Chapter 22
Caleb
It’s too soon.
I needed time. I needed to face the Voss pack before they could get to us. That wasn’t going to happen.
The bond had drained me for days. As I walked toward the silhouette of wolves in the trees, I fell for a third time. I tried to stand, but my legs didn’t answer.
The perimeter blurred at the edges. Sounds muffled into incoherent mumbles.
The wolf inside me was still. I didn’t know if it was even there anymore. Everything around me felt cold, as did my own body.
I didn’t even have energy to regret it. For my failure as a brother, a leader of the estate. For everything to do with Olivia.
I could feel the world grow dark, but there was no strength left in me to fight it. I closed my eyes. All I could do was accept everything I couldn’t do anymore.
“Caleb!”
I didn’t know if it was memory.
“Caleb!”
It felt so distant.
I was drifting. I was vaguely aware of something moving me. Of the sound of the grass brushing against me as someone sat beside me.
“I’m here…”
A soft hand laid itself against my chest.
I had forgotten what the bond felt like at full strength. Days of waning had made the absence feel like the natural state of things — the cold, the quiet, the wolf going still. I had started to mistake the emptiness for just the way things were.
Then it came back.
Not gradually. Not mercifully. All at once — a deep, resonant pulse that started where her hand pressed against me and moved outward through everything. My heart steadied. My vision cleared. The wolf came back as a roar.
I drew a breath that reached all the way down.
I felt whole again. Not restored. Not patched. Whole.
I finally opened my eyes.
A shadowy figure hovered over me. My wolf sight adjusted.
There in the moonlight, her tears streaming as she greeted me with a smile I thought I'd never see again… was Olivia.
I thought I was imagining things. I thought this was another trick of the bond dwindling. But the moment she spoke, I knew. She was here.
“I chose to,” she whispered back to me.
I held onto Olivia as tight as I could.
I didn’t want to let go. I wanted to hold onto her so tight that I would never lose her again. Never make the same mistakes that pushed her away from me.
But what Olivia said, what the bond communicated to me without words, was that it would be okay. It was alright that she was here. And it was alright for me to trust myself with her.
Once Donovan and the others reunited with us, I stood up. I didn’t bother to pick up the cane that had been holding me up. Beneath the returning strength, something stronger moved through me — clarity.
Even if I wanted to linger there, however, there was no time to spare. The Voss wolves were now on the estate grounds.
I turned to Olivia and started to explain, but she merely nodded with certainty.
"I know," she said.
For a brief second, I thought I saw Jake look at me. I understood. She fully knew the truth now.
I walked forward, but no longer out of fatalism. I had a purpose again. I would protect those I loved no matter the cost.
The wolves gathered by the trees. Some shifted back to human form, but none of them moved. They were watching — all of them — with the stillness of a pack reading a situation and recalculating.
Finally, another figure stepped forward.
I could feel the shift in the air. The weight of it. A few minutes ago, they'd had every reason to be certain about how this ended. Now they were less sure.
Maykhel Voss stepped out of the dark.
He was older than his son by twenty years, but his eyes told a different story. Broad across the shoulders, grey at the temples, and dressed in dark clothes.
Our eyes met as he continued to move forward. He looked at me the way people look at something they've already finished grieving — ready to enact his version of justice.
We stood across from one another. The moonlight harshly beat down on us. Our shadows stretched monsters along the ground.
“Maykhel Voss,” I said.
Maykhel smiled, but it was different from the one Elias had.
Where Elias’s grin was smug, there was no joy behind his father’s.
“Ashwood.” He said it like he was reading from a list. "I wondered how long it would take you to come out."
"You knew I would."
"I knew you'd have to." He tilted his head. "The only question was whether you'd be able to."
He was trying to read me. His eyes moved across my stance, my hands, the distance between me and the estate door. Looking for weakness. Looking for the wolf that stumbled on his own lawn twenty minutes ago.
I gave him nothing.
"You've been patient," I said. "I'll give you that."
"Patience,” he said, “is merely fortitude with timing.”
“You planned this despite it going against wolf code knowing I would be compromised,” I called out.
“Code?”
Maykhel looked at me for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was flat and certain, the voice of a man who had rehearsed this, too, but differently — not the performance of it, but the belief.
"There is no code that can save you,” he said. “Whatever ‘honor’ your pack has will always be tainted with what you did. I merely acted on what I saw."
"You saw a chance to take something from me.” I narrowed my eyes. "And when you failed seven years ago, you sought to take it again, and then everything else that belonged to us.”
“You say this as if it should shame me,” Maykhel said.
“I know there’s no convincing you,” I said. “It’s true. Our kind won’t forget what happened.”
Maykhel’s expression flickered.
“But that doesn’t mean I’m going to let you hurt the ones I love,” I said.
Maykhel stepped forward. “Then you know what must be done,” he said. “We’ll let the world and the fates decide. Let it choose who gets to live with what they’ve done.”
The last sentence made me think about myself.
How I let my own guilt, my own circumstances blind me to the things that should have been obvious from the start.
The trust my pack had for me. The love Olivia chose to give me, and was always willing to give me.
I was not going to let it cloud me anymore.
I now had a future I wanted to pursue. I would be damned if I let Maykhel take it.
The two of us circled one another, each raising our hands in an oath, as we called forth an ancient rite.
“This is the battle between alphas,” Maykhel said firmly. “Bound by the trees, the earth, and the blood of all witnessing it.”
“By the moon,” I continued. “By the shadows.”
I realized now this was Maykhel’s plan from the start. He needed this to be a duel.
But a formal duel between alphas was something that every other pack, no matter how contrived the circumstances leading up to it, would have no choice but to respect.
“Two wolves,” Maykhel continued. “One victor to claim the territory present.”
