CASSIDY
"Stand down." Alden's voice fills the stone clearing like a physical force.
He's only half-shifted — the wolf surfacing in his eyes, silver and absolute, his frame broader at the shoulders, the scar through his brow catching the Blood Moon light — but the command that comes out of him doesn't need a full shift to land. Every wolf in the outer ring goes still.
Ciaran moves in the same breath, his hand closing around my arm with firm, steady purpose, pulling me back through the pack toward the inside of the ritual stones.
I let him, because the clearing has fractured into something I can't navigate on instinct alone.
"Get her behind the stones," Ciaran says, not to me exactly, more like a directive issued to the situation itself.
"I'm fine," I say. "I can walk."
"I know you can." He doesn't let go. "Do it faster."
We clear the outer press of wolves and reach the ritual boundary, and Ciaran positions himself between me and the general noise of the clearing.
I look past his shoulder and find Gideon, standing with his temple bleeding and his composure reassembled into something impressively close to dignity given the circumstances.
"She fabricated it," Gideon says, loudly enough for the council to hear. "Whatever she claims to have found, whatever story she's constructed—she's been working to manipulate Alpha authority since she arrived." He sweeps his gaze across the council arc.
Brynn's staff strikes the ground.
"There will be no further action until evidence is presented to the council," she says. "That is the law, and I will enforce it. Violence within the ritual boundary is suspended." She looks at Gideon with the particular amber-eyed patience that has outlasted everyone who has ever tried to argue with it. "That includes you."
Gideon inclines his head. It's not agreement, but it's compliance, and Brynn accepts the distinction without comment.
Alden is beside me before I've finished tracking all the moving pieces. He's fully human again, shoulders squared, one hand coming to my arm in a gentle, present gesture
"Can you walk?" he says.
"Everyone keeps asking me that."
"Because you ran over a mile and a half through dark mountain terrain after being drugged and tied to a chair." His voice is level, but the look he gives me isn't. "So. Can you walk?"
"Yes," I say. "Let's go."
His quarters are quiet. That's the first thing I notice when the door closes behind us—the Blood Moon noise drops away like a curtain coming down, and what's left is lamplight and the low creak of the building and the particular quality of a room that belongs to one person and reflects that in its bones.
Alden moves to the side table and pours water from a pitcher, crosses back, and hands it to me without a word. I drink half of it standing before I've consciously decided to.
"Sit," he says.
"I'm not fragile."
"I know." He pulls the chair out from the desk. "Sit anyway."
I sit. He leans against the desk with his arms folded and looks at me, taking inventory. I let him.
"Tell me what happened," he says. "From the beginning."
So, I do. I tell him about the eastern corridor, the cameras, the way the unease arrived before I had a reason for it, the rocky incline and the absence of Kieran where Kieran should have been.
I'm still running on adrenaline, hands shaking, words flying from my mouth a mile a minute. I open my field notebook from my jacket pocket at some point because moving through the account requires something to do with the notes. I describe the cabin in precise detail: the layout, the gun rack, the mounted trophies, the crates against the wall, and the maps with Gideon's seal pinned above them.
Alden listens without interrupting. He's very still in the way he gets when he's cataloguing information rather than reacting to it, but his jaw tightens at the crates, and again at the part where Kieran pressed the cloth over my mouth.
"He talked the whole time," I say. "About pack strength, about you being compromised, about Gideon's vision. He genuinely believes it. That's what makes him dangerous."
