“Cameron—”
“Next room. Sleeping. The drug cleared his system faster than yours. The Ravenclaw magic burned it out. Some kind of metabolic response our healer’s never seen before. He’s been up once, ate half the kitchen, went back to sleep.” He holds my eyes. “He’s fine, Brenna. I checked on him twenty minutes ago.”
I press my hands over my face. My fingers smell like chemicals and grass and the residue of spent magic. I can feel him again, faintly, but there. Exhaustion. Relief. And underneath, a cold fury that he’s been holding for hours while he waited for me to wake.
“How long?”
“Eight hours. The drug was heavy. Military grade. We think the compound was tailored for your specific magical signature, not a generic suppressant. Custom work.”
Custom. Meaning someone provided the Syndicate with detailed information about my magic—its frequency, its characteristics, its vulnerabilities. Data you’d only get from close observation or from intelligence files.
“Just Syndicate?” I say.
“Syndicate operatives, purist wolves providing the breach. Coordinated assault on three fronts—south, north, and east. Thewhole compound attack was a distraction. They came for you and Cameron specifically.”
I lower my hands. My vision is clearing. The room is the cabin bedroom: timber walls, the mountain wildflowers on the nightstand, morning light through the window. Outside, I can hear hammering. Wolves repairing damage.
“Bern,” I say as everything falls into place. Bern’s aide. The tablet. Documenting everything at Ravenclaw, including the ward work I demonstrated.
“We have proof.” His voice is level. The kind of level that costs effort. Every word is measured, placed, controlled, because the alternative is the fury beneath them. “We picked up a communication device from the extraction team leader. Encrypted, Syndicate issue. Message logs routing through to Darkwood territory. His territory, Brenna. His communications infrastructure. The routing is direct, documented, and undeniable.”
I close my eyes. Open them. The ceiling of the cabin is rough timber, nothing like the water-stained plaster at Ravenclaw. But Merric is beside me, connected, and my son is sleeping in the next room. The things that matter most in the world are accounted for. For a moment, I let that be enough before the rest of it floods back.
“What’s the compound’s status?”
“Three wounded. Nobody critical. Petra took a bad slash on her arm defending the east breach, but she’s already back on her feet and threatening to fight anyone who suggests she rest. The perimeter has been sealed. Jonas held it together.” He pauses. “Edda Beaumont came to the cabin two hours ago. She wanted to see you.”
“To gloat?”
“To apologize.”
That stops me. I search his face for irony, for qualification. There’s none.
“The attack changed things,” Merric says. “The purist wolves had Ashfall markings. Every wolf in this compound saw them working alongside Syndicate operatives—the traditional packs she trusted, running coordinated ops with the enemy she was told to fear. And they saw the Syndicate’s target. Not the compound. Not the pack. You and Cameron. A mother and her son.”
“Cracked something in her worldview.”
“Cracked. Not broken. She’s not suddenly your best friend. She’s still Edda—fucking impossible. But she sat in this room, and she looked at the dart casings on the nightstand, and she said, ‘They made weapons to use on her specifically.’ And then she said nothing for a long time.”
I can picture it. Edda Beaumont sitting in this chair, gray eyes on the dart that was designed to suppress my magic, running the calculation that thirty years of certainty taught her to avoid: What if I was wrong? Not about caution, not about process, not about the duty of an alpha to consult his council. About the fundamental question. About who the threat actually is.
“She asked me a question I didn’t expect,” Merric says. “She asked why Bern would work with the Syndicate. What he gains.”
“And?”
“I told her the truth. That Bern’s crusade against magic-blooded wolves was never about tradition. It was about control. About ensuring that no wolf powerful enough to challenge the existing hierarchy could emerge. And that he’d rather sell his own kind to the Syndicate than allow the old structures to change.”
“Did she believe you?”
“She believed the communication device. She believed the attack. She believed the anti-magic darts designed for yourspecific signature.” He pauses. “She asked for the twenty-day review period to be cancelled. Voluntarily. Said the review was based on a threat assessment that no longer holds.”
I sit with that. Edda Beaumont—iron-gray conviction, her dead husband’s politics, three decades of certainty—looked at the wreckage and chose evidence over ideology. It doesn’t erase what she said to me that day. It doesn’t undo the unfounded opposition. But it means something. It means the ground can shift even under people who’ve been standing in the same place their whole lives.
“I want to address the pack,” I say.
“You can barely sit up.”
“I can stand. And they need to hear from me. Not from you, not from Jonas, not secondhand through the rumor chain. From the woman they were told to be afraid of.”
