This was it. The alliance.
Humans and lycans and a pregnant bookshop owner with a flare gun. The most ridiculous and improbable war council in the history of either world, and it was the best chance we had.
I turned away from the trees and walked toward the command table.
Solomon fell into step beside me.
“She’ll be fine,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“The grid prep takes thirty minutes. She’ll prep, she’ll map the sublevels, she’ll feed Thiago the false intel. Forty-eight hours and we breach.”
“Yeah.”
“Stop saying yeah.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Nothing. I want you to focus. We have a breach to plan and your head needs to be in the strategy, not the forest.”
He was right again. I was getting tired of him being right.
Suddenly, the raven screamed.
Not the usual territorial call or the surveillance chatter we’d gotten used to over the past weeks. This was a shriek that cutthrough camp and made every wolf within earshot snap their heads toward the eastern sky.
Red light.
A streak of fire climbing above the tree line, punching through the gray morning, hanging in the sky with the unmistakable burn of a signal flare. Coming from the compound.
Coming too early.
Every sound in camp stopped. Voss’s soldiers froze mid-drill. The converted hunters turned as one. Farmon stood so fast the supplement bowl crashed off his knee.
Lucian’s head came up from the maps. Solomon went rigid beside me. The bond channels, all three of them, pulsed with a single unified frequency that translated into a word I felt in my teeth.
Mira.
The flare was wrong. Today was prep. Grid work, false intel, sublevel mapping. The breach wasn’t supposed to happen for another forty-eight hours.
This wasn’t the signal. This was a distress call.
I didn’t think.
My legs were moving before the thought completed itself. The tree line blurred and the camp was behind me and I was running, full sprint, branches tearing at my arms as I crashed through undergrowth that I’d walked carefully through last night.
No care for noise or concern for the route Solomon had mapped. Just the straight line between me and that red light in the sky and the woman underneath it.
The bond screamed. Not just my channel. All three. Mira’s signal coming through distorted and panicked, a frequency I’d never felt from her before, and my wolf surged deep in my ribs so hard my vision blurred at the edges.
Behind me, the camp erupted. Shouting. Commands. Voss’s voice cutting through the chaos with military precision, organizing the breach that was supposed to happen in forty-eight hours and was happening now.
Solomon and Lucian were seconds behind me. I heard them crash through the tree line, heard the footfalls close enough that even at my speed they were keeping pace through sheer fury. Someone tried to stop them. A soldier’s voice, cut short by what I assumed was Solomon removing the obstacle without slowing down.
The compound’s eastern wall came through the trees. Gray concrete against the dawn sky, the flare still burning above it, fading now but visible.
The service entrance was ahead.
