I stand in my surgery with my mate’s arms around me and my map on the wall and the growing, unshakeable conviction that I am exactly where I’m supposed to be.
Maggie was right. She’s always bloody right.
Chapter 27
Threat and Control
Roan
The scent trailruns within two hundred metres of her back garden.
I find it on a Tuesday morning, during what I’ve started calling my patrol and what is technically an unauthorised sweep of the village perimeter that nobody asked me to do. The rogue’s scent is faint but unmistakable: male, unfamiliar, the same sour undertone of a packless wolf that I’ve been tracking for weeks. This trail is different from the previous incursions. It doesn’t follow the boundary markers or test the territorial lines. It cuts straight through open farmland on a direct path towards Ivy Cottage, then loops back towards the eastern ridge.
He wasn’t testing our borders. He was scoping her location.
The thought of him this close to her turns my blood to ice and my wolf to violence.
I crouch at the edge of the trail and breathe it in. My wolf identifies the individual: not the scarred male from the fight, not the red-furred one. Someone new. A fourth wolf, which means the group is larger than we estimated. They’re rotating scouts, keeping fresh noses on the approach, building a picture of her movements and her vulnerabilities.
The cold that runs through me has nothing to do with the air. Two hundred metres. The fucker was two hundred metres from her back door.
I pull out my phone. Put it away. Pull it out again. Stare at my father’s name in my contacts like it’s a loaded weapon.
Two hundred metres from her back door.
I call him.
“I need help,” I say, and every word costs me a piece of pride I can’t afford to keep.
The silence on the other end lasts three seconds. In those three seconds, I can hear Chris Mistwood processing the fact that his son has called him, unprompted, and asked for assistance. It’s probably the first timesince I was twelve.
“Tell me,” he says. No gloating. No satisfaction. Just the Alpha, ready to work.
I describe the trail. The rotation pattern, the direct approach to the cottage, the fourth wolf. I give him my tactical assessment: they’re planning a coordinated move, probably within the week, and their target is specifically Phoebe. Her emerging Omega scent is drawing them like a signal fire, and every day it gets stronger.
“What do you need?” he asks.
“Round-the-clock coverage on the eastern approach. Two wolves minimum, overlapping shifts. I want someone on the cottage at all times, close enough to intervene but far enough that Phoebe doesn’t feel surveilled. And I need the pack to extend the active perimeter by half a mile. Push it past the farmland to the ridge.”
“Done. Anything else?”
“Keep this between us for now. I’ll tell Phoebe myself, today, but I’ll do it my way. Not a pack briefing. Not a security assessment. A conversation, between me and her, where I don’t scare the shit out of her more than I have to.”
Another silence. “Roan. She deserves to know she’s being targeted.”
He’s right. I know he’s right. But the thought of putting that fear into her, of adding threat to the list ofimpossible things she’s already processing, makes something in my chest constrict.
“I’ll tell her,” I say. “Today. My way.”
“Your way.” I can hear the faint edge of a smile. “I’m getting used to that phrase.”
He hangs up, and I stand in the cold field looking at the scent trail that leads to my mate’s home. My father just mobilised the pack’s defences in under sixty seconds, no questions, no conditions, no I-told-you-so. The infrastructure I’ve spent a decade calling pointless is the only thing standing between Phoebe and a group of wolves who want to take her. I’m not going to call it gratitude. But it’s something close, and it tastes like eating my words.
The rebel asked for help. The sky didn’t fall.
Phoebe is in her surgery when I arrive, elbow-deep in a cat carrier and muttering something about uncooperative patients. The cat in question is an enormous ginger tom who looks like he’s never cooperated with anything in his life, and Phoebe is attempting to examine his teeth with the focused determination of someone who’s forgotten that cats have claws.
“Need a hand?” I ask from the doorway.
