Chapter 6
Brenna
My hands won’t stop shaking. They were steady during the fight. Steady when I came down the ridge, steady when I hit the first wolf, steady when I walked through Cameron’s fire and put my palm against his chest.
Now the job is done. And my hands are shaking so hard I have to press them against my thighs to keep them still.
Cameron is gripping my wrists. He hasn’t let go since I crouched in front of him, and his fingers are digging in hard enough to leave marks. I don’t care. He can break the bones if he needs to. I’ll take the pain as payment for what I put him through.
“Ma.” He says it again. Testing the word. Making sure it’s real. “Ma, what—? How—?”
“Not now,” I say. “I’ll explain everything. But not here. Not yet.”
His face crumples. Not into tears. Into something worse.
Confusion layered on grief layered on relief, all of it competing for space on features that have aged five years since I last saw him.
He was fifteen when I left. Tall for his age, still carrying puppy weight around his jaw, quick to laugh.
The boy in front of me has a man’s eyes in a teenager’s face, and the laughter is nowhere.
That’s on me. Part of it, anyway. The Syndicate owns the rest.
“Can you stand?” I ask.
He nods. Gets to his feet, still holding one of my wrists.
His legs are stable. The fire is gone, but I can feel the residual heat coming off his skin.
His magic is running hotter than it should, hotter than anything I taught him.
Something changed during his captivity. Something they did, or something they woke up.
I file that away. Later.
Right now, I need to deal with the man standing behind me.
I can feel Merric without turning around.
Not the bond. I buried that years ago, whatever the hell it was.
This is simpler. Wolf awareness. A large, wounded predator ten feet at my back, bleeding freely and not making a sound about it.
My wolf registers him the way she registers any potential threat: size, position, injury level, combat capacity.
And then, underneath the assessment, something else.
His blood is in the air—I can smell it from here, copper-bright and warm—and my wolf goes very still.
Not alert. Not wary. Still… the way she does when she catches a scent she’s been missing and doesn’t want to let go of.
I crush the response before it forms fully. I don’t have time for what my wolf wants. I’ve never had time for what my wolf wants.
He’s hurt. The flank wound is deep; I saw the gray wolf’s teeth go in during the fight. The leg is torn. He shifted back anyway, and he’s standing anyway because Merric Rourke would stand through an amputation before he’d show any kind of weakness.
That stubbornness used to make me feel safe. Now it just makes me tired.
I turn around.
He looks exactly like I expected and nothing like I remember.
Bigger. Harder. The scar on his jaw that I used to trace with my fingertip has settled into a permanent silver line.
His body is patterned with new marks I don’t know the stories behind: a thick ridge across his left shoulder, a scattering of small scars on his knuckles.
The platinum hair is longer now, damp with sweat and stuck to his forehead.
He’s staring at me the way a man stares at something he’d given up any hope of seeing again.
I don’t have room for that look. I can’t afford it. So I do what I’ve been doing for years: I focus on what needs to happen next.
“How many in your pack?” I ask.
He blinks. Whatever he expected me to say, a logistical question wasn’t it. “Four. Plus me.”
“The scout. The dark-haired woman. She’s good.”
“Briar. Yeah.”
“She found the surveillance position on the southeast ridge?”
He’s silent for a beat. “How do you know about that?”
“Because I found it two days ago. It’s part of a larger network.
Whoever’s running it has been mapping Ravenclaw defenses.
” I gesture at the downed wolves, three of them breathing, the rest either fled or not getting up again.
“These aren’t connected to the watchers.
Different operation. But the timing isn’t a coincidence. ”
I’m talking tactics because tactics I can handle. Tactics don’t require me to look at the naked, bleeding man in front of me and acknowledge that my wolf is howling inside my skull and has been since his scent hit me on that ridge.
“You need to get that wound closed,” I say. “And we need to get Cameron inside the wards.”
“Brenna—”
The drawl is still there. Just a hint—the way his vowels stretch when he’s not guarding them. Eighteen years, and his voice still sounds like the last warm night before everything went cold.
“Don’t.” I practically spit the word out.
“Don’t say my name like that. We’re not there.
We’re not anywhere close to there. Right now, we have wounded enemy wolves on the ground who might have backup coming, and a seventeen-year-old who just blew a magic signature that anyone with the right equipment could track from three counties away. So we move. Now. The rest can wait.”
He closes his mouth. His jaw works once, twice. Then he nods.
Good. He can follow orders. That’s new.
One of Merric’s team, a barrel-chested male, is already handling the scene.
He’s shifted back to human—they’re all naked, the whole lot of them, and nobody’s bothering with modesty because wolves don’t—and he’s binding the surviving wolves with rope that the big blond one apparently carries everywhere.
Practical man. I approve.
Speaking of the blond, he’s standing over the most injured purist, looking absolutely indifferent. Not cruelty. Just the total absence of concern for an enemy who picked the wrong fight.
And the auburn-haired woman—the one who lingers around Merric—is watching me.
Not with hostility. With something careful, assessing, and sharp enough that I revise my initial read. She’s not just a warm body at Merric’s side. She’s intelligent. And she’s trying to figure out what my resurrection means.
I’d respect that under different circumstances. Right now, I don’t have room for her either.
“Cameron.” I turn back to my son. “We’re going to the house. Stay close.”
He nods, and we start walking. He doesn’t let go of my wrist.
We’ve made it halfway across the south pasture when the sound hits. Wolves running, coming fast from the direction of the ranch. My hand goes up, magic gathering white and hot around my fist, and Cameron pulls close behind me. Reflex. His and mine both.
Willow comes through the tall grass at a dead sprint, two Ravenclaw fighters flanking her. She’s in human form, dressed, carrying a hunting knife in each hand. A red-haired kid is at her heels, hands on his knees, already spent from the run. Her eyes are wild and scanning for threats.
