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“You keep saying that.”

“Because it keeps being true.”

She stopped. They were at the edge of the tree line now, where the mowed grass met the wild undergrowth, the boundary between the compound and everything beyond it. She turned to face him. Her eyes were dry. Her jaw was set. Her hands hung at her sides, loose, but the tendons in her wrists were standing out against the skin.

“I’m a liability.”

“You are not.”

“Thirty wolves, Chris. Thirty wolves, coordinated, from three different packs, with a man who’s spent two decades building this. Every single one of them is coming here because of me. Because my father decided I belong to him and he wants to prove it.”

“That doesn’t make you a liability. That makes you the target of a man who lost the right to call you his a long time ago.”

“The distinction doesn’t matter when people die for it.”

He stepped closer. She didn’t step back, but her weight shifted onto her heels, the micro-retreat of someone who wanted to run without wanting to be seen running.

“Listen to me,” he said. “You have been sitting in that briefing room for weeks. You’ve given us more operational intelligence on Garrett than two months of scouting produced. You identified the ward vulnerability. You predicted his approach pattern. You held the west line alone against five wolves. You are the reason we’re ahead of this.”

“None of that matters if the whole point is me.”

“It matters because you’re part of Beaumont. You’re in those briefings because Kahn put you there. You’re on the rotation because Viktor trusts your instincts. You’re not here as bait, Sloane. You’re here because we need you.”

Her nostrils flared. Her breathing was coming faster now, short, sharp, the rhythm of someone fighting their own body for composure. She turned away from him, facing the trees, her shoulders drawn up tight.

“If he wants me, he should come get me. Alone. Not with an army. Not with the pack standing between us.” She shook her head. “I won’t let people bleed because Garrett Mercer can’t let go of a girl he used to hurt.”

“You don’t get to make that choice by yourself.”

“Watch me.”

“Sloane.” He moved around her so she had to look at him. Her eyes were bright, hot, furious in a way that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with a man who’d spent her entire childhood teaching her that she was the cause of her own pain. “You know what happens if you leave. You walk out past that tree line, alone, thinking you’re saving us. He catches you without witnesses, without backup, without anyone to hold the ground behind you. That isn’t brave. That’s exactly what he wants.”

Her mouth opened. Closed.

“The pack isn’t protecting you because you’re weak. The pack is protecting you because that’s what a pack does. Kahn doesn’t put resources into people he considers expendable. Viktor doesn’t add names to his rotation out of pity. You’re here because you earned it.”

“I didn’t earn it. The bond put me here.”

“The bond put you in my quarters. The rest of it, the briefings, the patrols, the respect you’ve built in that room over the last three weeks, that was you. Nobody handed you that chair. You walked in and took it.”

She was staring at him. Her hands had balled into fists at her sides, her knuckles white. He could feel the war inside her through the bond, the pull between the instinct to run and the newer, fragile thing that wanted to stay.

“I can protect myself,” she retorted hotly.

He stayed calm. “I know you can.”

“I don’t need your patrol rotation standing guard outside my door.”

“I know that too.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because I want to be.” He said it as though it were simple. No edge, no performance, just the words and whatever she chose to do with them. “Not because the bond told me to. Not because Kahn ordered it. Because the woman standing in front of me spent twenty years fighting alone, and she’s good enough at it to win, and she shouldn’t have to.”

The tree line was quiet. A bird called from deep in the canopy, sharp, then silent.

Sloane exhaled. It came out ragged, carrying the tail end of whatever had been locked in her lungs since Gideon had opened that folder. She looked at the trees. Looked at the compound behind him. Looked at the ground between her boots.