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One of the officers who had come with him turned to me. “We don’t follow orders from the Crimson.” He turned to Mervyn’s disappearing figure. “And we certainly don’t fight for traitors who betray the Crown for personal gain.”

I nodded.

He commanded his soldiers and led them away. The sounds of boots faded into the trees. The only sounds that remained were the wind and the stream and the low, grieving sounds of my pack tending their wounded.

The sun reached its peak overhead.

Sundown tomorrow would come and go, and my pack would still be here.

We buried our dead before dark.

Four of ours had fallen. Fewer than I’d feared yet far more than I could bear. We laid them on the rise above the river beside the others and built their cairns stone by stone. Imogene wrote their names in her ledger while I stood beside her. That meant I’d buried sixty-seven as alpha now. Sixty-seven too many. I lowered my head.

“The Order won’t return for their dead,” Ruby said. She asked for a pyre and we piled bodies on it.

“Goodbye, Louis,” she said. “I’m sorry it had to be this way.”

He was the operative she’d killed to save Gage.

“Who was he?” I asked.

“Someone I’d trained with.”

I nodded. “Were you friends?”

She didn’t answer right away. “No. I don’t think any of us were ever really friends.” Her voice was low.

My heart ached for her.

Her grandmother was the last to go upon it, still wrapped in her red cloak with Ruby’s on top of it.

Ruby said nothing. Just stood before the pyre with her head down.

Gage Corrin watched her from across the rise.

She was quiet for the rest of the night.

I didn’t take her back to the cottage.

The Hermit’s Hut had served its purpose. I’d gone there three weeks ago to wait for the Order’s assassin, to open the door to a conversation instead of a fight. I’d found my mate instead.

But it wasn’t my home.

I led her along the river, past the longhouse and the drying racks and the last of the lamplit windows, to where the hollow narrowed against the northern ridge. My house sat there alone, half-dug into the hillside like the others but larger, older, its turf roof silvered with frost. Carved into the lintel above the door was a running wolf, worn smooth by a hundred years of weather. My great-grandfather had cut it. Ruby glanced up at it before she stepped inside.

Without a fire, the air inside was cool. It smelled of cedar and old smoke. I lit a lamp and built up the fire in the great stone hearth, and while it caught, Ruby turned in a slow circle in the middle of the room, taking it in.

The table my father had built. The shelves of books. The chair by the fire with its arms worn pale from forty years of hands. The quilt my mother had sewn, folded over the back of it, faded blue and gray. The room in the back where I’d slept as a boy, and the larger one beside it where I slept now.

“This is where you live?” she asked.

I nodded, breathing her scent in a familiar space. “This is home. Where I grew up. Where I lived with my family.”

She ran her fingertips along the edge of my father’s table. “It’s bigger than the hut.”

“The hut was where I waited for you.” I smiled a little. “This is where I live.”

The firelight caught her face and the scratch on it.