Chapter 3
Merric
I don’t sleep well in strange places. Never have. Too many years of sleeping with one ear open, picking up every sound, sorting threat from noise. The bunkhouse creaks constantly, old timber settling, wind finding gaps in the walls, a shutter somewhere banging soft and regular as a heartbeat.
Rook snores. That, at least, is familiar.
I give up around four-thirty and slip outside.
The Ozark air hits cool and clean, carrying the river and the deep green smell of forest that’s been growing undisturbed for centuries.
My wolf stretches inside me, wanting to run, wanting to feel dirt under his paws instead of floorboards. I tell him later. Maybe.
The ranch is quiet. One Ravenclaw wolf on watch, a woman in her forties with tired eyes and a hunting rifle across her knees. She watches me cross the yard but doesn’t speak. Fair enough. I’m still the intruder.
I find the coffee supplies in the main house kitchen and start a pot.
Old percolator, the kind my grandfather used.
Takes forever, but makes a brew strong enough to strip paint.
While it works, I study the kitchen. Clean but bare.
Shelves half empty. Flour, rice, dried beans, canned goods that look like they came from a food bank donation.
One jar of honey. No fresh meat, no dairy, no fruit.
That will change once Sienna finishes unpacking the provisions we brought. But it won’t be enough.
These wolves are starving. Not the dramatic kind, the slow kind. The kind where you eat enough to keep moving but never enough to feel full, and after a while, your body starts eating itself, and you don’t notice until your clothes hang wrong and your teeth ache.
I pour two cups when the coffee’s done and take one out to the woman on watch. She looks at it, then at me.
“Thanks,” she says. That’s all. But she wraps both hands around the mug and holds it close, and I understand that sometimes a cup of coffee from a stranger is as much kindness as a person’s had in months.
By the time the sun clears the eastern ridge, my pack is moving.
Dane was up before me. I can hear him around the back of the collapsed barn, the rhythmic crack of a hammer driving nails.
The Ravenclaw teenagers from yesterday are already with him, holding boards, fetching tools.
One of them—a gangly boy with red hair—is asking Dane questions about load-bearing joints.
Dane answers in single words that somehow contain entire engineering lessons.
Briar’s gone. She left before dawn, back into the hills. Tracking those boot prints, building a picture. She won’t surface until she’s got something worth saying.
Sienna finds me on the porch with my second cup. She leans on the rail beside me, hair damp from a wash, and surveys the property with the same assessing eye I’ve been using.
“I talked to Greta last night,” she says. “After you turned in.”
“And?”
“Three families left in the last year. Packed up, tried their luck elsewhere. Two more before that. She doesn’t blame them, but every family that leaves takes warm bodies off the watch rotation and hands away from the fields.
” She takes a sip of her coffee. “There were sixty wolves here five years ago, Merric.”
Sixty. Cut in half. Not by a single catastrophic event but by slow erosion: fear, exhaustion, and hopelessness picking them off one by one.
“She told me something else,” Sienna says. “The families that left? Two of them stopped communicating within six months. Just went silent. Greta sent word through the network. Nothing came back.”
I set my coffee down. “How many scattered families total? Beyond the ranch.”
“She estimates eight to ten groups. Spread across four states. Some she hasn’t heard from in over a year.”
Motherfuckers. Whoever’s behind this—Syndicate, purists, or both—they’re not just hitting the ranch. They’re hunting those who leave. Picking off the isolated ones first, the families without pack protection, the wolves who thought running would keep them safe.
“We need a census,” I say. “Every Ravenclaw family Greta knows about. Locations, last contact, current status.”
“Already started.” Sienna pulls a folded paper from her back pocket. Names, locations, dates. Her handwriting, neat and precise. “Greta and I are finishing it today.”
I look at her. She looks back, and I can practically hear her saying, “You think I waited for you to ask?”
“Good,” I say. And I mean it in a way that goes deeper than the word.
Sienna doesn’t just follow orders. She sees the need and fills it.
She’s been doing that since she was fourteen and walked into Frostbourne with nothing but a rucksack and an attitude, and told me she was joining whether I liked it or not.
I liked it fine.
“One more thing.” She folds the paper back into her pocket. “The boy. Cameron.”
“What about him?”
