with those… with the same wolves who—”
He sees me. Stops mid-sentence. The relief on his face lasts about half a second before the anger swallows it whole.
“You’re okay.” He says it like an accusation.
“I’m fine. The parley went—”
“You left me here.” He comes off the porch. Two steps, three. The light is intensifying, pulsing with his heartbeat. “You went out there to face the people who tried to kill us, and you left me here with him.” A jerk of his head toward Dane, who hasn’t moved. “Like I’m a child. Like I can’t—”
“Cameron, I need you to breathe.”