“I accept the outcomes,” I finished. “Whatever the fates decide.”
Maykhel lowered his hand first. His smile hardened. His glowing eyes devoid of any true internal light.
“Whatever the fates decide,” he said.
Maykhel leapt into the air, his body turning into a liquid shadow as he pounced.
I shifted in an instant, the bond surging through me faster than it ever had.
We clashed. He went for my neck. I veered. Drove him back.
Blood streaked across the grass, shining crimson, as I scratched his face.
He growled.
Maykhel was not a careless fighter, and the years hadn't cost him anything in that regard.
He shifted the moment he accepted the challenge — not the jerking, effortful shift of a younger wolf still getting used to what he was, but the smooth, unhesitating change of a man who had done it ten thousand times and stopped counting.
Large, grey-pelted, and built the way alphas were built, he had every ability to take me down had I stayed weakened.
He came fast and low from the left.
I shifted hard and met him.
The second collision drove both of us sideways through the grass. His teeth found my shoulder and clamped down on it.
The bite was deliberate, not frenzied. He was testing depth before he went in for the kill. I didn't give it to him.
I turned inside the grip. I drove my weight down and to the right, forced him to choose: bite or balance. He held the bite. Wrong choice.
I drove him sideways into the grass with enough force that the impact shook through my own skeleton, and he released, and we separated, and both of us recalibrated in the two seconds of space between first contact and second.
He recovered faster than I expected. No hesitation in the reset, no sign of the shoulder impact registering as more than information.
He feinted left. For half a second he got behind me. A clean pivot. He misjudged my speed.
Confusion crossed his face.
I was matching him in ways he hadn’t expected. Outmaneuvering him.
He adjusted. He'd come here expecting the wolf on the lawn. The one that stumbled. He was getting something else entirely, and some part of him, the experienced fighter, the alpha who had survived decades of conflict, was already doing the arithmetic.
The numbers weren't working out for him.
I heard Donovan make a sound from the estate doorway.
Without seeing her, I could feel Olivia standing breathless as she and everyone else watched us fight tooth and claw.
Maykhel went for my throat on the third pass.
It was the right move and I'd been waiting for it.
He went for the throat. It made sense. It's not recklessness — it's arithmetic.
He could not outlast me on the restored bond; he knew that now, a few exchanges in, reading the difference between what I'd been on the lawn and what I was now.
The throat was the fastest path to a different outcome, and he was smart enough to take it.
I had everything to lose, but I refused to give it.
I took Maykhel off his feet in a move that covered four yards of ground and drove him into the center of the clearing.
Maykhel on his back. My jaws at his throat. He went still.
The Voss wolves at the perimeter went still.
Everything went still.
The only sounds were my own breathing and the fog moving through the fir at the clearing's edge.
Rain fell hard on us. I could smell it above the blood and the wet grass and the scent of two packs standing at opposite edges of this field.
I held it long enough for them to understand that what happened next was my decision, not Maykhel's.
I stepped back.
I returned to my normal form. The rain stung against my bare wounds and skin.
“The rite is done,” I said, my voice harsher and lower than it had been. “You’ve lost.”
Maykhel pushed himself up. He didn't look at me at first. He looked at the ground.
Finally, he looked up.
"You're letting me live," he said.
It came out flat. Not a question. Not gratitude.
"Yes," I said.
His jaw clenched. "Why..."
I thought about it. It wasn't a short answer, but I gave him the shortest version I had. "Because your pack doesn't need another casualty to hand down. And because I'm not him."
He knew who I meant. My father. The previous alpha. The man who killed Kieran Voss over a territorial dispute that had already been half-settled and hadn't needed blood to finish.
Something moved behind Maykhel's eyes. I wouldn't call it grief — not exactly. Part of it was frustration. And the other part of it was him slowly realizing he would not have his opportunity for revenge.
Maykhel dipped his chin.
In the distance, the wolves howled. It was the sound of a pack acknowledging what the rite demanded — not grief, not anger, just the formal, animal acknowledgment that it was done.
The sound moved through the fog and dissolved into the fir.
One by one the howls dropped off, until the clearing was quiet again.
The Voss pack dispersed slowly. They pulled back the way soldiers pull back: deliberately, in formation, without turning their backs until the distance made it unnecessary. I watched them go and I let them. The challenge was concluded. Pack law was clear. There was nothing left to enforce.
Maykhel stayed down a little longer. He was smart enough to know the ground was the right place to be right now — that getting to his feet too fast would read as a provocation, and a provocation would require a response, and he didn't have the position for that anymore. He sat with it.
The loss, the terms, whatever was happening behind his eyes that I couldn't fully read from where I stood.
Then, finally, he rose. He didn't look at me again.
He walked back into the tree line at the pace of a man who was not running, which was the only dignity the rite left him, and I let him have it.
But then I looked further to the east.
Elias Voss stood at the edge of the tree line, apart from the others. He hadn't moved during the retreat. He stood very still, watching. Unlike the way the other wolves watched, reading threat assessment and tactical outcome, he was watching differently. Filing it. Deciding what it meant for later.
Elias looked at me for a long moment. Then he looked at Olivia, standing at the edge of the lawn with her arms crossed and her jaw set. Something passed across his face that I couldn't name.
Then he turned and walked into the dark.
No words. No acknowledgment of the outcome. Just the fog closing over the place where he stood, as clean as if he'd never been there at all.
I knew things with him weren't over. Maykhel's grief had limits — it was old and rigid and built from a wound that had finally, tonight, been given something other than silence.
Elias was different. Elias was patient in a way his father never was, and he left tonight with more information than he arrived with, and I didn't yet know what he intended to build from it.
That was a problem for another night.
I turned back to the estate.
To home.