Chapter 28
Brenna
The attack comes at dawn. I’m awake when it starts.
I’ve been awake for hours, lying in the dark with Merric’s arm across my waist, sensing his restless half-sleep.
My wolf has been pacing inside me since midnight, hackles raised, teeth bared at nothing.
Something in the air. A change in pressure, like forest sounds shift when a large animal moves through the underbrush.
Except this isn’t one animal. This is the absence of animals.
The birds have gone still, the way they do before a storm or a predator.
I’m reaching for Merric’s shoulder when the first explosion hits the south gate.
The blast rattles the cabin windows. Glass cracks in the kitchen. The compound erupts into noise: shouting, running, the howl of wolves shifting mid-stride. My training takes over before my thoughts do. I’m on my feet, dressed in the clothes I laid out on the chair, boots in my hand.
“Merric—”
He’s up. Already moving. Already shifting. I see the silver fur ripple across his shoulders as he clears the bedroom door. Through the wall, I hear Cameron’s door slam open.
“Cameron, stay—”
“I’m here.” He’s in the hallway. Dressed. Shoes on. He sleeps in his clothes now. Ready to move at a sound. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know yet. Stay behind me.”
The second explosion hits as we reach the cabin door.
Closer. The north side. I feel the concussion through the floorboards, and my field mind starts running the calculations: two strike points, south and north, simultaneous detonation.
Classic pincer approach. Designed to split the defensive response, pull forces in two directions.
Outside, the predawn compound is a controlled scramble.
Merric is already in full wolf form; silver, massive, blazing blue eyes cutting through the half-dark.
Jonas appears at his flank, half-shifted, shouting instructions.
Wolves pour from the cabins and the lodge in various states of readiness, some shifted, some human, all moving with the trained precision of a pack that drills for this.
Frostbourne’s discipline holds. I’ll give them that.
I scan from the cabin porch. The south gate is burning, two vehicles rammed through, figures fanning out. North boundary breached. I can see movement in the trees, military formation, too organized for purists. Night vision. Suppressed weapons. The flat black gear of a professional extraction unit.
Syndicate.
Fuck!
The realization hits me in the chest. Not here. Not at Frostbourne, behind walls, inside a large wolf compound in the mountains. The Syndicate doesn’t hit targets this size unless they’ve already scoped every inch of the operation. Unless someone gave them the blueprint.
“Cameron. With me. Now.” I grab his arm and pull him off the porch. The lodge is forty yards south; stone foundation, heavy timber walls, the most defensible building in the compound. If I can get him inside, if I can get him behind stone—
Merric is already at the south gate, silver wolf tearing into the Syndicate line.
I feel him: focused, lethal, the full force of an alpha defending his territory.
He’s drawing the fight to himself. Pulling the south strike force away from the cabins, away from us.
He doesn’t know yet that he’s doing exactly what they want.
The third strike comes from the east.
Not explosions. Wolves. A dozen of them in shifted form, pouring through a gap that shouldn’t exist—a gap I noted three days ago on my walk, the blind spot between the old pine stand and the equipment shed.
Wild wolves, running without formation, snarling, savage.
Purists. The lead wolf has Ashfall markings on his flank—dark slashes behind the shoulder that identify pack allegiance even in wolf form.
Syndicate from the south and north. Purists from the east. Three coordinated prongs, hitting simultaneously, using intelligence that could only have come from inside the political structure.
And they’re not attacking the compound.
They’re converging on the space between the cabin and the lodge. On the path I’m running with my son.
On us.
No! No, no, no!
I stop. Plant my feet. Push Cameron behind me.
“Ma—”
“Get to the lodge. Don’t stop. Don’t look back.”
“I’m not leaving—”
“Cameron. Go. NOW!”
He goes. I turn to face the eastern breach, and the white fire comes to my hands. Not the controlled, measured burn I used at the parley. The raw, desperate flood of a mother standing between her child and the beasts who’ve come for him.
The first purist wolf hits my fire line and yelps, veering sideways, fur smoking. The second tries to flank left. I catch him with a whip of flame that sends him rolling. The third and fourth come together, and I meet them with a wall of white heat that turns the predawn air to shimmering glass.
But there are too many. Twelve wolves, fanning out, and I can’t hold a perimeter this wide.
