Chapter 12
Merric
I don’t sleep. How could I? I sit on the riverbank until the moon sets, then I walk back to the bunkhouse.
I lie on the cot and stare at the ceiling while Rook snores and the night thins toward dawn.
My body is a mess—the flank wound, the leg, a day of hard walking—and none of it registers because my entire nervous system is tuned to a single frequency.
Her mouth. The way her hand pressed against my chest. The white fire at her fingertips, warm through my shirt. The mate bond snapping awake between us like a live wire hitting water.
And then her walking away. Back stiff. Not looking back.
Okay, I told her. One word. The right word. The only word that wasn’t going to make things worse.
I meant it. I’ll keep meaning it for as long as she needs.
But my wolf is pacing circles inside my chest, and the ghost of her lips is still on mine, and okay is about the furthest thing from what I actually feel.
Dawn comes. I get up, get dressed, drink coffee that tastes like nothing. Walk outside.
Brenna is already in the yard.
She’s talking to Willow near the garden, hands on her hips, head tilted in that way she has when she’s thinking three moves ahead.
She’s wearing the same borrowed clothes from yesterday, and her hair is damp.
She looks like she slept about as well as I did, which is to say not at all, but she’s carrying it better because she’s had more practice at functioning on empty.
She sees me cross the yard. Our eyes meet for exactly one second.
One second. That’s all. Then she looks away, says something to Willow, and walks toward the main house without breaking stride.
One second, and my whole chest remembers.
I pour more coffee. Mind my own business. Get to work.
The morning is half gone when Rook finds me at the collapsed section of the west fence. I’m digging postholes again because digging postholes doesn’t require me to think about anything except dirt.
“We’ve got a problem,” Rook says.
“Which one?”
“The prisoner. The gray one. He wants to talk.”
The gray with the torn ear. The pack leader from the ambush, currently secured in the tool shed with a broken foreleg and burns across his shoulder where Brenna’s fire caught him.
“So let him talk.”
“He’s asking for you specifically.”
Fuck. I knew we couldn’t put this off forever.
I drive the posthole digger into the ground one more time, lever out the dirt, and set it aside. “Fine.”
The tool shed is dim and smells like motor oil and blood.
Three purist wolves in human form, bound and seated against the back wall.
The two lesser wolves are quiet—sullen, beaten, resigned.
The gray is sitting upright despite the broken arm, which is splinted with strips of lumber and a torn shirt.
Greta’s work. She set the bone herself, briskly and without sympathy, and told him if he moved before it knitted she’d break the other one.
He watches me come in with sharp, calculating eyes. Forties, maybe. Gray at the temples. He has the weathered look of a wolf who’s spent his life outdoors and the composed bearing of someone used to authority.
“Merric Rourke,” he says. “Frostbourne.”
“And you are?”
“Harlan. Ashfall Pack. Southeastern Missouri.”
I pull a crate over and sit. “Talk.”
Harlan shifts his weight, wincing as the broken arm adjusts. “By my reckoning, you got twenty-four hours. Maybe less. My alpha knows we’re here and he’ll come for us.”
“With how many?”
“Enough.”
“That’s not a number.”
“It’s more than you’ve got. Ashfall runs sixty wolves, and we’ve got alliances with two other packs in the region. Stoneridge and Blackhollow.”
Three packs. Potentially a hundred and fifty wolves. Against our combined strength of maybe fifteen fighters, if I’m generous with the count.
“He’ll claim parley rights,” Harlan continues. “Under the old territorial accords. Captured wolves must be surrendered to their alpha upon formal demand, or the holding pack assumes a state of hostility.”
“I know the accords.”
“Then you know Ravenclaw can’t afford a state of hostility with three packs.” He leans forward. “I’m telling you this because you seem like a reasonable man. We were sent to test your defenses. That’s done. Return us, and this doesn’t have to escalate.”
“Sent by whom?”
“My alpha.”
“Who told your alpha where to find us?”
Something shifts behind Harlan’s eyes. A quick caution. “That’s not your concern.”
“It is when your people ambushed a seventeen-year-old on my watch. Someone gave you our schedule, our positions, the fact that Cameron and I would be at the south fence that morning. That didn’t come from your alpha sitting in Missouri. That came from someone with eyes on this property.”
