26. Chapter 26
Nadia smelled them before she saw them.
She and Rhys had walked to the creek at the edge of camp. The rest of Blackridge was a quarter mile back through the trees.
Laughing around low fires. Passing food. Telling the story of the hearing in voices that got louder with every retelling.
Acting like the threat had passed.
Nadia crouched at the water’s edge, rinsing blood from her wrists where the ropes had cut her the day before. The icy water stung.
Rhys stood a few feet behind her, arms crossed, watching the tree line the way he always watched tree lines. Like he trusted nothing that lived between trunks.
The wind shifted.
Four wolves. Maybe five.
Nadia grabbed Rhys’s arm. His head was already turned. His nostrils flared.
“Thornwood.” He breathed the word like a curse. His body changed in an instant. The man beside her disappeared and something harder took his place. Sharper. Built for what was coming.
They had seconds.
Garrett came through the trees first. Human form. His coat was gone, his shirt torn at the collar, his boots muddy. He looked like a man who had left camp fast without telling anyone where he was going.
Three wolves flanked him. Already shifted. Big, scarred, picked for violence. A fourth hung back in the shadows between the pines. Five total against two.
No staff. No mediator. No neutral witnesses. Two flankers angled to cut her from the creek, one set wide to drive Rhys off his weak side, Garrett centered to hold the line of sight.
No rules.
Garrett stopped ten feet away. His face was calm but his eyes were not. His eyes belonged to a wolf backed into the last corner of a shrinking room.
“This doesn’t need to be ugly.” His tone came out low. Almost gentle. The voice of a man offering something reasonable while standing behind three wolves built for killing.
“Come with me, Nadia. Walk away quietly. I take you back to Thornwood and this whole thing ends. No more hearings. No more politics. Just come.”
The creek gurgled behind them. Somewhere far off through the trees, a Blackridge wolf laughed at a joke Nadia would never hear.
“No.” Her voice came out level and hard. No anger in it. No fear. Just the word and everything it meant.
Garrett’s mouth pressed thin. “You understand what happens if you refuse.”
“I understand what happens if I don’t.”
Rhys stepped forward. Not all the way in front of her. Enough to put his body between Garrett’s teeth and hers.
“You lost the hearing.” Rhys’s voice was quiet the way a blade is quiet. “And now you’re standing in the dark with five wolves, trying to steal back what was never yours. This is what you’ve become, Garrett.”
The words landed somewhere deep. Garrett’s nostrils flared. His hands opened and closed at his sides.
“Four generations back, this land from the creek to the ridge was Thornwood’s before a rigged council vote ripped away our rights.” Garrett’s voice came out like a vicious whip. “I will get them back.”
“You think this is desperation?” Garrett’s chin lifted. “This is survival. If I go home empty-handed, I lose my pack by spring.”
“That’s not her problem.” Rhys ground the words between his teeth.
“No.” Garrett’s careful calm cracked. Just for a second. His careful control dropped to something raw and honest. “It’s yours.”
He shifted.
The change was fast and savage. His wolf hit the ground on four legs before his shirt finished tearing apart. Dark-furred. Massive. A scar ran from his left ear down his neck like a river carved into stone.
The three flanking wolves surged forward.
Rhys shifted to meet them.
His dark wolf exploded from his skin with a sound like tearing cloth. Scars mapped his body in pale lines across dark fur. His bad leg hit the ground hard. It held.
The first Thornwood wolf reached him before the shift had fully settled. Big. Fast. Teeth aimed at Rhys’s throat.
Rhys caught it mid-lunge. He used its speed against it, twisting at the last second, and hurled it sideways into the second. Both went down in a snarling tangle of teeth.
The third wolf circled wide. It was not going for Rhys.
It was going for Nadia.
She did not run.
Sage had trained her for this. Not to fight like a warrior who could overpower a wolf twice her size. To fight like a person who refused to die.
Use the ground. Use what’s near your hands. Make them pay for every inch.
The wolf lunged low. Nadia dropped, scooped a river stone the size of her fist from the creek bed, and drove it hard into the wolf’s muzzle as it closed on her.
The crack of stone against bone snapped through the trees like a branch breaking.
The wolf yelped. Blood sprayed from its nose. It staggered back, shaking its head, dazed.
Nadia scrambled back two steps. Planted her feet. Stone still in her hand. Wet with creek water and blood.
Come on. Try again.
It did. Slower now, wary of the stone. Nadia waited until it committed, then swung from her shoulder into the side of its skull.
The wolf’s legs buckled. It went down hard. She kicked it in the ribs before it could rise and it whined and dragged itself backward into the brush.
Across the creek bank, Rhys fought with cold, calculated violence.
The first two wolves had separated and come at him from both sides. One caught his shoulder in its jaws.
Pain lanced through the connection like fire on Nadia’s own skin. But Rhys turned into the bite, locked his jaws on the second wolf’s front leg, and wrenched hard.
Something popped. The wolf screamed. It hit the dirt with its leg bent wrong.
The wolf at his shoulder released. Backed up. Looked at its packmate on the ground. Looked at Rhys. Blood dripped from its muzzle.
It turned and bolted into the dark.
The fourth wolf, the one that had hung back in the shadows, never came out of the trees at all. It watched the fight from the darkness. Then it was gone.
That left Garrett.
The Thornwood alpha had not moved during any of it. He had stood ten feet away and watched his wolves fall, one by one. His dark eyes tracked every move Rhys made with the focus of a wolf memorizing a weakness.
He found it.
The leg. He’ll go for the leg.
