"What did you say?"
"I said they will not leave." I held his gaze, letting the weight of the words settle between us. "I will give you my word, as Alpha of Hanging Rock, that the strangers will remain within this valley until the matter is resolved. They will not flee. They will not be spirited away in the night. They will be here when you return."
Karik studied me. The amusement had drained from his expression, replaced by the sharp, predatory focus of a man reassessing his opponent. Behind him, his wolves had gone still, reading their alpha's mood the way all pack wolves did—instinctively, instantly, adjusting their own posture to mirror his shift from theatrical confidence to genuine calculation.
"Your word," he said slowly.
"My word. Before my pack. Before yours. Before the Great Mother herself." The formal phrasing was deliberate. An Alpha'ssworn word, given publicly, was binding. Breaking it would cost me my leadership, my honour, everything my father and his father had built. Karik knew that. I held his gaze without blinking, even as something inside me screamed at what I was committing to. I was caging them. Caging her. But the alternative—Karik dragging her out of here today, right now, in front of my pack, in front of Daska—
That could not happen.
"A moon cycle," I repeated.
"Half." Karik's smile returned, but it was different now. The smile of a man who smelled blood in the water. "The dark moon. Half a moon cycle, Rivik.”
Half a moon cycle. Not even a full turn of the Mother's face across the sky. Fourteen days, maybe fifteen, before Karik came back with his wolves and his hunger and his absolute certainty that Ellie belonged to him like a tool or a hide or a cut of meat.
It wasn't enough time. It wasn't close to enough time.
But it was more than nothing, and nothing was what I'd have if I refused him outright with twenty of his wolves standing in formation and my pack's children huddled in the caves behind me.
The trap was elegant. I had to give him that, even as the full weight of it settled onto my shoulders like a physical thing. Karik hadn't come here expecting to leave with Ellie today. He'd come to create a framework—a public demand, a deadline, a set of terms that would make any refusal look like aggression. If I handed her over, he won. If I refused, he had justification to escalate. And if I fought him now, here, with twenty of his wolves against my twenty-three and the rest of my pack exposed behind us...
I could feel my wolves watching me. Every single one of them, reading my body language the way wolves always did, lookingfor the cues that would tell them whether to stand down or bare their teeth. Daska hadn't moved.
I held Karik’s gaze. Let the silence stretch between us, thick and suffocating, while every fibre of my being screamed at me to reject him. To snarl the wordnointo his face and let the consequences come. I could refuse outright. The word was right there, sitting on my tongue, hot and ready.No. She stays. Come and take her if you dare.My wolf spirit howled for it, demanded it, threw itself against my ribs with such force that I tasted blood where I'd bitten the inside of my cheek.
If I refused outright, Karik had his justification. He'd brought enough wolves to make a challenge viable, and even if we drove them back—which we could, probably, with casualties—he'd have his story for the summer gathering.Hanging Rock refused a lawful claim. Hanging Rock chose violence.The other packs would hear his version first, and by the time I stood before the council, the narrative would already be set.
For the first time since I became alpha, I had to admit to myself, I didn’t know what to do for the best. All I could do was to play for more time.
I bowed my head in agreement.
“You have my word.”
CHAPTER 20
DASKA
Ifound him at the overlook.
The place where the ridge jutted out above the camp like a jaw set against the sky, where you could see the whole valley spread below. Rivik stood at the edge with his back to me, watching the last of the Broken Ridge formation disappear into the shadows between the pines. The wind had picked up since the confrontation, carrying the bitter tang of coming rain and the fading musk of enemy wolves, and it whipped his hair across his face in strands he didn't bother to push away.
He heard me coming. Of course he did. I wasn't trying to be quiet. The bear in me was close to the surface. Closer than it had been in years, maybe ever. I could feel it pressing against the underside of my skin like something trying to claw its way out, hot and vast and utterly, devastatingly furious. My hands were shaking. I was trying very hard not to shift, which took most of my concentration, because the bear inside me had been clawing at the walls of my chest since the moment Karik had looked atEllie and called herproperty, and the only thing keeping me in human form was the thin, fraying thread of knowledge that if I shifted now, I would not stop until something was dead.
I stopped three paces behind him. Close enough to be heard without shouting. Far enough that I wouldn't do something I'd regret.
"You would give her to him."
The words came out low. Rough. Barely human.
Rivik didn't turn around. He just stood there, silhouetted against the bruised sky with his shoulders set like a man bracing for a blow he'd already decided to take.
The silence stretched between us like a wound opening, and with every heartbeat that passed without him speaking, the fury inside me climbed higher. The bear pressed harder against my skin, my vision sharpening at the edges the way it always did before a shift, colours bleeding away until the world was all contrast and movement and the dark shape of the man in front of me who had just traded away the only person I had ever…
"You just stood there," I said, and my voice cracked on the words like ice splitting. "You stood there and you bargained her away like she was a winter hide. You looked that animal in the eye and youagreed."
"I bought time." His voice was flat. Controlled. The alpha's mask, locked in place so tight I could see the strain of it in the rigid line of his spine. "Which is more than we had an hour ago."