I’m burning too hot, too fast, spending magic at a rate I can’t sustain.
The rational part of my brain knows this, knows they’re running me down, making me spend everything I have so that when the real strike comes, I’m empty.
The real strike.
I spin. Two Syndicate operatives have materialized from behind the equipment shed—not dragons, humans, body armor, dart rifles at their shoulders. They were already inside. Pre-positioned. Waiting while the three-pronged assault drew every wolf to the breaches.
I throw fire at the nearest one. He dodges—fast, trained, expecting it—and the second one raises his rifle.
The dart takes me in the neck.
Small. Precise. Sinking into the muscle between my throat and shoulder with a cold sting that spreads outward like ice water in my veins.
The effect is immediate and absolute. My magic stutters.
Not fading; severed. The white fire dies in my hands as if someone closed a valve.
My knees buckle. The compound spins, and the ground comes up to meet me.
Anti-magic suppression compound. Syndicate biotech, designed specifically for wolf-witch physiology.
I’ve heard about this. Months of intelligence work, and I know exactly what’s in my bloodstream: a chemical cocktail that blocks the neural pathways between the magical core and the motor systems. Paralysis for the magic.
Sedation for the body. Tailored. Targeted.
They came for me. Specifically. Personally. This isn’t a raid. It’s a kidnapping.
I hit the ground face down. The gravel bites my palms. I try to push up, and my arms fold.
I try to shift, and my wolf slams against a wall inside me, howling, trapped.
The connection to my magic—the thing that’s been woven through me since birth, as natural as breath—is gone.
Not dormant. Gone. The absence is worse than pain.
Through blurring vision, I see Cameron. He’s twenty feet from the lodge door.
Running. Almost there. Then two more operatives step from behind the building’s corner; they were inside too, a second pre-positioned team, and understanding crashes through me: the lodge was never safe.
They knew we’d run for it. They put men at both ends of our path.
Cameron’s fire erupts. Even drugged and terrified, his instinct is to fight.
Corvus blood, Rourke stubbornness, the raw survival reflex of a boy who spent six months in Syndicate captivity.
He takes down the first operative with a blast that lifts the man off his feet and throws him into the lodge wall.
The second operative ducks, rolls, comes up with a dart rifle.
The dart hits Cameron in the thigh. He staggers. The fire flickers—gold, copper, gold—and dies. He drops to one knee. The operative catches him before he falls.
“No!” My voice comes out as a croak. The drug is flooding my system, and the world is going dark at the edges.
I feel hands on me. Lifting. Two operatives, professional, efficient, carrying me like a piece of equipment.
My head lolls, and I see the compound upside down.
Fire at the south gate, wolves fighting, Petra in half-shift taking down a purist, Jonas coordinating the north defense.
Nobody sees us.
The diversion worked. Every Frostbourne wolf is engaged, fighting the visible assault, and behind their turned backs, a four-man extraction team is carrying the alpha’s mate and son toward the eastern border.
Merric!
I reach for him. The bond is there, but the connection is dimming, the drug smothering it.
I can feel him—the fury of a wolf in combat, the heat of his fight at the south gate—and I try to scream through the link.
Try to push everything I have into it: East side, extraction team, Cameron, find us, find us. FIND US!
I don’t know if it reaches him. Something inside me flickers.
Fades. His presence goes from a roar to a murmur to a whisper, and the whisper is the worst thing I’ve ever felt.
Worse than the dart, worse than the paralysis.
The man I love, disappearing from inside my chest. The connection that survived through so many years of separation going dark because someone designed a chemical specifically to take it from me.
The last thing I see clearly is Cameron. Limp in the arms of two operatives, his head hanging, his fire extinguished. My boy. The boy I hid and lied for and died for and came back from the dead for. Being carried into the trees like cargo.
I try to move. My body doesn’t answer.
The darkness takes me in stages. First the edges, then the center, then everything. And the very last thing I feel, in the final second before the drug pulls me under, is Merric.
A sudden flare through the dying bond. His awareness hitting like a freight train, the realization that something is wrong, that I’m not where I should be. His fear. His rage. The sound of a wolf howling, somewhere far behind me, and the howl isn’t a battle cry.
It’s my name.
Then nothing.