Nadia felt the knowledge settle through her the same moment Rhys felt it too. He knew what was coming. He set his feet anyway.
Garrett held still. Counted distances. Marked the angle of Rhys's stance, the slant of his weight onto the weak side, the small habits a desperate wolf could exploit. Then he charged.
He was fast. Faster than his wolves had been. He came in low and hard, driving at Rhys’s right side where the scarred tissue carried the weight.
Rhys didn’t dodge. He pivoted on the strong leg the way Sage had drilled the past three years, weak side away from the strike, shoulder closing the angle. He absorbed the hit, used the impact to spin. His jaws found the back of Garrett’s neck and bit down hard.
Garrett twisted free with a roar that scattered birds from the pines. He spun. Raked claws across Rhys’s chest. Blood flew in dark lines across the creek stones.
They broke apart. Circled. Moonlight reflected off the water between them. Both bled. Both breathed hard.
Garrett feinted left. Drove right. Trying to get behind Rhys, to reach the blind spot on his weak side.
Rhys read it.
He had watched wolves move while his own body could not. Nothing but watching and learning and memorizing what a feint looked like versus a real strike.
He knew the difference the way other wolves knew how to breathe.
He caught Garrett mid-turn. His full weight drove into the bigger wolf’s ribs. They hit the ground together and gravel sprayed into the creek.
Garrett rolled, snapping. His teeth caught Rhys’s ear and tore. Rhys snarled through the pain and drove his head under Garrett’s jaw, forcing the alpha’s skull back. Exposing throat.
Three brutal seconds of muscle against muscle. Will against will.
Rhys’s teeth closed on Garrett’s throat.
Not a kill bite. A hold. The kind that pressed against the artery and delivered one message without words. I can end this. I am choosing not to.
Garrett thrashed. Rhys held. His thigh shook beneath him. Blood ran from his torn ear, the slashes across his chest, the reopened wounds from the patrols he had fought through the day before.
He held.
Garrett went still.
Not submission. Not yet. The stillness of a wolf calculating whether the next move would be his last.
Nadia stepped forward. Blood on her hands. Creek water soaking her boots. Her voice cut through the dark like something clean and final.
“It’s over, Garrett.”
The Thornwood alpha’s eyes rolled to find her. She stood in the moonlight with her shoulders back and her chin raised. Behind her, three of his wolves lay beaten on the ground.
His body went slack under Rhys’s jaws.
Rhys held the bite five more seconds. Counting. Making sure. Then he opened his mouth and fell silent.
He stayed between Garrett and Nadia. His dark fur bristled along his spine.
Garrett shifted to human form. He lay on his back in the dirt with his chest heaving. Blood ran from the punctures on his neck. His eyes stared at the sky.
He turned his head and looked at Nadia.
Something had cracked behind his eyes. Not his pride. That was still there, battered and bleeding but alive.
What had cracked was his certainty. The bone-deep belief that the world worked the way he had always been told.
“They’ll come for me.” His voice came out scraped raw, like something dragged over gravel. “My own wolves. After tonight. You know that.”
She did know. The pale-eyed Thornwood wolf. Already counting, the way wolves inside a pack counted when their alpha started losing.
“That’s between you and your pack.” Nadia’s voice held no sympathy. But it held no cruelty either. Just the fact of it.
Movement in the trees. Torchlight flickering between trunks. Blackridge wolves crashed through the underbrush with Declan at the front, knife drawn, Sage a half-step behind.
They stopped at the edge of the creek. Took in the scene.
Three Thornwood wolves on the ground. Garrett on his back, bleeding from the throat. Rhys standing over him, torn open and still upright. Nadia with a river stone in her fist and blood that was not hers on her knuckles.
Declan stared. Then a grin cracked his face.
“You two started without us?” His voice held disbelief and something close to awe.
Rhys shifted back to human form.
“Finished without you too.” His wounds looked worse on bare skin. He limped to Nadia and put his arm around her shoulders. She leaned into his side.
Jace arrived thirty seconds later with six more wolves. He took in Garrett on the ground and his expression went hard and quiet as granite.
“Get him up.” Jace’s voice carried the weight of an alpha done with patience. “He attacked my wolves on neutral ground after a council ruling. Every pack in this territory will hear about this by dawn.”
Two Blackridge wolves hauled Garrett to his feet. He did not resist. Blood ran down his neck. His wolves lay around him beaten.
He had played his last card and it had come back with teeth marks in it.
He had nothing left.
Garrett looked at Nadia one last time. His mouth opened. Closed. Whatever words he had left died behind his teeth.
He turned and limped into the dark. The wolf with the mangled leg hobbled after him, whimpering. The other followed at a distance with its head low and its tail tucked.
The forest swallowed them.
Nadia stood by the creek with Rhys bleeding beside her and Blackridge surrounding them both. The night smelled like pine and blood and icy water running over stones.
“It’s done.” Rhys murmured it against her hair. “Really done this time.”
She wanted to believe him. She wanted to close her eyes and let the relief pour through her the way it poured between them.
But she had seen Garrett’s face at the end. Not the anger. Not the defeat.
The understanding.
He knew what waited for him when he walked back to his pack.
Wolves that had watched him lose in public. Wolves that had watched him lose in private. A pale-eyed Thornwood wolf who had counted every public failure without speaking once.
Garrett was not finished. But Garrett was no longer the thing she feared most.
She pressed her face against Rhys’s chest. His heartbeat was there under the blood and sweat and torn skin. Fast but steady. Alive.
His arms closed around her. Solid. Warm. Present.
We survived. Not because someone saved us. Because we fought.
It would hold.