19. Gracie
Gracie
The next morning the convoy crested the last rise, bringing Northgrove into view.
My wolf slammed forward against my ribs, a full-body reaction that had nothing to do with rationality and everything to do with instinct. I gripped the edge of the truck bed, my knuckles white, and made myself look.
It was smaller than I remembered. That was the first thing that struck me, absurd as it was.
Ten years of memory had built the compound into something enormous, a place too vast to ever escape.
But from this ridge it was just walls, gray and weathered, smoke curling up from somewhere behind the fence line, and Cold Moons Pack’s crest hanging on a wall that looked as if it was one breeze from falling off.
A place. Just a place, and I was staring down at it from the outside for the first time in my life.
Basir’s hand found mine without either of us saying anything, and on my other side Thornar had gone quiet in a way that wasn’t like him at all.
“Gracie.” Ravik promised. “We’re not leaving until it’s ours.”
The compound, Ivan, the people—he meant all of them.
I nodded, because I didn’t trust my voice yet. The trucks rolled forward, closer, until the fence line sharpened from a smudge into something real.
After that, I didn’t let myself look directly at the compound for a few hours. It was easier to watch the soldiers around me instead, the controlled chaos of a camp going up in record time than to stare too long at the place that had swallowed a decade of my life.
Three days left. Ivan knew we were here.
I could feel the weight of the whole compound’s attention pressing on us, but so far he hadn’t moved and neither had we.
We were just here, a growing presence outside his gate, and I wouldn’t lie and say there wasn’t some comfort in imagining how furious that had to be making him.
At the same time, the thought hurt my heart. What would his fury mean for the innocent people still trapped inside those walls?
“We just sent out a letter. We’re giving him one chance at reason before things escalate,” Ravik said, appearing at my side with two cups of hot coffee. “Hopefully the runner will be back within a few hours.”
“And if we don’t hear back?”
“We have a plan for that too.” He said it evenly, but I caught the tightness at the corner of his mouth that gave him away.
I nodded and let my gaze drift back toward the compound. My wolf stirred uneasily, settling into something quieter now. Watchful instead of frantic.
It was strange, how a single day could stretch and compress at the same time. Yesterday felt both impossibly far away and close enough to touch. I closed my eyes, just for a second, and let myself go back to the conversation I’d had with Thalira.
After taking ten minutes to calm myself down, I approached Thalira. She offered me a look of concern and something that might have been fear. No one had ever looked at me that way before.
The priestess had always carried herself with a kind of quiet authority, but the woman who stood across from me had none of that left.
Her robes, once a deep fitted navy material, hung threadbare off a frame that had wasted down to almost nothing.
Her hair had gone brittle and dull. But her eyes, when they found mine, were exactly the same.
“Gracie.” My name again, disbelieving this time, like she needed to say it twice to make it real. Her knees gave out and I was at her side in an instant, wrapping my arms around her and feeling just how fragile she’d become.
“You’re okay,” I whispered, more to assure myself than her. “You’re okay, I’ve got you.”
“I didn’t think I’d see you again.” Her voice cracked against my shoulder. “I prayed I wouldn’t. Prayed you’d made it far enough that none of this would ever touch you again.”
“Thalira, why are you here? What happened after I left?”
She pulled back just enough to look at me, and something in her expression made my entire body tense.
“Velina”—her mouth twisted at the name of Ivan’s sister—”put it together. The vial, the note, all of it. Said there was only one person in that compound with access to poisons and the temple stores both. She wasn’t wrong.”
The herb pouch. The note that had turned to ash in my fingers. This will carry you back to The Eight. She’d given me a way out, a mercy disguised as poison, and it had nearly cost her everything.
“You should have let me take the blame. Told them I stole it,” I said, throat tight. “You shouldn’t have—”
“I would do it again,” she said without hesitation. “Don’t you dare stand there and tell me I shouldn’t have helped you.”
