It's still darkwhen the radio on the desk crackles. I'm awake before Alden is, but he's moving before I finish processing the sound, crossing to the desk in two strides, pressing the channel.
"Report," he says.
The scout's voice is taut. "The convoy is moving. Six vehicles, organized formation, approaching the lower boundary road. ETA to property line, fifteen minutes."
"All teams to position," Alden says. "Hold until my signal."
He grabs his clothes and clips his radio to the belt.
I'm already dressed—field pants, boots, the vest with the remaining equipment still in its pockets. He looks at me in the pre-dawn dark and doesn't tell me to stay inside.
We walk out into the clearing together.
The pack is already assembling, wolves moving into formation in the gray light, the eastern sky barely lighter than the west, the braid hanging over my shoulder catching the first thin edge of dawn. Ciaran meets us at the tree line with a look that takes in both of us and settles into something that is almost approval.
The distant sound of engines drifts through the pines.
The pack holds its ground and waits.
34
ALDEN
The ridge gives me everything I need and nothing I want.
From here I can see the lower access road, the tree line flanking it on both sides, and the convoy headlights threading through the dark like a procession. Six vehicles in formation—the flatbeds first, the SUVs behind them—moving with the organized confidence of people who have done this kind of thing before and have never encountered a reason not to.
Rafe's voice comes through the radio, barely above a whisper. "Convoy crossing the boundary line now. Lead flatbed is past the marker."
"All teams hold," I say. "Wait for the second vehicle."
Thirty seconds. The convoy closes the gap.
"Now," I say.
Silence—then the first tire goes, the sound a sharp hiss beneath the engine noise, and the lead flatbed lurches and drags. The driver overcorrects.
The second truck's headlights swing wide as it brakes, and in the gap that creates, four wolves hit the second vehicle's tires in quick succession and melt back into the dark before the spotlights can track them.
Shouting from the convoy rises in the night. Doors opening. Rifle muzzles sweeping tree lines that have nothing to aim at.
I watch from the ridge and keep my grip loose on the radio.
The wolves don't engage directly—they move in the dark at angles the spotlights can't follow, fast and low, using the tree line the way I taught them, never stopping long enough to become a target. The hunters fire blind, the shots cracking through the trees in directions that are mostly wrong and entirely harmless.
Below me, I can see the convoy formation breaking down—drivers abandoning the lead vehicles, men spreading out to look for something they can't see, the organized approach fracturing into individual decisions.
Good. Individual decisions are mistakes.
"Ciaran," I say into the radio.
"Moving." His voice comes back steady. "East team is in position at the ravine."
"Drive them in."
The next two minutes are noise and movement and chaos, but it’s going exactly the way I planned it, which means it's also just beginning to deviate in small ways I have to account for from up here. Two hunters break west instead of east, away from Ciaran's funnel. I radio the overwatch team on the western slope and redirect them without breaking my observation of the main engagement.
My shoulder pulls with every movement, and my left side reminds me at regular intervals that Ansel's opinion about tonight was the medically correct one. I ignore both.
