“Where are they?”
“I don’t— They were in the first vehicle, I’m just… I’m support.”
“Which direction?”
“North. The extraction point is north, maybe ten miles, there’s a… a clearing, helicopter, they’re—”
Helicopter. They’re airlifting them out. Once Brenna and Cameron are in the air, I lose them. Gone. Into Syndicate infrastructure, into a system that swallows people and doesn’t give them back. Cameron survived it for six months. I will not let them go back.
I drop the operative. Rook is already shifted, running north. Karl follows. I follow.
Ten miles. At full sprint, in wolf form, through territory I’ve known since childhood. My wolf has never run this fast. Not in training, not in combat, not the night my father died, and I ran for three hours through the mountains because I didn’t know what else to do with the grief. This is different. This is the bond driving me forward, even though it’s silent, dark. The void where Brenna should be isn’t an absence. It’s a compass. And I can feel the direction she was taken.
Every stride eats ground. The forest blurs. Trees, rock, creek crossings that I hit without slowing, water spraying. My lungsburn. My muscles scream. I don’t care. Pain is a signal, and I’m not receiving signals that aren’t about Brenna.
Karl falls behind at mile six. He’s fast, but I’m faster when the need for my mate is driving, when the wolf takes over completely, and the human mind becomes nothing but a passenger in a body built for this single purpose. Rook keeps pace longer, but by mile eight, he’s fading in my peripheral vision.
I run alone. The last two miles through old-growth pine, the canopy so thick the dawn barely reaches the forest floor. I can’t feel her anymore. My chest is empty. And I run.
I smell the clearing before I see it. Engine exhaust. Rotor wash. The hot, kerosene-tinged downwash of a helicopter at idle. The sharp ozone of Syndicate tech. And underneath it, faint, almost lost in the chemical stink: copper and warmth. Brenna’s scent. Cameron’s scent.
I break through the trees.
The clearing is maybe sixty yards across, an old logging flat, grass and stumps, the helicopter sitting in the center with its rotors turning. A civilian model repainted flat black, no markings. Two operatives are carrying Cameron toward the open door. He’s stirring, his head lifting, eyes flickering between open and closed. A third operative has Brenna over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. She’s limp.
The sight of her carried like cargo does something to me that goes beyond rage. Beyond fury. Beyond the alpha instinct. Into the place where a man looks at the people he loves being taken from him, and every civilized restraint dissolves.
I attack.
The first operative—the one carrying Brenna—goes down under my full weight. I hit him from behind, and he crumples, and Brenna slides from his shoulder onto the grass. I’m already turning. The second operative drops Cameron and reaches forhis weapon. I’m on him before his hand finds the holster, fangs closing on the rifle stock, tearing it away, then a shoulder check that sends him sprawling.
A fourth operative comes from behind the helicopter. Sidearm raised. I dodge the first shot—it chips bark from a stump behind me—and close the distance before he can fire again. My jaws find his vest. I drag him down.
Cameron hits the ground where the operative dropped him. His eyes snap open—blazing, confused. His fire erupts. Weak, sputtering, barely more than sparks, the drug thick in his blood. But enough. The operative crawling toward him catches a blast of heat across his chest and recoils, screaming, rolling in the grass.
I shift. Human. Naked, bloodied, breathing hard enough that my vision swims. The operatives are down. Two unconscious, one clutching his burned chest, one curled around his broken arm. The helicopter pilot sees me through the cockpit glass. He takes in the blood-smeared alpha standing over his fallen team in a field of scattered weapons and burning grass, and he makes the smart decision.
The rotors spin up. The helicopter lifts. Banks hard east. Flies off fast.
Let him go. He’ll carry the message. And the message is this: You came for my family. Bad idea.
I drop to my knees beside Cameron. He’s sitting up. Groggy. The fire flickers around his hands, burning brighter now, his magic purging the suppression drug faster than it should. Faster than human, faster than ordinary wolf. The Ravenclaw bloodline, fighting back. Rejecting the poison the way fire rejects water.
“Dad?”
The word strikes me harder than anything I’ve taken tonight. Harder than the south gate. Harder than the ten-mile run. Asingle syllable that rewrites seventeen years of absence into something that has a future.
I put my hand on his shoulder. “I’m here. You’re safe.”
“Mom— Is she—?”
I turn to Brenna. She’s on her side in the grass where she fell from the operative’s shoulder. Breathing. I can see the rise and fall of her ribs. Unconscious. I still can’t feel her, the drug holding its grip on her magic, but through the silence, I catch something. The faintest tremor. Like a signal from very far away, trying to reach me through heavy interference.
I check her pulse—steady. Pupils—equal, responsive. The injection site on her neck is swollen, the skin around it bruised dark from the chemical compound. Heavy-duty but not lethal. She’ll come back. The drug will metabolize. She’ll wake up.
I gather her against my chest. Her head falls against my shoulder. Her hair is tangled with grass and dirt, and she weighs nothing in my arms. And yet, she weighs everything.
“She’s alive,” I tell Cameron. “The drug hasn’t cleared yet. But she’s coming back.”