She sees the charred ground. The downed attackers. Merric’s pack. Cameron behind me.
Then she sees me.
Willow stops. Her whole body locks mid-stride, like she’s hit a wall made of glass.
The knives don’t lower. Her face goes through something I can’t watch and can’t look away from—recognition, denial, recognition again, each one hitting her like successive waves, and underneath all of it a sound that doesn’t make it out of her throat.
“Hey, little bird,” I say. The old nickname. What I called her when she was ten and followed me everywhere, chattering and fierce and half the size she is now.
Willow’s face breaks.
Not the way Cameron’s did—confused and searching. Willow breaks clean. Joy and fury and grief all at once, and she’s crossing the distance between us before I can brace for it.
She hits me hard enough to stagger me. Arms locked around my neck, face buried in my shoulder, knives in her fists, and digging into my back.
She doesn’t notice, and I don’t care. She’s shaking.
Her whole body is shaking, and she’s saying something muffled that might be my name or might be a curse or might be both.
I hold her. One arm around her back, my other hand on her hair. I let myself have this for five seconds. Five seconds of my niece, alive and strong and so angry at me I can feel it vibrating through her bones.
Then I pull back. Gently. She resists, then lets go.
Her eyes are wet. Her teeth are clenched. And there it is: the anger arriving, right on schedule.
“Two years.” Her voice shakes. “Two goddamn years, Brenna.”
“I know.”
“We buried you. We held a ceremony. Cameron—” She looks at him, standing behind me with his hand locked around my wrist. “He cried for a month. A month. He was fifteen, and he cried himself sick every night. And I held him, and I told him you were gone… but you weren’t!”
“Willow.”
“Don’t. Don’t you dare tell me it was necessary. Don’t you dare tell me you had a plan.”
“I had a plan.”
She makes a sound that’s almost a laugh and entirely a wound. “Of course you did. You always have a goddamn plan. And it’s always a plan that involves you disappearing and everyone else picking up the pieces.”
She’s right. Not about always. But about this time, she’s right. I won’t insult her by arguing.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “It doesn’t cover it. But I’m saying it anyway.”
Willow glares at me. Her chin is trembling, and she’s biting down to stop it. The knives hang at her sides, forgotten.
“Are you staying?” she asks. “Or is this another stop on the Brenna Corvus Save Everyone Alone Tour?”
“I’m staying.”
Something shifts in her face. Not forgiveness. We’re a long way from that. But the faintest release of a tension she’s been carrying. The possibility that she might not have to hold all of this by herself anymore.
“Good,” she says. “Because your ranch is falling apart and your people are eating squirrel, and I am tired, Brenna. I am so goddamn tired.”
I reach out and grip her arm. Firm. Stable. The way I used to when she was ten, and the world was too big for her.
“I know you are. And I’m going to fix it. But right now we need to get out of this field and behind the wards, because Cameron just sent up a flare that every hostile within fifty miles could have picked up.”
Willow registers the reality of our situation. The anger doesn’t leave her face, but it rearranges itself around something more functional. She straightens. Nods. Turns to her fighters and starts issuing orders.
There she is. The leader who held Ravenclaw together without me. Hurting and furious, and still the first one to flip from emotion to action when the situation demands it.
She’s magnificent. And I will spend the rest of my life making this up to her.
We move as a group back toward the ranch.
Cameron walks beside me, close enough that our arms brush.
Willow takes point with her fighters. Behind us, Merric’s pack handles the prisoners—the males hauling the bound purists, the redhead collecting scattered weapons, the dark-haired scout appearing from somewhere with a silent efficiency that makes me nervous in a professional way.
Merric walks behind me. I don’t look back at him. I can hear his breathing—uneven, the flank wound making itself known—and the unsteady cadence of his stride where the torn leg is holding but only just.
He doesn’t ask for help. Doesn’t slow down. Just keeps pace with blood on his skin and questions in his mouth that he’s too smart—or too stubborn—to ask while we’re in the open.
Good. Let him hold those questions. Let him carry them the way I’ve been carrying mine.
We reach the ranch yard, and the Ravenclaw wolves come out to meet us.
They see the blood first. Then the prisoners. Then Cameron, walking upright with his hand locked around mine.
Then me.
The silence that falls over the yard is crushing. Thirty faces, some I know and some I don’t, staring at a dead woman walking through their gate.
Greta is the first to move. She steps off the porch with her hand pressed to her mouth, white hair bright in the afternoon sun. She doesn’t speak. She just walks toward me with the slow, deliberate pace of a woman who’s lived long enough to know that miracles are often just delayed disasters.
She stops in front of me. Looks me up and down. Reaches out and touches my face, one weathered hand against my cheek, feeling for real.
“Well,” she says, and her voice is stable even if her hand isn’t. “You certainly took your time.”
My throat closes. I blink hard and hold my ground.
“I need to talk to everyone,” I say. “All of us. Inside.”
Greta nods. Drops her hand. Turns to the watching wolves with the authority of a woman who’s been feeding and fixing and holding this pack together emotionally since before I was born.
“You heard her. Inside. All of you.”
The wolves move, some staring at me, some unable to look. Cameron stays pressed against my side. Willow walks ahead, already organizing, already leading, because stopping isn’t something she knows how to do.
Merric’s pack lingers in the yard, the prisoners secured against the porch rail.
Merric stands apart from them. Someone has thrown him a pair of jeans, and he’s pulled them on, but the flank wound is still open, bleeding in a slow, stubborn seep down his ribs.
He’s watching me walk into the house with his pack’s eyes on my back, the questions unspoken.
I don’t look back.
I’ll face him. I’ll face all of it. But I’m going to hold my people first.
Everything else comes after.