Page 39

***

Rolf

The thirty nights ended on a moon that was just past full.

Rolf crossed the warehouse threshold expecting the familiar weight of Mathias’ presence—the steady pressure of a true sire holding the camp in line. He found only absence. The air felt thinner. The younger ones moved without the old rhythm. Something essential had been pulled out of the walls.

Gina met him near the interior doors, hair drawn severely back, ancient eyes unreadable.

“You’re late,” she said.

“I’m on the night I was given.” Rolf searched the shadows behind her. “Where is he?”

“Gone.” The word was clean. Brutal. “He took the human and fled. The bond was going to burn him if he stayed. It may burn him anyway.”

Rolf stood very still. The last time he’d seen Mathias, his sire had been locked to Carson in an alley, taking too much, offering a choice Rolf had been too exiled to interrupt. Now the center of the camp was empty.

“He would not abandon them,” Rolf said.

“He abandoned this.” Gina’s gesture took in the warehouse, the whelps, the fraying order. “He left the rest to whoever could hold it.”

The first elder didn’t wait for permission.

A gray-eyed male stepped out of the cluster near the entertainment rooms, voice sharp with old authority. “You were cast out for failing to master a single human. You do not walk back in and reach for the sire’s place.”

Rolf turned to face him. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. “I was cast out to learn control. I learned it. Mathias knew what the exile was for. So do you.”

A second elder, female, thinner, colder: “The camp followed Mathias. Not his mistakes. Not his leftovers. You were a liability. You remain one.”

“Then test me.” Rolf let the words settle. “I will not beg for a title he never handed me. I will keep this camp alive the way he taught us—or you can watch it tear itself apart while you argue over who failed first.”

A third voice, younger but backed by two silent supporters: “Gina is dam. That is enough. We do not need another sire drunk on someone else’s legend.”

Gina’s gaze flicked to Rolf, then to the speaker. She didn’t defend him. She also didn’t stop him.

Rolf stepped into the open floor.

He met the first challenge with law, not heat—citing the exile’s term, the purpose Mathias had named, the nights Rolf had spent feeding clean and leaving the homeless encampment standing. He met the second with memory of how Mathias had structured reapings, how he had used illusion instead of slaughter, how he had placed the young behind the strong. He met the third by refusing the insult and offering work instead of pride.

One by one the objections thinned.

Not because they loved him.

Because the alternative was a camp with a weary dam, restless whelps, rival pressure at the borders, and no one willing to stand in the center.

When the last elder looked away, Gina inclined her head a fraction.

“The nights will tell us if you can hold it,” she said. “Until they do, the camp needs a sire. Do not make me regret this.”

Rolf tasted the title and found no triumph in it. Only the shape of Mathias’ absence, and the hard knowledge that he would have to become what his sire had been—or lose everything Mathias had left behind.

“I won’t,” he said.

He knew it would take everything he had.

***

Gina