Chapter 4
Brenna
My son is alive. I’ve been watching for two days, and I still need to see it again.
Every few hours, I lift the binoculars and find him—hauling lumber, sitting on the porch steps, eating at the communal table.
He’s thinner than the last time I saw him.
The way he moves has changed. There’s a guardedness to it, a constant scanning of his surroundings, that tells me more about what the Syndicate did to him than any report could.
But he’s walking. Talking. Eating. Working alongside a big blond Frostbourne wolf who speaks entirely in grunts, like he’s remembering how to be part of something.
My boy is alive, and he’s home, and I am three hundred yards above him on a limestone shelf watching through stolen binoculars because I can’t go down there.
Word reached me five days ago through the network, fragments passed between scattered contacts, coded messages routed through dead drops I set up across three states.
A Corvus wolf, male, teenage, recovered from a Syndicate facility in the Cascades by an Aurora strike team.
Alive. Injured. Being treated at the Aurora compound.
I dropped everything to find him. Five days of running south on almost no sleep, checking contacts, calling in favors with the few trusted people who know I’m not dead.
Five days of not knowing if the report was accurate, if it was really Cameron, if he’d survive his injuries.
I’ve tracked Syndicate supply convoys through freezing rain without flinching, but those five days nearly put me in the ground.
When I finally picked up the convoy’s scent trail heading south through Oregon—three trucks, multiple wolves, Frostbourne pack signatures—I almost broke cover right there.
I followed them from the ridgelines instead, staying upwind, moving fast. Confirmed Cameron was in the lead vehicle.
Confirmed he was conscious, moving under his own power.
Confirmed who was driving.
Merric Rourke.
My first thought, clear and sharp: What the hell does he want?
My second thought, uglier: If he’s using my son for politics, I’ll kill him myself.
I haven’t seen Merric Rourke in nearly two decades.
Haven’t wanted to. When a man tells you to your face that you’re not worth the fight—that his council, his reputation, his precious pack standing matter more than the woman carrying his scent on her skin—you don’t pine.
You don’t check in. You burn it out of yourself, and you keep moving.
I kept moving. Raised my son. Built a life out of the scraps the wolf world left us. And when that life got torn apart, I built something else. Something with teeth.
So no. I’m not here for Merric Rourke. I’m here for Cameron.
But Merric is a problem I have to solve.
I’ve spent two days trying to read his intentions from three hundred yards.
He drove past Frostbourne territory—his own stronghold—and came straight to Ravenclaw.
My territory. That’s either genuine commitment or a calculated political play, and from this distance I can’t tell which.
He’s put his wolves to work; real work, not token gestures.
The collapsed barn is half-rebuilt. The generators are running. His scout is monitoring security.
He’s also spending time with Cameron. Walking the property together. Talking. Being patient in that deliberate way he always had, where he’d let silence do the heavy lifting rather than filling it with noise.
Cameron is opening up to him. I can see it in my boy’s body language, the way he angles toward Merric when they walk, the way his shoulders drop a fraction when the alpha is nearby.
That should make me glad.
It makes me want to put my fist through the limestone.
Because Merric Rourke doesn’t get to walk in and be the calm, patient presence my son needs. Not after what it cost us. Watching him earn Cameron’s trust in three days when I spent seventeen years building it from nothing. That burns in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
And it would be easier if that were all I felt.
He’s in the yard most of the day. Working.
Not directing, working. Hauling timber for the barn frame alongside the big blond wolf, stripping fence posts with a drawknife, digging postholes in the south pasture with a rhythm that says he’s done this a thousand times.
He stripped his shirt off by midmorning on the second day and hasn’t put it back on since, and I hate that I noticed. I hate that I keep noticing.
The years have done things to him. The lean boy I knew has been replaced by something broader across the shoulders and thicker through the chest, built by physical work and fighting and the demands of holding an alpha’s body together through winters that would break lesser wolves.
The platinum hair is longer, tied back when he works, falling loose when he forgets.
He moves the way I remember, and nothing like I remember. The same efficiency, the same absence of wasted motion. But there’s weight behind it now. Gravity. A man who’s settled into his body fully, who knows what it can do and what it costs, and uses it without hesitation.
He reaches for a fence post and his back flexes—the long muscle that runs from shoulder to hip, working under skin that’s darker than it used to be, scarred in places I can’t read from this distance.
His arms are corded with strength that doesn’t come from vanity but from use.
The waistband of his jeans sits low on his hips when he bends, and I can see the line there—the cut of muscle below his navel, disappearing into denim.
My hands remember that line.
It hits me without permission. Not a thought.
A sensation. My palms carrying the memory of tracing that exact groove of muscle and bone, the texture of his skin under my fingertips, warm from the sun.
Behind the north creek. Summer. We were young, and the grass was tall enough to hide in, and he’d pulled me down into it, laughing.
I’d pushed his shirt up and traced that line from his hip to his ribs while he went still beneath me.
The sound he made when my fingers dipped below his waistband.
Not a groan, not a word. A held breath. As if letting it out would break whatever spell kept my hands on his body.
