21. Gracie
Gracie
By the next morning, after a patchy night of sleep, I’d started counting the potential cost of every search team differently than I had at the start.
Every team that went in was a risk. Every hour someone spent inside those walls was another chance for Ivan’s soldiers to catch them, another chance for whatever he’d rigged to go off by accident instead of design, another name added to the list of people we might not get back.
I watched them return covertly, reporting the same thing over and over.
Nothing. No sign of Ivan. No trace of wherever he’d tucked himself away to wait out the hours until the full moon turned red above us.
While I was starting to feel desperate about our mission to find Ivan, I felt secure in knowing that over forty children now slept somewhere warm and safe for the first time in longer than most of them could remember.
They’d been taken by transfer truck to the nearest town, somewhere they could rest, eat real food, and be watched over by soldiers who’d taken to the job with a compassion I hadn’t expected from hardened fighters. It didn’t undo what this place had done to any of us. But it was something.
Proof that not every risk we’d taken had ended in loss or a lack of information.
Still, every hour that passed without a lead on Ivan felt like watching sand run out of an hourglass that none of us could tip back over.
I sat at the edge of camp, staring at Northgrove’s walls the way I had every day since we’d arrived, and let myself think about the compound.
The altar. The arena. The marble slab I’d once been laid across. The way the whole compound had gathered to watch me die, whether they’d wanted to or not. The moment when all of this had started, when I had first seen Nyxarra, felt impossibly far away now.
It worried me, how long it had been since I’d heard from any of the gods.
Realistically it had only been days, but considering what was on the horizon, my gut told me it wasn’t a coincidence.
So I closed my eyes and tried, not for the first time, to reach out to whatever threads connected me to Nyxarra, to Vaelithra, to any of the gods.
I’d done it enough by now that I wasn’t expecting a vision, or even an answer.
This time, though, something did answer. Or almost did.
Pressure built at the edges of my mind, familiar and warm, the particular pulse of energy reminding me of Vaelithra. It was faint but I chased it the way I’d learned to, and for one breath, I thought I might actually hear her.
Then something else shoved me back violently.
A cold, heavy weight drowned out anything Vaelithra could have been trying to signal. My wolf went rigid, hackles raised at a threat I couldn’t see. I understood, with a certainty that had everything to do with instinct, exactly what I was feeling.
Kaevorak.
He was close. Closer than he’d ever felt before—so close that even his shadow could reach across whatever distance separated his realm from mine and choke off a god mid-sentence.
I nearly let go. Every instinct I had told me to pull back, to retreat somewhere safe, somewhere he couldn’t follow. But some stubborn, furious part of me, the part that had survived a decade of being silenced, had finally learned not to listen.
If the gods couldn’t reach me because of Kaevorak, then I would find another way.
Rather than trying to reach Nyxarra or Vaelithra, I focused on the three points of light that extended out of my chest and toward my mates.
Since the night our bond had become whole, they’d been constants.
Our bond was a living thing, exactly the kind of magic Kaevorak couldn’t smother.
It was mine. Ours. Embedded in our souls.
I followed the strings of magic down into the center of my chest, past the fear and the weight of what was to come, focusing instead on the sensation of it under my skin—on my three mating marks.
The marks at my throat flared, sudden and sharp enough that I gasped, my eyes snapping open.
Not now. When it matters most.
Those words rose up from wherever I’d buried them, and beneath them, something new.
A pull, unmistakable, dragging my attention toward the compound like a hook set deep in my sternum.
Not toward the arena. Not toward the ground-level places our search teams had spent two exhausting days combing without result.
Beneath it. Visions flashed before my eyes like a blessing, locking onto the place where Kaevorak’s power radiated strongest. Through the ground, under the altar—
I stood so fast the camp chair toppled behind me.
“Gracie?” Basir’s hand found my shoulder, steadying me. I hadn’t known he was there, but our tent was nearby and my mates were never far.
“He’s under it.” My voice came out strange, distant, like it belonged to someone standing just outside of myself. “The altar. He’s not somewhere in the compound. He’s underneath it.”
Ravik was on his feet in an instant. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
The gods had been blocked from reaching me, but the bond hadn’t needed their permission to show me anyway.
