“I’m here,” I mutter. “I’ll do what you asked.”
The hills swallow the words. Somewhere out there, past the ridge where boot prints mark the dirt, something is watching.
And now I’m watching back.
Chapter 3
Merric
I don’t sleep well in strange places. Never have. Too many years of sleeping with one ear open, picking up every sound, sorting threat from noise. The bunkhouse creaks constantly, old timber settling, wind finding gaps in the walls, a shutter somewhere banging soft and regular as a heartbeat.
Rook snores. That, at least, is familiar.
I give up around four-thirty and slip outside. The Ozark air hits cool and clean, carrying the river and the deep green smell of forest that’s been growing undisturbed for centuries. My wolf stretches inside me, wanting to run, wanting to feel dirt under his paws instead of floorboards. I tell him later. Maybe.
The ranch is quiet. One Ravenclaw wolf on watch, a woman in her forties with tired eyes and a hunting rifle across her knees. She watches me cross the yard but doesn’t speak. Fair enough. I’m still the intruder.
I find the coffee supplies in the main house kitchen and start a pot. Old percolator, the kind my grandfather used. Takes forever, but makes a brew strong enough to strip paint. While it works, I study the kitchen. Clean but bare. Shelves half empty. Flour, rice, dried beans, canned goods that look like they came from a food bank donation. One jar of honey. No fresh meat, no dairy, no fruit.
That will change once Sienna finishes unpacking the provisions we brought. But it won’t be enough.
These wolves are starving. Not the dramatic kind, the slow kind. The kind where you eat enough to keep moving but never enough to feel full, and after a while, your body starts eating itself, and you don’t notice until your clothes hang wrong and your teeth ache.
I pour two cups when the coffee’s done and take one out to the woman on watch. She looks at it, then at me.
“Thanks,” she says. That’s all. But she wraps both hands around the mug and holds it close, and I understand that sometimes a cup of coffee from a stranger is as much kindness as a person’s had in months.
By the time the sun clears the eastern ridge, my pack is moving. Dane was up before me. I can hear him around the back of the collapsed barn, the rhythmic crack of a hammer driving nails. The Ravenclaw teenagers from yesterday are already with him, holding boards, fetching tools. One of them—a gangly boy with red hair—is asking Dane questions about load-bearing joints. Dane answers in single words that somehow contain entire engineering lessons.
Briar’s gone. She left before dawn, back into the hills. Tracking those boot prints, building a picture. She won’t surface until she’s got something worth saying.
Sienna finds me on the porch with my second cup. She leans on the rail beside me, hair damp from a wash, and surveys the property with the same assessing eye I’ve been using.
“I talked to Greta last night,” she says. “After you turned in.”
“And?”
“Three families left in the last year. Packed up, tried their luck elsewhere. Two more before that. She doesn’t blame them, but every family that leaves takes warm bodies off the watch rotation and hands away from the fields.” She takes a sip of her coffee. “There were sixty wolves here five years ago, Merric.”
Sixty. Cut in half. Not by a single catastrophic event but by slow erosion: fear, exhaustion, and hopelessness picking them off one by one.
“She told me something else,” Sienna says. “The families that left? Two of them stopped communicating within six months. Just went silent. Greta sent word through the network. Nothing came back.”
I set my coffee down. “How many scattered families total? Beyond the ranch.”
“She estimates eight to ten groups. Spread across four states. Some she hasn’t heard from in over a year.”
Motherfuckers. Whoever’s behind this—Syndicate, purists, or both—they’re not just hitting the ranch. They’re hunting those who leave. Picking off the isolated ones first, the families without pack protection, the wolves who thought running would keep them safe.
“We need a census,” I say. “Every Ravenclaw family Greta knows about. Locations, last contact, current status.”
“Already started.” Sienna pulls a folded paper from her back pocket. Names, locations, dates. Her handwriting, neat and precise. “Greta and I are finishing it today.”
I look at her. She looks back, and I can practically hear her saying,“You think I waited for you to ask?”
“Good,” I say. And I mean it in a way that goes deeper than the word. Sienna doesn’t just follow orders. She sees the need and fills it. She’s been doing that since she was fourteen and walked into Frostbourne with nothing but a rucksack and an attitude, and told me she was joining whether I liked it or not.
I liked it fine.
