Chris doesn’t hesitate. He never does when his people are at risk.
He assigns the flanks with a series of short, sharp barks that carry across the ridge. Lewis and Jack take the left, circling wide to cut off the retreat to the east. The two younger wolves hold the southern approach.My father takes the centre, the direct line between the rogues and the village.
He looks at me. Not a question. An invitation.Beside me.
I take my position at his right shoulder, and something clicks that I’ve been fighting for ten years. Not submission. Not obedience. The two of us, side by side, going to war. The Alpha and his son, standing on the same line for the first time.
We go down the ridge together.
The scarred male sees us coming. He slows, the formation bunching behind him, and for a moment the two groups face each other across fifty metres of open farmland. Seven rogues. Six pack wolves. The arithmetic is close enough that a smart leader would reconsider.
The scarred male is not a smart leader. He’s a desperate one, which is more dangerous.
He howls once, short and sharp, and they charge.
The farmland erupts. The V formation breaks apart as the rogues scatter into attack runs, and the field becomes teeth and fur and the guttural sounds of wolves fighting without rules. There’s no honour in a rogue assault. No ritual challenge, no posturing. Just seven wolves who want what we have and are willing to bleed for it.
The scarred male comes straight for me. Heremembers our last fight. He wants a different outcome.
He’s bigger than I remember. Heavier through the chest, with fresh scars layered over the old ones. He hits me at full speed. We go down together. Nothing but instinct, violence, the hot copper taste of blood.
He’s learned since the last time. He doesn’t go for the throat first. He goes for my injured side, the ribs where his claws caught me in the forest, and even though the wounds are long healed, the precision of it tells me he’s been planning this. His claws find the same lines and open them again, three fresh tracks of fire across my flank, and the pain is bright and clarifying.
I catch his muzzle in my jaws and wrench sideways. He screams and twists free, taking a chunk of my ear with him. Blood runs hot down the side of my face. We separate and circle, both of us bleeding now, and from the corner of my eye, I can see the wider fight.
It’s not going cleanly. Lewis is down, pinned by two rogues who are working together to hold him while a third goes for his hindquarters. Jack has taken a bite to the shoulder that’s slowing his left side. One of the younger wolves is fighting well, holding his ground against a rogue nearly twice his size, but the other is being driven backwards towards the wall.
My father is fighting two at once. Even at fifty-eight, even against wolves half his age, Chris Mistwood is terrifying in combat. He moves with the brutal efficiency of an Alpha who’s held territory for three decades, and the two rogues circling him are already bleeding from half a dozen wounds each. But they’re fast, and they’re coordinated, and even an Alpha can be overwhelmed by numbers.
The scarred male hits me again while I’m looking. His weight drives me sideways, and his teeth find my shoulder, clamping down with a pressure that grinds against bone. I feel the muscle tear. The pain is white and total. Fuck. My vision narrows to a tunnel.
Phoebe. The nest. The trust in her eyes.I choose you.
I twist inside the scarred male’s grip, sacrificing flesh to gain an angle, and my jaws close on his throat. Not the scruff. The throat. The soft tissue beneath the jaw, where the blood runs close to the surface, and the pressure of a bite translates directly into the knowledge that the next few seconds will determine whether you live or die.
He feels it. His whole body goes rigid. His jaws release my shoulder, and he tries to pull away, but I follow him down, bearing him to the ground with my full weight, and I bite harder. Not enough to kill. But enough that he feels the edge of it, the precise distance between submission and the end of everything, and thechoice I’m giving him is the only mercy he’s going to get.
He submits. Not the partial, grudging submission of our first fight. Total. His body goes limp, his legs splay, and his bladder releases. Every wolf on the field smells it: absolute surrender. The kind a wolf doesn’t come back from.
I hold him for ten seconds. Then I release and turn to help my father.
One of Chris’s two rogues has already gone down, lying on its side with its flank torn open, breathing in shallow gasps. The other is still fighting, but it’s lost its coordination. My father and I hit it from both sides simultaneously, a move we’ve never practised and never needed to, and the rogue folds between us like paper. My father’s jaws find its shoulder. Mine find its haunch. We bear it down and hold it until the struggling stops and the submission comes.
Lewis has fought free. He’s limping badly, blood matting his dark fur, but he’s on his feet, and he’s driven one of his attackers off the field entirely. Jack and the younger wolves have the remaining rogues cornered against the boundary wall. Snapping, snarling. One by one, the cornered wolves drop to their bellies. Show their throats.
It’s over.
The field is torn up, the grass churned to mud anddark with blood. Not all of it is theirs. Lewis is favouring his right foreleg. Jack’s shoulder wound is deep enough to need attention. One of the younger wolves has a gash across his muzzle that’s bleeding freely. My own shoulder is a mess, the muscle shredded where the scarred male’s teeth found purchase, and my ribs are open again, the old wounds reopened along the same lines.
We’re standing. They’re not. That’s what fucking matters.
The scarred male is the first to move. He drags himself upright, slowly, his twisted foreleg barely holding his weight. He looks at me, and there’s nothing left in those eyes. No aggression, no calculation, no plan. Just the flat recognition of a wolf who bet everything and lost.
He turns away. Limping, dragging his injured leg, he moves towards the eastern ridge. The others follow. The red-furred wolf can barely walk, lurching sideways with every step. Two of the rogues who can still move support the one who went down hardest, hauling him between them. They leave blood trails in the churned grass, dark against the mud, and they don’t look back.
No formation. No defiance. Just beaten wolves dragging themselves away from a fight that cost them everythingthey had left.
I watch them until the darkness takes them. They won’t be back. The scarred male’s total submission told every wolf on that field what the outcome was. You don’t recover from that. You don’t regroup and try again. You find somewhere far away, and you stay there, because the alternative is coming back to die.