It took less than twenty minutes for the war council to confirm what our bond had already shown me.
Thornar cross-referenced older blueprints—pulled from one of the many searches—against the newer maps our scouts had built.
That was when we found it: a series of service corridors beneath the arena floor, sealed off and unmarked on any current map.
“Knowing where he is only helps us if we know he won’t retaliate the second we move,” Basir pointed out. “We still don’t know if he’ll risk killing everyone if we attack too soon.”
“He won’t,” I said, feeling a sense of clarity. “Not because he’s holding back. Because he doesn’t think he needs to. I can feel Kaevorak on him, closer than ever, and Ivan believes every word of what he’s been promised. He’s not afraid of an army at his gates.”
“He did say ‘come and see,’” Lacey murmured.
It made a terrible kind of sense. Ivan hadn’t rigged the compound because he was afraid of us reaching him. He’d rigged it because he needed time, every threat just another way to hold us off until the ritual began and it no longer mattered what we did.
“Then let’s go see,” I said with finality.
The camp exploded into motion the second the war council broke: soldiers grabbing gear, commanders shouting formations, the whole machine of allied forces snapping into readiness.
I didn’t stay outside to watch it happen, instead following my mates to our tent. My pulse pounded in my throat. It was happening. No more search teams, no more small encounters. We were about to take Northgrove, and I had no idea what was going to happen.
Inside, the noise of camp dulled to a distant hum. Pressing my lips together, I looked around at all three of my mates, still talking quietly among themselves, and made my way to Ravik first. He looked down at me in soft confusion as I placed my hand right on top of his heart.
“We’re going to end Ivan,” he promised me, tucking a piece of hair behind my ear. “This is the end of it, lux mea. Then starts our real future, with no fear.”
My eyes watered as I buried myself against his chest. His hand came to my hip as he let out a low rumble, his wolf pushing against mine. “I promise we’ll be fine.”
Thornar’s large arm wrapped around my waist from behind and I relaxed between the two of them, taking a deep breath. When he pulled back, I looked at all three of them, Basir standing just as close, his hands in his pockets like he was resisting the urge to touch me.
“I love you.” I got it out before any of them could say it first. “All of you. I know we have the ability to beat Ivan, but—”
“No ‘but,’” Basir countered, his voice soft. “We are doing it, glow.”
His confidence steadied me, and I nodded. “You’re right. We’re doing this together.”
Basir stepped forward and kissed the top of my head. I let the moment sink into my skin, surrounded by them, feeling the strength of our bond.
***
The silence of the tent shattered.
One second I was pressed between three heartbeats—three men who meant everything to me—the next, the comm at Ravik’s hip crackled to life, one word cutting through everything.
“Now.”
The world outside tore open a heartbeat later, gunfire cracking against the night air in a rhythm too deliberate to be anything but war.
Ivan had been watching. Ivan had been waiting. The moment we moved toward him, the moment our signal went up for our allied forces to begin their push—he gave the order to his own soldiers to fire.
I was moving before I’d fully processed the sound, my mates already ahead of me, already transforming into the hardened versions of themselves this war would demand.
My wolf pushed forward almost immediately, allowing me to shift with an ease I’d come to expect.
The battlefield unfolded, the open field between us and the compound stretching wide and exposed under a sky turned dark except for the flares.
There was no cover out here, nothing but frozen dirt and debris, and every second we spent crossing it felt like standing still in the middle of a shooting range.
Soldiers poured out from the compound’s gates, spreading along the walls in numbers we hadn’t seen in any previous engagement, meeting us with a resistance that made it clear they’d been prepared since we first arrived.
Flares lit the sky in intermittent bursts of red and gold, throwing long shadows across bodies already down in the dirt—both allies and enemies.
Ravik cut a path forward without slowing, taking down anyone in his way with brutal efficiency rather than engaging, exactly the way we’d planned. We weren’t here to clear the field. We weren’t trying to hold ground.
My mates and I weren’t here to win this fight—that was the job of the allied forces.
Push. Move. Reach Ivan before the moon rises and finishes its turn, and let every soldier we bypassed be someone else’s problem for tonight.
