Kade.
The howl comes again, lower this time, carrying the pitch of a summons rather than a warning. My chest answers it before the rest of me decides to, the old bond pulling at a frequency that has nothing to do with choice and everything to do with bloodline. Two hundred and thirty years have not worn it down even slightly. I feel him the way I feel the scar on my left shoulder—present, permanent, and occasionally inconvenient.
I move carefully out of bed, pulling on jeans and a shirt in the dark, deliberately avoiding waking Charlie. She sleeps in the stillness of the undead, motionless, her hair spread across the pillow, and the sight of her strips something raw in my chest the way it has every morning of the six days we’ve been here. I hold it for one breath. Then I close the bedroom door quietly behind me and step out into the cold.
My lycan pack is waiting at the tree line.
Three of them, standing in a loose formation at the edge of the dark, and the sight of them anchors something in me andunsettles something else in equal measure. Kade stands at the center, exactly where he always stands, because he has never in his life positioned himself anywhere other than the front. He’s built like old timber, dense and solid, the kind that’s weathered more storms than anyone bothered to count. His beard carries more silver than the last time I saw him, and the lines around his eyes have carved deeper, but his eyes themselves haven’t changed. Still that same burnt amber they’ve always been.
The pack alpha.
My mother’s older brother. The man who taught me to shift for the first time in a field outside of Oslo when I was barely old enough to understand what I was.
To his left stands Brynn, my cousin. She has her arms crossed and her jaw set in the expression she was born wearing, watching me cross the yard with the quality of attention she reserves for situations she has already assessed and filed under‘complicated.’She stands at the same height she always has, lean and coiled, every line of her radiating the controlled readiness of a lycan who has never once in her life been caught off guard and intends to keep that record intact.
To Kade’s right is Talon. Younger and Brynn’s brother. He leans against a tree with studied ease, trying to look as though the situation doesn’t concern him, and the fact that he’s tracking every shadow at the edge of the cabin’s light with those dark eyes of his tells me everything about how well that’s working.
I stop in front of them, and the pack bond settles into recognition, ancient and automatic.
“You ran hard to get here,” I say.
“Six days,” Kade says. His voice hasn’t changed. It probably never will. He holds my gaze the way alphas hold a handshake, firm and measuring. “You’ve been gone too long, and your energy feels off. What’s happened?”
I consider the question for a moment. Kade is family. The bond between us reaches across oceans. He can’t read my mind, but he can feel what I feel. Years ago, across an ocean, I felt him lose a son. I didn’t know the boy’s name… I only knew the shape of his grief.
He has been feeling me unsettled for six days.
I’ve had that long to find the words. They still sit awkwardly, as if the shape of what happened doesn’t quite fit the available language.
“I found her,” I say.
The silence that follows is its own kind of loud. Brynn’s arms don’t move from their crossed position, but something shifts in her face. Kade’s jaw tightens once and then releases. Talon straightens off the tree and forgets to look casual about it. “You’re fated,” Kade states.
“Yes.”
“And the off energy I’m feeling through the bond.” His eyes move to the cabin, then back to me. “It’s not yours.”
“No.”
Kade breathes in slowly through his nose, and I watch him read the air the way only an alpha of his age can, layering scent, instinct, and two centuries of pattern recognition into a picture that assembles faster than words could build it. His eyes go very still. “Lycan and vampire,” he states.
“Yes.”
Talon makes a sound, more of a growl than a word. Brynn shoots him a look that kills it before it becomes one.
“A turned vampire,” Kade continues. “Recently turned. The scent is still new.”
“Seven days ago. She was human. Someone turned her against her will and abandoned her in the scion stage. No sire, no guidance. I found her one day into the bloodlust.” I let thatsit for a breath. “She’s been here with me since. She’s holding. Better than holding.”
Kade’s eyes come back to my face and stay there. He is looking for something specific, and whatever he finds or doesn’t find in the next few seconds will determine how this conversation goes. I hold still under the inspection, the way I learned to hold still under it when I was seventeen years old and terrified, and let him look.
“She’s your fated mate,” he says finally. “And she’s a vampire.”
“Yes, we’ve established this.”
He exhales. It’s a long breath, absorbing information he would have preferred to be different.
“The Coven,” Brynn says, speaking for the first time. Her voice is clipped and direct, the way it always is. “They’ve given you an ultimatum.”