Harlan says nothing. The caution has hardened into something closed and final.
“Twenty-four hours,” he repeats. “That’s all I have to say.”
I stand and leave the shed. Dane is outside, leaning against the wall with his arms crossed.
“Hear all that?” I ask.
“Yep.”
“Thoughts?”
Dane considers for approximately two seconds. “He’s scared. Not of us. Of whoever sent them.”
That tracks. Harlan delivered his message like a man reciting orders, not like a man who believes in them.
I find Brenna in the kitchen.
She’s alone, standing at the counter with a map of the property spread across the surface, marking ward positions with a pencil. She looks up when I come in, and her face does something complicated—the flash of last night surfacing and being pushed down, all in about a quarter second.
“We need to talk,” I say.
“About?” Her eyes narrow. She’s assuming I mean about last night.
“The prisoners.” I set her mind at ease. Or maybe I don’t. “Their alpha is going to claim them under the old territorial accords. Twenty-four hours.”
The pencil stops moving. She straightens up. “Which pack?”
“Ashfall. Southeastern Missouri. He says they’ve got alliances with Stoneridge and Blackhollow.”
“They do. Loose alliances, but real. All three packs lean purist. Ashfall’s alpha is a man named Cade Hatchett—mid-fifties, old-school, runs his pack like it’s still 1850.”
“You know him?”
“I know all of them. Sustained tracking of enemy movements gives you a comprehensive directory.” She puts the pencil down and leans a hip against the counter. “The parley demand is legal. Under the accords, we’d have to surrender them or declare hostility.”
“And declaring hostility with three packs while we’ve got fifteen fighters and no security—”
“Isn’t an option.”
We look at each other across the kitchen table.
Map between us. Coffee cups. Morning light touching her face.
All the ordinary ingredients of a conversation that isn’t ordinary at all, because twelve hours ago I had my hand on the back of her neck and her mouth was on mine.
Now we’re standing three feet apart, discussing territorial law like none of it happened.
I can smell her from here. Not perfume; Brenna’s never worn perfume. Just her. The scent my wolf has been chasing through my dreams, now close enough to taste.
Focus. For the love of God, focus.
“There’s a third option,” Brenna says. “We return the wolves and use the parley to gather intelligence. If Hatchett comes in person, I can read him. His body language, his pack’s positioning, who he defers to, who’s giving him orders.
These purist alphas aren’t operating independently.
Someone’s coordinating them, and a face-to-face meeting is the fastest way to find out who. ”
“You want to use the parley as a recon operation.”
“I want to turn their demand into our advantage. They come expecting a cowed pack handing over prisoners. They find a defended position, an alpha with council standing—” she nods at me, “and a woman they thought was dead. That’s a lot of new information for them to process, and people make mistakes when they’re processing. ”
She’s brilliant. I’ve always known that, but watching her work in real time—the way she takes a threat and rotates it until it becomes a tool—is something else entirely.
“You’d reveal yourself to their network,” I say. “That burns your cover permanently.”
“My cover’s already burned. The wolves from yesterday saw me. If any of them make it back to their people—and the one who ran certainly will—then every pack in the south could know Brenna Corvus is alive by now.” A beat. “I factored that in when I came down the hill.”
“You factored in losing two years of cover.”
“I factored in everything.” Her eyes hold mine. Unflinching. Unreadable. “I made a choice about what mattered more.”
I take that in, chew on it. She’s talking about the ambush, about Cameron, about tactical necessity.
She’s not talking about last night. But the sentence has a double edge, and we both feel it.
For a moment, the kitchen is very quiet, and the space between us is doing that thing again—contracting, warming, pulling.
I break first. Look down at the map. “Where would you plan the meet?”
“The north boundary. Open ground, clear sight lines, far from the house and the main settlement. We control the approach and the exit. If things go bad, we’re not fighting in our own yard.”
“Your ward line runs along the north boundary. Can you reinforce that section before the meeting?”
“If I work on it today and tomorrow. Yes.”
“Then we do it. But I want Briar on the ridge during the parley, watching their rear positions. And I want Rook at the boundary with us.”