I didn’t have an answer for that. For a minute neither of us said anything at all, the sounds of the yard around us fading into something distant. Soldiers moved between the cells, wrapping prisoners in blankets and leading them toward the trucks.
It was strange, sitting in stillness while everything around me moved in the aftermath of what I’d done. I kept waiting for the guilt to catch up to me the way I knew it should. It never came.
I’d killed a man with my teeth. I’d felt his throat give out under the force of my jaw, felt the exact moment his heart stopped beating. And I didn’t feel guilty, not a flicker. Maybe that should have scared me more than it did.
But sitting there with Thalira, watching a mother clutching her two children like she still couldn’t quite believe they were free, I acknowledged something I hadn’t let myself understand before.
Guilt was the luxury of a peaceful world.
Colyn hadn’t earned my grief. He’d earned exactly what he’d gotten, and pretending otherwise—forcing myself to feel bad about it—wouldn’t have made me better. It would have just made me softer and slower next time, in a way I couldn’t afford during war.
I wasn’t becoming something monstrous. I was becoming someone who could actually protect the people I loved. There was a difference, even if it didn’t always feel like one.
“There’s something you need to know before you go.” Thalira’s hand found my wrist as the soldiers began loading the last of the prisoners. “About where you’re heading.”
“Northgrove?”
She nodded, and her expression turned grim in a way that made my wolf go still and alert. “Word travels, even now. The altar is being rebuilt in the same arena as before. Where you were meant to die.”
Ice moved through my veins. Of course it was.
“How many people has he gathered?” I asked, dreading the answer.
“Thousands.” The word landed like a stone.
“Shifters pulled from every corner of this territory, told they’re being honored—told they’ll be blessed by Nyxarra herself.
They don’t know what waits for them. Most of them believe they’re attending a ceremony, spending days sleeping on the cold, hard ground, eagerly waiting for their own slaughter. ”
My hands curled into fists at my sides. I had known it was bad, but she was still trying to prepare me for what I was about to see.
“Four days,” I whispered, the countdown suddenly a physical weight against my ribs. “We have four days to stop this.”
Thalira squeezed my wrist once, hard, before letting go. “Then don’t waste a single one of them grieving a man like Colyn.”
“Lux mea.”
Ravik’s voice cut through the memory, and I blinked, bringing myself back into the present. He was crouched in front of me now, both his hands wrapped around mine. When had I sat down on the ground?
“You went somewhere,” he said quietly.
“Yesterday.” I let out a breath. “Thinking about everything Thalira said.”
Understanding settled over his expression, and he didn’t push for more.
Instead, he slowly lifted one of my hands and pressed his lips to my knuckles.
“They’re safe now. She’s safe now,” he said against my skin.
“And if we play it right, we can make sure almost everyone trapped in Northgrove is safe as well.”
I hoped so.
“Sit with me?” I asked. He did, sinking down onto the ground beside me and pulling me into his lap.
The rest of the afternoon passed in odd pockets of time.
The camp had fully taken shape by the time the sun started sliding toward the horizon: tents in neat rows, the smell of cooking fires drifting through the cold air, soldiers moving with practiced efficiency.
I kept finding my gaze drifting back toward the compound, watching for any sign of movement at the gates—any indication that our letter had landed the way Ravik intended.
Nothing. Northgrove sat exactly as still as it had all day, giving nothing away.
“He’s not going to respond quickly,” Basir said, appearing at my elbow with a blanket. He draped it over my shoulders before tucking the fabric closer. “Men like him draw out everything. Delay it, just to feel in control.”
“How long do we wait’?” I asked.
“Until tomorrow. Then we stop asking nicely,” Thornar said, coming up on my other side. “Come on, little flame. You’ve been out here long enough.”
“Worried about me?” The words came out soft, almost teasing, but I could see they landed.
“Always,” he said simply, tugging me a step back from the edge of camp before I could argue.
I let them both lead me toward the fire Ravik had already claimed, tucked far enough from the noise of camp to feel like ours alone, and let the compound fall out of view behind me.