Chapter 26 - Caitlynn
The bond was screaming.
Not a sound—not something she could hear with her ears or block with her hands over them.
It lived deeper than that, in the hollow between her ribs where Kahn’s heartbeat had taken up residence months ago and never left.
His heartbeat was wrong now. Too fast. Spiking with a violence she could taste at the back of her throat—copper and adrenaline and something older, something that belonged to the wolf and not the man.
Caitlynn stood in the center of the Alpha house’s front room with her hands pressed flat against the dining table and her bare feet on the cold floor, and tried to breathe.
The howling had started twenty minutes ago.
Maybe longer. Time had started moving strangely since the moment Kahn’s mouth left hers and the door shut behind him and the lock engaged and the silence of the house closed around her like a fist. She’d counted her breaths for the first five minutes.
Paced the kitchen for the next ten. Checked the locks on every door and window with the methodical focus of a woman who understood that if she stopped moving, the fear would catch her.
The fear caught her anyway.
It didn’t arrive as a thought. It arrived as a contraction—a physical clenching low in her belly that had nothing to do with labor and everything to do with the bond transmitting what Kahn was feeling with the fidelity of a live wire.
He was fighting. She could feel the impact of contact reverberating through the connection—the concussive slam of bodies, the white-hot flare of pain across his ribs, the dark fury that poured through him like water through a broken dam.
Elianna turned inside her. Not the lazy roll of a baby settling into sleep. A sharp, deliberate movement—a kick that landed against Caitlynn’s palm where it rested on her stomach.
Then another.
Then a third, harder, insistent, as if her daughter were pressing against the wall between them and trying to tell her something.
The wards shifted.
Caitlynn’s head came up. She didn’t know how she felt it—couldn’t have explained it any more than she could explain how she knew which way was north or when bread was done by the smell alone.
The wards around the Alpha house were part of the territory’s magical infrastructure, and she had learned to read them the way she’d learned to read the oven’s temperature—by feel.
By the way the air tasted. By the hum against her skin that changed pitch when something wasn’t right.
Something was not right.
The hum had gone thin. Frayed at the edges, like fabric pulled too tight. And through the fraying, she felt them.
Moving fast. Low to the ground. Five bodies that registered in her awareness as absence rather than presence, holes in the ward’s pattern, dark shapes sliding through the torn places like water finding cracks in stone.
They were circling wide of the main battle.
Coming from the northwest, through the tree line, heading straight for the house she was standing in.
The baby kicked again. One sharp, final strike.
They’re coming for us.
The thought arrived with a clarity that burned away everything else—the fear, the paralysis, the part of her that wanted to hide behind locked doors and wait for Kahn to keep his promise. That woman had existed twenty seconds ago. She was gone now.
Caitlynn crossed the front room in four strides. She didn’t look for shoes. She put her hand on the door, felt the fire wake in her palms like a pilot light catching—a warmth that began at her wrists and climbed, steadied, gathered—and she opened the door.
The first rogue was already on the steps.
He was mid-shift—caught between forms, half-wolf and half-man, teeth too long for a human mouth. His eyes locked on her, and his weight shifted forward, and his mouth opened around a snarl that she never heard finish.
The fire left her hands before the thought completed itself.
It hit him in the chest. Not the careful, controlled flames she’d practiced in the clearing at dawn—the measured throws, the contained blasts, the shields she’d built and held while Kahn watched and pretended the whole thing didn’t terrify him.
This was raw. Unfiltered. A column of gold that punched through the rogue’s ribcage and sent him backward off the steps and into the dirt, where he writhed and screamed and then stopped screaming.
The other four froze.
They’d been fanning out—two from the east, two from the west, the kind of coordinated flanking that said this was planned, that said someone told them exactly what they’d find when they arrived.
What they’d expected to find was a pregnant human woman behind a locked door.
What they found instead was a pregnant woman with bare feet and fire pouring from her hands and absolutely no interest in making this easy for them.
The hesitation lasted two seconds. She didn’t give them a third.
She threw fire left. The rogue on the eastern flank caught it across the face and went down howling.
She pivoted—muscle memory now, the sequences Kahn had drilled into her, throw-shield-sense-throw—and hit the western pair with a blast that scattered them apart.
One crumpled against the base of a pine tree and didn’t get up.
The other rolled, came up snarling, lunged—
Her shield snapped into place. The rogue hit it at full speed, and the sound was like a window breaking in reverse, a sharp, crystalline crack, and the wolf’s body crumpled against the golden light and slid to the ground.
The fifth rogue ran.
