Chapter 35
Brenna
The Ozarks welcome us with rain. Not a storm.
A slow, warm rain that comes off the hills and turns the dirt road to mud.
It makes the whole valley smell like green and stone and the petrichor of Ravenclaw territory that I’d know blind and deaf and a thousand miles away.
The scent hits me through the open truck window, and my wolf goes calm inside me.
The road winds through the valley. Past the old fence line, past the creek crossing where the water runs copper in the rain, past the oak grove where my mother used to take me to practice ward work when I was small, and the magic was new and terrifying.
The trees are taller than I remember. Or maybe I’m smaller.
Maybe grief and distance shrink you, and coming home is the thing that gives you back your real dimensions.
Willow is on the porch when we pull up. She’s not alone.
Thirty wolves are with her, most of them standing in the rain because apparently the return of the matriarch and her newly mated alpha is an event that warrants getting wet for.
They’re all here. Faces I know and some I don’t recognize, wolves who joined while I was “dead,” drawn by word of mouth or desperation or the gravity that Ravenclaw exerts on magic-blooded wolves who have nowhere else to go.
Greta has an umbrella. She’s the only one.
I get out of the truck. The rain hits my face, and I stand in it for a moment, eyes closed, feeling the power in the earth beneath my feet. The wards recognize me. I feel them adjust, expand, welcome me back into the environment. My magic reaches down into the earth, and the earth reaches back.
Merric comes around the truck. Cameron climbs out of the back, squinting at the rain, looking at the valley with faraway eyes.
Not the assessment of a new territory, the way he looked at Frostbourne.
Something softer. Something that remembers being five years old and running barefoot through this grass.
Sienna, Dane, and Briar emerge from the second vehicle, looking around at the ranch with fresh eyes—the repaired barn, the gardens heavy with moisture, the settlement in its river valley with the old-growth forest rising behind it like a wall.
Willow comes down the steps. She looks at me.
At the red mate mark on my throat. At Merric standing at my side, his platinum hair dark with rain, his hand near my back without quite touching it.
The restraint of a man who knows this moment belongs to my wolves and me and is making himself small enough to let it happen.
“You’re back,” she says.
“We’re back.”
“All of you?”
“All of us. Sienna, Dane, and Briar, too. They’re staying.”
Willow’s eyes sweep the new arrivals. Then she nods—once, firm—with the decisive economy of a woman who doesn’t waste gestures.
“Barn’s finished,” she says. “Dane’s going to be disappointed.”
“I’ll find something else,” Dane says from behind me. He’s already looking at the south fence like a workman who’s spotted structural flaws. Some things are wonderfully predictable.
The pack closes around us. Not ceremony. Warmth. Hands on shoulders, murmured greetings, the physical language of wolves welcoming their own. Arlen grips my arm with his gnarled hand and nods at Merric with something that might be approval.
“You bring trouble down on Ravenclaw, girl,” he says, the same words he said at the parley, “you make sure it’s the right kind.” He looks at Merric. “He’ll do.”
“High praise from Arlen,” Merric says.
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
Greta takes Cameron by the elbow and steers him toward the kitchen. Cameron goes without protest, which tells me the time at Frostbourne has filed down some of his sharper edges. Or maybe he’s just hungry. With seventeen-year-olds, it’s hard to tell.
Inside, the house smells like bread and woodsmoke and the cedar oil Greta uses on everything.
It smells like home.
We eat. All of us, crowded around the kitchen table and spilling into the living room, Frostbourne wolves and Ravenclaw wolves sharing plates and passing bread.
The noise level builds from murmur to conversation to laughter, and the laughter is the sound of two packs discovering that the distance between them is shorter than anyone thought.
Dane makes Hannah and Warrick laugh with a story about a building project that ended with him on a roof in his underwear.
Sienna sits next to Willow and asks questions about ward maintenance that are genuine and detailed.
It makes Willow’s guarded expression soften by degrees.
Briar disappeared into the hills before the soup was served, because the forest is the only welcome home she needs.
Cameron sits between Lena—who made the drive from Frostbourne through force of will and her parents’ reluctant permission, and who I suspect will be visiting often—and Greta.
He’s talking. Not loudly, not performing.
Just talking. About Frostbourne, about the sparring yard, about Kai’s terrible chess game, and Mark’s terrible jokes.
The way a traumatized teen talks when he’s finally allowing himself to believe that the ground under him might hold.
Merric sits beside me. His hand finds my knee under the table. I put my hand over his and leave it there.
The evening settles. Wolves drift to their rooms, their porches, their places. The rain thins to mist. The valley fills with the blue light of an Ozark twilight that I love so much.
Willow finds me on the back porch after the house has settled. The mist hangs in the valley, and the hills are dark shapes against a sky that’s holding on to the last of the light.
“We need to talk,” she says.
I knew this was coming. Willow doesn’t do casual porch conversations. She leans against the railing and tilts her chin at an angle that means she’s already made a decision and is informing me of it rather than asking permission. I recognize the posture. It’s mine.