“He asked me about you last night. While we were eating.”
I keep my face level. “What’d he ask?”
“How long I’d known you. What kind of alpha you are. Whether you keep your promises.” She pauses. “And whether you’d ever been mated.”
The morning air feels thinner. “What’d you tell him?”
“The truth. That you’re stubborn, honest, and you’d walk through fire for your pack. And that the mating question wasn’t mine to answer.” She holds my eyes. “He’s a smart kid.”
“I know he’s smart.”
“Then you know he’s going to start asking questions we all want the answers to.”
She’s right. I know she’s right. But the confirmation—yeah, this is my kid—opens a door I can’t close, and behind it is every failure I’ve been trying to bury.
“I’ll handle it,” I say.
Sienna nods and pushes off the rail. She’s halfway across the yard before she turns back. “For what it’s worth? He’s a good wolf. Just like his mother.”
She walks toward the main house, toward Greta and the census work and the business of holding a broken pack together. I watch her go and think, not for the first time, that Sienna sees people more clearly than anyone I’ve ever known. Always has.
The morning gets busy. I organize a work detail with the able-bodied Ravenclaw wolves, fixing the south fence line, clearing deadfall from the main approach road, repairing the generators.
Willow shadows the operation, not helping my crew directly but directing her own people alongside them.
Parallel chains of command. She won’t give up authority, and I don’t push.
Her wolves need to see her leading, not deferring.
We settle into a rhythm. It’s rough-edged and full of tension, my wolves and hers circling the same tasks without quite merging, but the work gets done. The fence goes up. The generators hum to life. The bunkhouse roof gets its first real repair in what looks like a decade.
Cameron pitches in, hauling lumber for Dane’s barn project.
The boy’s stronger than yesterday, color coming back into his face, the food and the familiar ground doing their work.
He carries boards alongside one of the Ravenclaw teens, and for a few minutes, he looks like any other kid doing chores on a family property.
Then he picks up a crossbeam that’s too heavy for one person, and his magic decides to help.
The wood goes light in his hands. Not floating, just suddenly weightless, like gravity forgot about it.
Cameron lifts it onto his shoulder with one arm, and a glow traces up his forearms, faint but visible.
A couple of the younger Ravenclaw wolves gawk.
An elder near the garden straightens up, watching.
Cameron doesn’t notice until he does. The beam drops.
Hits the dirt with a crack that makes everyone flinch.
The glow dies, and Cameron stands there staring at his hands with an expression I recognize from every wolf I’ve ever seen lose control of a shift, shame and fear twisting together so tight you can’t tell where one stops and the other starts.
Willow is there in three strides. She doesn’t touch him, just moves close enough that he can feel her presence and speaks low enough that I only catch it because of wolf hearing.
“It’s alright. You’re alright. We’ve done this before. Breathe out, count to five, let it settle.”
Practiced. Calm. A routine they’ve built together. Cameron’s hands stop glowing. His breathing evens. Willow picks up the beam herself—she’s strong for her size, farm-work strong—and carries it to where it needs to go as if nothing happened.
But her eyes find mine across the yard, and the message is clear: “This is what I’ve been managing. Alone. Every day.”
I give her a nod. Not sympathy. She’d spit on sympathy. Acknowledgment.
Afternoon brings heat and the misery of manual labor in humidity that could drown a fish. I’m helping dig postholes along the west fence when my phone buzzes. I haven’t checked it since we got here.
Fourteen messages.
Fuck.
I scroll through them with dirt-caked fingers, standing in a half-dug hole with sweat rolling down my back.
The first seven are from Frostbourne. Pack members left behind at the stronghold asking when I’m coming back, what’s happening, why they’ve heard rumors I went to Ravenclaw instead of home. Confused. Worried. Not angry yet, but the tone shifts as the messages progress.
The eighth is from Jonas, my third-in-command back at the stronghold. Short and tense: Bern’s people contacted us. Requesting your immediate attendance at a territorial review. What do I tell them?
The ninth through twelfth are from other southern alphas. Some concerned, some curious, one openly hostile. Word travels fast in wolf country. A Frostbourne alpha on Ravenclaw land is the loudest statement I could have made short of pissing on the Elder Council’s front door.
The thirteenth is from Nathan Bern himself.