“Agreed.” She pauses. “I want Willow there, too. She’s been running this pack in my absence. Hatchett needs to see that Ravenclaw isn’t a handful of refugees. It’s a functioning pack with a chain of command.”
“Good.”
We stand there. The practical conversation is over. Everything that needs deciding has been decided. There’s no reason to stay in this kitchen, looking at each other across a map and two coffee cups and the ghost of a kiss that neither of us is going to mention.
“Brenna—”
“No.” Her voice isn’t sharp. It’s tired. “Not now.”
“I was going to ask about the wards. Whether you need help carrying supplies to the north line.”
A beat. The faintest color touches her cheeks. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
She looks away. Her throat works. And then—so fast I almost miss it—the corner of her mouth flickers. Not a smile. Not quite. But the hint of one, suppressed before it can fully form.
“I could use having the canteens filled,” she says. “And something to eat. Preferably not another goddamn protein bar.”
“I’ll handle it.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
Neither of us moves for a second too long. Then she picks up her pencil and goes back to the map, and I turn and leave the kitchen.
Outside, I breathe in the air like a man who’s been underwater.
Greta is on the porch, shelling beans into a bowl. She watches me come out of the kitchen with a look of supreme neutrality that somehow communicates more than a paragraph of commentary.
“The prisoner’s burns need redressing,” she says. “I’ve done what I can, but I’m not a healer. Cormac would have had those sealed in a day.”
“Cormac?”
“My mate.” She says it simply. No waver. “Pack healer for forty years. He died six months after Brenna disappeared. His heart, they said. I say his heart broke when the pack did, and the rest of him followed.”
I sit on the step below her. She keeps shelling beans, her weathered hands moving automatically.
“He kept the healing wards,” she continues.
“The way Brenna keeps the protective lines. His magic was gentler; not fire, not force. He could lay his hands on a wound, and the skin would just… remember how to close. When he died, that part of the wards went dark. The protective lines held because they’re anchored to the land.
But the healing magic was anchored to him. ”
“And there’s nobody else who can do it?”
“Brenna’s magic is defensive. Protective. She can set wards and throw fire, but she can’t mend a wound any more than a sword can stitch a cut.” Greta pauses. “Cameron, though…”
“What about him?”
“Yesterday, after the fight. I was bandaging the burns on the prisoner—the young one, the female. Cameron came in to help. He put his hand near the burn, and I watched the skin ease. Just a fraction. He didn’t even know he was doing it.”
I think about Cameron’s magic—the uncontrolled fire, the copper light. Dangerous on the surface. But he calmed when Brenna put her hand on his chest. I calmed him with the anchor sense. And now Greta is telling me there’s a healing thread buried in all that raw power.
“Cormac had the same instinct,” Greta says. “When he was young. Didn’t know what it was at first. Thought he was imagining things.” She looks at me over her bowl of beans. “That boy has more in him than fire, Alpha Rourke. Someone just needs to help him find it.”
She goes back to her beans. Conversation over.
I sit on the porch and think about Cameron’s magic and Cormac’s death and a pack that lost its healer right after it lost its alpha and somehow kept breathing. I think about Greta, who buried her mate and kept shelling beans and kept feeding people and kept going because someone had to.
I think about Brenna in the kitchen, almost smiling, and the way she said “I factored in everything” while looking at me like the words hadn’t come out the way she expected.
The day stretches ahead… wards to reinforce, a parley to prepare for, a ranch full of wolves to feed and secure. The captured purists on a twenty-four-hour clock. Bern’s silence on the other end of an unanswered message. Pressure coming from every direction.
And I realize that this is what I was born for. To take the pressure so others don’t have to.
The kitchen is empty when I return to it. I fill the canteens. Pack food—real food, not protein bars. Then find Brenna at the north boundary, already working, white fire sinking into the earth.
I set the supplies beside her without a word. She picks up a canteen without looking at me. Drinks. Keeps working.
But when I turn to go, she says, “Merric.”
I stop.
“Thank you.” Two words. Almost lost in the wind.
I nod and walk back to the ranch. And I carry those two words with me like they’re worth more than everything else combined.