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For one moment, we just sit there. The estate rising before us. The morning going on without us. Inside those walls, a room full of people I need to brief and decisions I need to make and a pack that needs its strategist to have her head entirely in the game.

“Mia,” Nash says.

“Don’t,” I say. Quietly. Not unkindly. “Not right now.”

A beat.

“Okay,” he says.

I get out of the car.

By the time Nash has grabbed his bag, Echo is somehow already sitting on the hood of the vehicle parked next to ours. He watches me get out with his small dark eyes and his folded hands and his expression of a creature who knows things he’s not going to share.

“Thank you,” I tell him because I don’t think I said it before. “For the buttons.”

He blinks.

I straighten my jacket. Square my shoulders. Walk toward the estate doors.

Behind me, I hear Nash following. His footsteps on the gravel, unhurried as always. And then, so quietly I almost miss it, he says, “I'll be here when you’re ready.”

I don’t turn around.

I walk through the doors and let them close behind me, and I go to work.

15

NASH

The meeting room feels smaller than it did two days ago, despite there being half as many bodies in it. Maybe it’s the fact that everyone in here looks ready to go to war. In this moment, it’s easy to see this fight is personal for them. Ramsey was a friend, and now he’s their greatest enemy. Not just capable of hurting them but actively doing so at every chance.

Makes me want to put the fucker down even more. Especially when I glimpse the pain Mia’s trying so hard to hide. She stands at the far end of the room, pacing back and forth while she texts furiously.

Everyone else was already here when I arrived.

Grey and Lexi sit at the head of the table, Andy and Dutch flanking them like brackets. Crow sits quiet and watchful at the far end with Razor beside him, the latter cracking his knuckles like he’s about to face off with his opponent here and now.

I take a seat in the middle with Marcus at my right.

My wolf is on edge in a way I’ve never felt before. Maybe it’s Ramsey or the fact that I’m sitting in the middle of a pack that’s not my own, who all look ready to attack something. Then again, maybe it’s Mia, standing in the center of the room like she owns it, and the fact that I spent three days in the woods, falling in love with her, and now I’m sitting eight feet away, pretending like she’s someone I could ever walk away from again.

She hasn’t looked at me since we walked in. As usual.

I’ve looked at her approximately every forty-five seconds. Same old.

Grey calls the room to order. Everyone settles. The air shifts from the low hum of individual conversations to collective focus.

“Mia,” Grey says simply.

She takes it from there.

I’ve watched her work before. In this room, at the restaurant fire, today in the woods after Ramsey left. Always with the focused patience of someone who trusts her own instincts completely. But this is different. This is Mia Reyes in full command of a room full of wolves who would follow her into a war zone, and she knows it, and she uses it without ever making it about herself.

Because for Mia, it’s about the innocents she’s determined to protect.

She starts with Lena Voss.

The room stills as she talks about how Echo brought us the coat buttons. Then led us to the young woman’s body. She delivers the news cleanly—the facts, the location, the cause of death. But I can see what it costs her in the set of her jaw and the way she keeps her focus on the table rather than on the faces around it.