16. Aitor
Aitor
We hit the Brashov supply depot at the dead hour — that stretch between two and three in the morning when even sentries started trusting the dark. Four of us. Four against twenty-two.
Stupid odds. Beautiful odds. The kind that made my wolf sing behind my ribs like a drunk finding his favorite tune.
Toma's signal came through the bond before his hand moved — a pulse of now that hit my spine and fired my legs.
I was moving before I'd decided, already shifting mid-stride, the change ripping through me with familiar violence.
My wolf took the ground in four strides and the night opened its throat.
Zviad flanked left. I didn't need to see him — I felt him through the threads, a cold silver certainty cutting through the undergrowth like a blade through silk. Toma went center. Always center. The anchor point we pivoted around.
And Suzana stood on the ridge above us, hands pressed flat against the frost-hardened earth, and pulled.
The bond ignited. Not the slow warmth of proximity.
Not the comfort-hum of sleeping close. The full thing — four threads drawn tight as a bowstring and channeled.
She reached through my mark and grabbed hold of the berserker.
The red thing. The part of me I'd spent eleven years learning to cage because uncaged it burned through reason like fire through paper.
She didn't uncage it. She aimed it.
My vision sharpened. Colors bled away and the world became geometry — vectors and gaps and the exact angle between a sentry's turned head and the unguarded stretch of his throat.
I was faster. Stronger. The berserker flooding muscles without flooding mind, because she held the tether.
She held the line between useful fury and destruction.
"Two on the eastern post," Toma murmured through the bond. I was already turning.
The first sentry went down before he drew breath to shout.
My jaws found the junction of shoulder and neck — not lethal, but he wasn't getting up.
The second wheeled, short sword clearing the sheath with a sound like a struck bell, and I danced sideways, letting the blade cut air where my ribs had been.
Zviad materialized behind the second man like the forest had grown a wolf from its shadows. One strike. Silent. The man crumpled.
"Clear east," I sent through the bond, already running.
Toma hit the main structure like a siege engine — his alpha presence pressing outward in a wave that made lesser wolves hesitate. That half-second where instinct said submit before training said fight — and in that half-second, we owned them.
Three Brashov wolves boiled from the depot's main door. Professional soldiers. The real thing.
My wolf grinned. Or I did. Hard to tell when the bond burned this bright.
The first charged Toma. Mistake. You don't charge the center of a four-point formation because the center is bait — always was.
Zviad cut the man's hamstring from behind before Toma needed to turn.
The second hesitated. I hit him from the flank at full sprint — two hundred pounds of bonfire wolf with the berserker singing and Suzana's steady hand keeping the music from becoming a scream. My teeth found his wrist. Crunched.
I didn't kill him. The message was the point.
The third wolf ran. Toma let him go. A survivor carries the story.
Because with the bond open like this — Suzana pouring herself into the amplification, Toma's command and Zviad's precision and my fire all woven together — it almost was a training exercise.
I shifted back. The berserker still humming, wanting more. But Suzana's thread tugged at the base of my skull and the red thing settled like a dog called to heel.
"Supply manifest," Toma said. Already back in his skin, thinking three moves ahead. "Anything with Mircea's seal."
I vaulted broken crates, landed beside the record table. "Got it — supply rosters. Three weeks' worth. And a garrison rotation. Six locations marked."
"Zviad."
Zviad appeared in the doorway — blood on his jaw, not his. "Two fled north. One wounded. The rest are down."
"Count."
"Eighteen incapacitated. Four fled. None dead."
I laughed. Couldn't help it. "That's a story, brothers. Four wolves. Twenty-two professionals. Zero casualties. Our side, anyway."
"Aitor." Toma's voice meant contain yourself. But through the bond — pride. Fierce, barely-contained. The bastard was proud and wouldn't say it and the bond ratted him out.
I grinned at him. All teeth. He looked away.
"We move in four minutes. Take what's useful. Leave the rest standing."
"Standing seems generous. This feeds Mircea's eastern garrisons — the same ones that burned Petrescu."
"The depot intact says we could have destroyed it and chose not to. That's a bigger message than ash."
He was right. Infuriating.
"Fine. But I'm taking the meat."
Zviad made a sound that might have been amusement. From him, practically hysterics.
Suzana met us at the ridge. Pale — the cost of holding the bond open that wide, channeling all three simultaneously. Her hands trembled. New shadows under her eyes.
But she was standing. She was smiling.
"Tell me everything. I felt it all — but I want to hear it."
"Four against twenty-two. We didn't break a sweat. Well — I sweated. I sweat attractively. It's a thing."
"You shift back naked in freezing weather," Zviad said. "You are insane."
"Insane and victorious, tracker. Don't bury the lead."
Toma's hand found Suzana's elbow — steadying. "You held," he said. Quiet. Just for her. But the bond carried it and the weight of those two words landed like a blessing. You held.
"I held." Softer: "It's getting easier."
"Watch the cost."
"I'm watching."
She wasn't. I knew because her jaw set the way it did when she was managing pain she didn't want to share. The amplification cost something every time. She paid willingly and the paying terrified me in a way I couldn't look at directly.
But not tonight. Tonight we'd won. Tonight we were the thing Toma had always said we could become.