The heat arrives low and sudden. I shut my eyes against it.
No.
I open my eyes. Refocus the binoculars. Force myself to see the alpha, not the man.
Position, capability, threat level. He’s strong, he’s competent, he’s brought four wolves into my territory without invitation.
That’s what matters. Not the width of his back or the way his hands grip a post or the ghost of a twenty-year-old afternoon that my body refuses to let go of.
I lower the binoculars and press my forehead against the cool limestone until my pulse settles.
Three hundred yards. That’s all that separates us. And it’s not enough.
When I raise the binoculars again, I make myself look past him.
There’s an auburn-haired woman in his pack.
She’s clearly close to Merric, operates at his shoulder, knows his rhythms. But it’s not the closeness that catches me.
It’s the way she interacts with Cameron.
Easy. Natural. Like she’s already claimed a place in my son’s world, already established a rapport that took me months to build with strangers.
She fits. That’s the word for it. She fits with them—with Merric and Cameron both—in a way that looks effortless. And I know what effortless means. It means time. It means showing up, day after day, being present for the small things until your presence becomes part of the architecture.
I watch her touch Merric’s arm while making a point about something. Watch him listen. Watch the comfortable distance between their bodies—close enough to be intimate, far enough to be habitual.
Enough, dammit!
Whatever Merric’s built in his personal life is his business.
That doesn’t stop me from turning the binoculars away.
The work. Focus on the work.
Two years ago, I walked into a fire and didn’t come out. Let the flames erase the evidence, let the pack believe what they needed to believe. Brenna Corvus, dead in the defense of her people. Mourned. Memorialized. Gone.
The decision nearly destroyed me. But it was the right call, and I’d make it again.
Alive, I was the biggest target in the southern wolf territories.
The most powerful Ravenclaw magic-user, the matriarch of a pack the purists wanted eradicated and the Syndicate wanted harvested.
Every enemy we had oriented toward me. As long as I was breathing and visible, the ranch would never be safe.
They’d keep coming. Keep hitting us. Keep picking off our scattered families to draw me out.
Dead, I became invisible. And invisible, I could hunt.
So I slid into field work. Tracking the intelligence leaks that fed our enemies locations of isolated Ravenclaw families.
Burning Syndicate supply caches that serviced their wolf-territory operations.
Relocating three families before the purist packs could reach them.
Mapping a network of surveillance positions across the Ozarks that told me someone—someone with resources, patience, and access to pack intelligence channels—was systematically monitoring every magic-blooded wolf in the south.
I haven’t cracked who’s running that network. Not yet. I’m close. But close isn’t proof, and without proof, I’m just a dead woman making accusations.
Everything I’ve built depends on staying dead.
Every contact, every safe house, every line of intelligence.
The moment someone sees my face, the network unravels.
My contacts scatter. The surveillance positions I’ve logged become useless because whoever’s running them will relocate. All that work, gone.
That’s why I can’t go down there.
Not because of Merric. Not because of the auburn-haired woman who fits so neatly into the space I left. Because the wolves on that ranch are safer with me dead and working than alive and exposed.
Except…
I found the other watchers yesterday.
Southeast ridge, opposite side of the valley from my position. Boot prints in a deliberate pattern, same approach three times over the past two weeks. Professional concealment. Whoever set up that position knows the ranch’s blind spots, which means they’ve been studying the property.
I’ve seen this pattern before. It matches the surveillance methodology I’ve been tracking across the region, the same spacing, the same approach discipline, the same careful avoidance of direct observation. This isn’t freelance. This is part of the network.
And it’s active. The most recent prints are less than forty-eight hours old. Someone was on that ridge watching the ranch while Merric’s trucks were rolling in.
The Frostbourne wolves have drawn attention. Four trained fighters, an alpha with political enemies, and a teenager who radiates magical energy that anyone with the right equipment can detect from miles away. That’s not a low-key arrival. That’s a signal flare.
If the watchers report back to whoever’s running the network, the ranch could be hit within days. Willow doesn’t have the fighters to repel a serious assault. Merric’s wolves improve the odds, but not enough. Not if the attackers come prepared for magic-blooded resistance.
I lower the binoculars. Below me, the ranch is settling into evening.
Greta’s organizing dinner at the outdoor table.
Willow is checking the generator fuel levels, moving between tasks like a woman who hasn’t stopped working for too long.
Cameron is sitting on the porch with a book, and from the way he keeps looking up from the pages, he’s not reading; he’s watching the treeline.
He used to do that as a child. Sit on the porch and watch the forest, looking for something he couldn’t name. I always told him it was just his wolf, wanting to run. But I wondered sometimes if it was something else. If he was looking for the shape of a missing person he’d never met.
My throat closes. I put the binoculars down and press my palms against the stone until the feeling passes.
One more day. I’ll hold position, gather more data on the southeast ridge surveillance, confirm the pattern. Then I’ll make a decision based on the real picture, not on the knot in my chest.
That’s what I tell myself.
Below me, my son turns a page he hasn’t read. The ranch lights come on one by one. And I settle in for another night of watching the life I gave up keep going without me.