Ravik’s chocolate fur-covered form tore through the first wave like a living blade, clearing a path wide enough for the rest of us to follow. I’d seen him controlled, strategic, and careful—but there was something almost beautiful in watching him like this, his force in its rawest form.
Basir moved beside him, faster and quieter—a dark blur of movement that soldiers sensed a half-second too late every time. Thornar ran on my other side, white fur streaked red, snarling a warning at anyone that came too close before I even registered the threat myself.
I was thankful. I didn’t want to kill again.
But I could run.
I ran faster than I’d ever run in my life, weaving through gaps in the fighting that my mates carved open. My only goal was reaching the altar, the pull in my chest dragging me there.
A soldier lunged for me from the left, but I didn’t meet him head-on the way Ravik or Thornar might have.
I twisted past him instead, letting his own momentum carry him into the space I’d just vacated.
Basir extinguished the threat immediately.
That was the pattern, over and over, across ground that seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction.
I ran.
I dodged.
I knew I would need every ounce of my strength for what waited beneath the arena. The battlefield roared louder around us.
Out of the corner of my vision, I caught the distant shapes of dragons wheeling low over the compound’s wall and allied forces engaging in a coordinated push that pulled entire units of Ivan’s defense away from our path.
Somewhere behind, I heard the deep structure-shaking boom of something far larger than gunfire, or even an explosion.
It was working. Whatever Stark Flight and the others were doing up there, it was providing us exactly what we needed. We pushed forward through the gap it left behind.
For a stretch of maybe thirty seconds, the gunfire nearly ceased. We could still hear the distant echo of the larger battle raging behind us, but the most immediate sound was the thundering of four sets of paws as we crossed open ground toward the compound entrance.
That was when I saw him.
Marek, Ivan’s enforcer, stood near a collapsed section of wall, rifle raised at someone on the ground. I don’t know what made me risk stopping, even for a second—maybe it was his eyes, the cruel way they squinted, just like before.
The memory tore loose, raw and unfiltered, before I could stop it. The plane’s narrow aisle, his hands, the way he smiled like he already owned whatever he wanted from me. I’d buried it so deep, underneath everything I’d been through since, I’d almost convinced myself it didn’t matter anymore.
I felt three points of fury detonate through the bond, sharp enough to steal my breath.
They’d felt the memory, every second of it, bleeding straight into our bond in the way only the rawest of memories could.
I shifted back on an exhale and my mates followed, leaving us standing only feet away from him and his gun.
“You,” Marek snarled, backing up a step, rifle swinging wildly between the four of us like he couldn’t decide which threat to aim at first. “I should have fucking killed you when I had the chance. Would’ve been a lot less trouble.”
His hand was shaking; I saw it even through the haze of my own anger. He was still vacillating between the four of us, barrel trembling as he tried to decide which of us to focus on—which gave the person on the ground just enough time to move and Ravik the half-second he needed.
My mate crossed the distance in a blur, closing in fast before Marek’s finger could fully tighten on the trigger. He knocked the weapon aside so that the shot went wide, cracking harmlessly into the ruined wall behind him.
I didn’t look away from what happened next.
Ravik didn’t shift back into his wolf form; he didn’t need the extra strength it would give him.
His hands closed around Marek’s throat, and he slammed him back against the ruined wall.
I heard something crack, plaster and stone crumbling to the ground.
Marek clawed at Ravik’s wrists, gasping while trying to shift.
Ravik didn’t make it quick. Marek’s face went from red to purple to something worse, his legs kicking uselessly against the dirt. Then Basir stepped in and drew his knife across Marek’s throat, making sure there was nothing left to come back from.
Marek’s body hit the ground and didn’t move again.
“Little flame.” Thornar’s voice was steady but filled with concern, a hand finding mine. “Are you—”
“I’m fine.” And strangely, impossibly, I meant it. Marek was just one more person who had terrorized this place, and he deserved his fate. It felt cruel, it felt calculated…but I didn’t feel bad, my wolf howling in my ear that it was justified.
“Let’s finish this.”
We shifted again, four wolves moving as one into the compound. The moon had climbed higher while we fought, shifting into shades of pink, bleeding into something that no longer looked like any moon I’d ever known.
I had no idea how much time remained.