“Patrick.” Caelan’s voice cuts through the roaring in my ears. I didn’t notice her entering the room, but suddenly, she’s beside me with her hand on my arm and her scent filling my lungs. “Breathe.”
I force air into my chest. In. Out. The panic recedes enough for me to think clearly, though my heart continues to slam against my ribs.
“This changes things,” Dorian comments.
“It changes nothing.” The words scrape out of my throat. “Jonas being on guard duty doesn’t affect the mission parameters.”
Oren’s unimpressed. “It affects you.”
“I can handle it.”
“Can you?” He pushes off from the table and walks toward me with a measured stride. “You just went pale as a ghost at the mention of your brother’s name. If you freeze up in the field, people die. My people. Llewelyn people.” His gaze flits to Caelan and lingers there for a moment before returning to me. “Your mate.”
The mention of her name snaps something into focus. I meet Oren’s stare without flinching. “I won’t freeze.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because Jonas is my brother. If anyone can get through to him, it’s me. I know him better than anyone alive. I know what words will reach him and what arguments will make him listen.”
Caelan’s fingers squeeze my arm. I can feel her worry bleeding through the bond, but underneath it, there’s somethingelse. Faith. She believes I can do this, even when I’m not sure I believe it myself.
Oren eyes me for a long moment. I’ve faced down Mordaunt’s fury and Bastian’s cruelty and a hundred other threats that should have broken me, but something about this alpha’s scrutiny makes me want to squirm. He’s not trying to intimidate me. He’s trying to see inside me, to determine whether I’m worth the risk he’s about to take.
“You want to lead the infiltration team,” he surmises.
“Yes.”
“Even knowing your brother will be there.”
“Becausemy brother will be there. Jonas isn’t a killer. He’s a twenty-four-year-old kid who’s been fed lies his whole life about what Thornridge stands for. If I can get to him before the fighting starts, I can make him understand. I can bring him over to our side, and maybe some of the other guards, too. But that only works if I’m there to do it. Anyone else will be a stranger, an enemy. Jonas won’t listen to a stranger.”
“And if you can’t convince him? If he attacks you anyway?”
The question settles over the room like a shroud.
“If I can’t convince him, I’ll do what needs to be done. But I have to try, Oren. He’s my brother. He’s all I have left of the life I had before Thornridge swallowed everything. I can’t just write him off without giving him a chance to choose differently.”
Oren turns away and walks back to the table. He braces his hands against the edge and stares down at the maps like they hold answers none of us can see. The room waits in silence while he weighs my words against the risks, and I can feel every second ticking by like a countdown to judgment.
“Aidan,” Oren starts, “you’ll take point on the extraction team. Three wolves, the fastest runners we have. Your only job is getting the prisoners out once Patrick’s team secures the bunker.”
Aidan nods. “Understood.”
“Wyn, you’re coordinating from the ridge line. I want eyes on every approach in case this goes sideways, and we need to pull back.”
“On it.”
Oren straightens and turns to face me. “You can lead the infiltration team. Four wolves, including yourself. You pick them.”
Relief floods through me so fast it makes my knees weak. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.” Oren crosses the distance between us until we’re standing nearly toe to toe. “I’m agreeing to this because you know Thornridge better than anyone. But I need you to understand something, and I need you to hear me clearly, because I will not repeat myself.”
“I’m listening.”
“If Jonas attacks you or any member of your team, you put him down. No second chances or trying to talk him around in the middle of a fight. The same goes for any other Thornridge wolf who refuses to stand down.” Oren’s voice drops to something cold and final. “I’m not losing people because you couldn’t pull the trigger on family. If it comes to a choice between your brother and my wolves, you choose my wolves. Are we clear?”
The words land like stones in my gut. He’s asking me to promise that I’ll kill Jonas if it comes to that, that I’ll puta stranger’s life above my own blood. Everything in me rebels against the idea. Jonas is the reason I stayed in Thornridge as long as I did. He’s the reason I didn’t defect years ago when I first started seeing the rot at the pack’s core. I told myself I was staying to protect him, to find a way to get us both out together.