“The missing families,” she says. “The group in Texas. Four months without contact.”
“I know. I’ve been—”
“You’ve been mating, rescuing your son, and restructuring southern wolf politics.
I know. You’ve been busy.” No malice in it.
Just fact. Delivered with the blunt efficiency of a woman who’s learned that softening bad news is a luxury.
“But three Ravenclaw families are out there somewhere, and every day we don’t find them is a day that the Syndicate might. ”
“Willow—”
“I’m going to find them.”
There it is. The decision, delivered with the certainty of a Corvus female who’s learned that waiting for someone else to act is something she can’t tolerate.
“It’s dangerous,” I say. “You don’t know what you’re walking into. The Syndicate has networks in every major city—”
“You did it alone for two years.”
“I had training. Field experience. I’d been running operations since—”
“And I’ve had two years of holding this pack together through raids and starvation. Through the absence of the only family I had left. I think that qualifies.” She holds my eyes. Corvus to Corvus. “I’m not asking, Brenna. I’m telling you.”
She’s right. The recognition stings, because I know exactly what it costs to make a choice like this. To walk away from the people you love into uncertain ground because someone out there needs you more.
“Willow…” I try again, because my conscience demands it.
“We can’t abandon them.” Her eyes fix on mine. “Not again. Our pack needs you here. But somebody has to get to them. Who better than me?”
I sigh, because she’s right. “Take Briar,” I say. “She’s the best tracker I’ve ever seen. And she’ll keep you alive even when you’re being reckless.”
“I’m never reckless.”
“You’re a Corvus. Reckless is genetic.”
Her mouth twitches. Not quite a smile. The Willow version.
“I’ll find them,” she says. “And I’ll bring them home.”
“I know you will.”
She turns her head. Looks at the valley. “Aunt Brenna?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m glad you’re home.” She pauses. “Even if you snore.”
“I don’t snore.”
“Merric does. These walls are thin.” She steps away from the railing. “Greta was right about the south cabin.”
She goes inside. The screen door closes behind her.
I stand on the porch and watch the mist settle over the valley. Ravenclaw territory. The land that raised me. The land I left and came back to and will defend until there’s nothing left to defend it with.
The screen door opens again. Merric steps out.
He stands behind me, wraps his arms around my waist, and rests his chin on the top of my head.
I lean back against him. His chest is warm through his shirt, and I feel the steadiness behind it—calm, settled, the sense of two people who found each other twice and aren’t letting go.
“Willow’s going after the missing families,” I say.
“I heard.”
“She’s young. And stubborn. And she has no idea what she’s walking into.”
“She’s you. Twenty years ago.”
“That’s what worries me.”
He laughs. Low. I feel it in his chest against my back.
We stand together on the porch while the last light fades.
The valley goes dark. The ranch lights come on one by one—the lodge, the barn, the cabins.
The homes of thirty wolves who’ve survived against all odds and are still here, still standing, still Ravenclaw.
And now, mixed among them, a handful of Frostbourne wolves who chose to follow their alpha south and are learning that home isn’t a place you’re born. It’s a place you choose.
“Merric.”
“Hmm?”
“Thank you. For coming here. For bringing Cameron home. For staying.”
“You asked me if I’d change things, if I could go back. This is me going back. This is the choice I should have made the first time.”
I turn in his arms. Face him. The mark on his throat is still visible in the dark, matching mine. His eyes are steady. His hands are warm on my back. And through it all, the mate bond connects us. Solid. Something built to last.
“I love you,” I say. Because I haven’t said it.
Through all the fighting and the running and the sex and the politics and the terror, I haven’t said the words, and they deserve to exist in the air between us.
Deserve to be spoken on this porch, in this valley, on this land.
“I loved you when I met you. I loved you when you broke my heart. I loved you every year between then and now, even when I called it hatred. And I love you now.”
He doesn’t answer immediately. His hands come up to frame my face. He looks at me the way he looked at me in the bunkhouse, in the bed, in the clearing where he held our son and me and didn’t let go.
“I know,” he says. “I’ve always known.”
He kisses me. Slow. Unhurried. A kiss that isn’t going anywhere because it doesn’t have to. We have time now. Not borrowed time or stolen time or the desperate minutes between crises. Real time. The kind you build a life in.
The rain starts again. Soft. Warm. We stand on the porch and kiss in it, and neither of us moves to go inside, because the rain on our skin and the earth beneath our feet and the bond between our hearts is enough.
It’s more than enough. And it always will be.
But even as I bask in the warmth of Merric’s arms, something tugs at the back of my mind.
I spent enough time alone out there to know that our world is not kind to magic-bloods.
With Bern’s exposure on the horizon, who knows what he’ll be capable of, or how it will affect the families we’re looking for.
Willow is as strong and stubborn as I am; maybe more. But she’s walking into something that none of us fully understands yet. And I’m afraid that by the time we do, she’ll already be in too deep to pull her back.
Willow’s story, “Seeking the Pack,” is coming to on March 27, 2026. Pre-Order your copy now!