The walk back took ninety minutes through frozen forest. I fell back beside Zviad.
"Twenty-two. And none of them touched you."
He pulled his collar aside. A thin graze across his neck. "His reach was longer than his skill."
"That's going to scar beautifully. Ladies love a?—"
"Aitor."
"Right. One lady. One lady loves a neck scar. Luckily, the correct lady."
His mouth did the thing — the imperceptible thing that meant amused and annoyed in equal measure. Eleven years of reading his facial micromovements like sheet music. Most people thought Zviad was expressionless. Most people were illiterate.
We reached camp as dawn broke — cold light spilling over the ridge, painting the tent canvas in shades of frost and pale gold.
The night sentries clocked our return and word spread fast. By the time we reached the central fire, a dozen wolves had materialized, reading the victory in our posture before anyone spoke a word.
I dropped the sack of cured meat by the supply store. "Compliments of the Brashov eastern garrison. They send their regards. Also their pain."
The camp woke around us. News of the raid spreading like fire through dry grass — whispered between tents, shouted across cookfires. I watched faces shift as the story traveled. Fear becoming something with spine.
By midmorning, word had reached Codru. Bogdan's runner arrived with a sealed message.
"Bogdan pledges thirty wolves for the northern line," Toma said. "Immediately. Muresanu will match."
Thirty from Codru. Thirty from Muresanu. Added to our eighty-three — the impossible math was becoming actual numbers.
"Berescu next," Suzana said. Color returning, tea between her hands. "Daciana's already made contact."
"Mircea supplied three garrisons from that depot. We didn't just take supplies — we cut a supply line. He'll feel that within the week."
"He'll retaliate within the week," Toma corrected.
"Let him." The words came out hard. More than bravado. The bond burning bright, the four threads woven so tight I couldn't tell where mine ended and theirs began. "We just proved that four of us equals twenty-two of his."
"We proved we can hit a supply depot. We haven't proved we can hold ground against a concentrated attack."
"Not yet."
"Not yet," Toma repeated. A promise in his voice.
The day unfolded in triumph. More runners arrived — houses that had been watching from the shadows, waiting to see which direction the wind blew.
Berescu sent formal acknowledgment. Lazar's second son appeared at noon with winter furs and his father's verbal commitment.
Even Istvan, who'd been silent for weeks, sent a bird.
I tracked Suzana through the afternoon — not physically, through the bond.
Her thread humming steady and bright as she moved between meetings, between the quiet conversations that built alliances one word at a time.
The amplification's cost had faded to something she wore casually, the way a soldier wore an old bruise.
But it was there. The faint shadowing under her eyes.
The way she paused sometimes, mid-step, recalibrating something internal.
Noticing Suzana was my particular devotion.
Toma called us to the command tent at sundown. Just the four.
"We need to discuss what happens when Mircea answers."
"He'll hit the weakest point," Suzana said. "Not us directly."
"Berescu," Zviad said.
"Berescu. Neither fully committed nor safely neutral."
"Then we commit first," I said. "Extend the line.
We do what we did tonight — precision. Speed.
The bond." I pushed off the tent pole, stepped toward the table, toward the map with its lines and the spaces between that meant death or safety depending on who reached them first. "We don't garrison Berescu — we need to be fast enough to answer any move he makes before it lands. "
"A reaction force," Suzana said. "Mobile. Built around the bond's amplification."
"It makes the bond the centerpiece of our strategy," Toma said. "If Mircea understands that?—"
"He targets us specifically," Suzana finished.
Silence. The fire crackled.
"He was always going to target us," I said. Quiet now. The jazz-rhythm broken because the truth demanded stillness. "The bond is what we are. Hiding it doesn't make it less real. It just means we fight without our strongest weapon."
"We commit," Toma said. "Fully. The bond is our strategy. Our strength."
Suzana's hand found Toma's on the map table. Zviad stepped forward — one step, into the circle of firelight. I moved closer, drawn by the threads pulling tight until the four points formed something as close to a single thing as four separate bodies could manage.
"Four as one," I said. Not a joke. Not bravado.
A vow.
And for one perfect moment in a cold tent on a dying autumn night, I believed we were invincible.
That was the danger, of course. That was always the danger.
You reach the peak and the view is so beautiful you forget that peaks are where lightning strikes.
We'd shown our hand tonight — shown Mircea, shown the coalition, shown every watching eye exactly what the bond could do when all four threads burned together.
A weapon you can see is a weapon you can plan against.
But standing there with my brothers. With her. With the bond humming four-voiced in a key that shouldn't exist — I couldn't make myself care about what was coming.
The higher you climb, the further you fall.
We were so high. So bright. So perfectly, terribly visible against the darkening sky.
Suzana's thread curled against mine — warm, steady, the scent of wildflower and iron that meant I see you and I'm here and whatever comes, we face it together.
I pressed back. Let her feel the thing I couldn't say: that the reckless wolf who'd been running solo for seven years had finally found the thing worth staying alive for. This room. These people. This bond.
Worth dying for was easy. I'd had that since the first day.
Worth living for was harder. Worth living for required believing in tomorrow.
Tonight, I believed.