She let him.
Her hands were shaking. The fire was still there—still lit, still pulsing with her heartbeat in a way that felt less like a tool and more like a part of her circulatory system, as essential and involuntary as blood.
She stood on the front steps with four bodies in the dirt around her and the compound burning in the distance, and was about to go back inside when the tree line moved.
Not wind. A deliberate parting—something large pushing through the pines with the unhurried confidence of a predator who had already decided how this would end.
He stepped out of the shadows, and she knew him immediately, though she’d never seen his face.
Marcus Cole was leaner than she’d expected.
He’d shifted back to human form—naked, blood running from a wound at his shoulder that looked like it had been made by Kahn’s teeth.
His face was sharp and angular, and his eyes were the flat, assessing eyes of a man who cataloged threats by instinct.
He looked at the rogue bodies. He looked at her hands. He looked at her stomach.
His mouth moved into something that wasn’t a smile.
“The witch.”
His voice was calm. Conversational. The voice of a man standing in someone else’s territory over the bodies of his own soldiers, and finding the whole thing mildly inconvenient. It made her skin crawl—not the words but the steadiness beneath them, the absolute absence of the panic she’d expected.
He wasn’t afraid of her.
He should have been.
“You should leave,” she said. Her voice came out flat. The same detached register she’d learned in foster homes, the one that said you can’t touch me if I don’t let you in.
Marcus tilted his head. The gesture was canine—an echo of the wolf underneath, assessing an unfamiliar animal. “You’re not what I planned for.”
“No.” The fire in her palms brightened. “I’m not.”
He moved.
Fast—faster than the rogues, faster than anything she’d trained against. Not toward her.
To the left, circling, drawing the angle wider, forcing her to turn and track him.
He was testing her. The way he’d tested the borders.
Patient and methodical, looking for the gap, for the weakness, for the place where her fire couldn’t reach.
She turned with him. Kept her hands raised. The fire tracked his movement like a searchlight.
He feinted right. She threw—a tight, controlled blast aimed at where he’d be if he committed to the dodge. He didn’t commit. He pulled back, changed direction, came at her from the opposite angle, and she had to plant her feet and throw a shield that cost her more than it should have.
The drain was immediate. A hollowing behind her ribs, a drawing-down, as if the fire were fed by a reservoir that had a bottom and she’d just discovered how close she was to it.
Elianna shifted inside her—not a kick this time but a settling, a bracing, and something flowed through the bond that didn’t come from Kahn.
Something warm and fierce and small that fed into the fire like kindling.
Her daughter was helping her.
Marcus circled closer. His eyes hadn’t left hers.
“You’re burning through it,” he said. Quiet. Almost gentle. The observation of a man who understood magic well enough to see what it cost. “How long can you hold?”
She didn’t answer. They both knew.
She couldn’t fight him the way she’d fought the rogues—one blast at a time, each one smaller than the last, her reserves draining while he circled and waited for the fire to gutter out.
He was smarter than that. More patient. He would outlast her, and the calm in his eyes said he’d been counting on exactly this from the moment he’d sent the rogues ahead as bait.
So she stopped trying to fight him one blast at a time.
She reached deeper. Past the reservoir with its falling levels.
Past the place where training and practice lived.
Down into the place she’d only touched once before—in the clearing, months ago, when Kahn had pushed her too hard, and the fire had answered with a voice she didn’t recognize.
The place where the bloodline lived. The witch who had stood in a ring of flames and said Daughter.
The magic came up like a geyser.
It ripped through her so hard her vision whited out.
Not fire from her hands—fire from everywhere, from her feet and her chest and the ground beneath her and the air around her, a wall of golden light that erupted from the earth in a line a hundred feet wide and twenty feet high and split the compound in two. Pack on one side. Rogues on the other.
Marcus stumbled backward. The calm was gone.
The patience was gone. The careful, methodical predator who’d circled her and counted her reserves—gone.
What remained was a man staring at a wall of flame he couldn’t cross, couldn’t break, couldn’t outlast, and the thing in his face wasn’t anger or frustration.
It was fear.
She held his gaze across the fire. Her bare feet on the stone steps. Her hands raised. Her body, a straight line between the house behind her and the man who’d come to tear it down.
Then, through the bond—underneath the roar of the magic and the screaming of the rogues and the deep percussive hum of the wall itself—she felt him.
Close. Getting closer. Running flat out with blood on his ribs and something in the bond that was louder than the battle and louder than the fire and louder than every howl the Beaumont wolves had ever raised.
Kahn.