Chapter 13
MIA
Nash is already up when I wake to soft sunlight streaming in through the canopy overhead.
I can hear him at the fire behind me, moving around, probably cooking another rabbit.
The smell of coffee reaches me, real coffee this time from wherever he produces things from inside that pack, and my wolf is disgracefully pleased about all of it.
Not just the cooking and the coffee but everything that happened last night too.
If I’m being honest, I’m pretty pleased about it too, though I’m not sure that’s the wisest feeling to have.
I lie in the grass and conduct a brief internal assessment with my wolf.
Last night happened. Yes.
It was amazing. Yes.
And now you’re going to… Figure it out. Later. When there’s more distance between me and this campsite that has somehow turned into a romantic getaway, and the way he said I’ve got you like it was some kind of marriage proposal.
I sit up. Find my pack. Grab it and head around the big tree to change. When I’m done, I take the Null from the inner pocket.
This time, I don’t hesitate. I take it quickly, before my wolf can register an opinion and because I know any hesitation might cost me a decision I’ll regret tomorrow.
Then I tuck the vial away and stand up and walk to the fire like last night was a thing that happened and not a thing that is still happening inside my chest.
Nash looks up when I approach. His expression does a sort of quiet assessment, reading me in the space of a second, finding whatever he finds and keeping it to himself.
“Morning,” he says.
He hands me coffee.
“Morning,” I return.
We drink in silence. Comfortable silence, despite what I said to him after, which is somehow worse than if it was awkward. Awkward I could have used as evidence that I’d made a mistake. This just feels like… us.
Don’t, I tell myself. There is no us. There can’t be.
And since my wolf immediately puffs up to start arguing with me, I glance around a bit desperately for a distraction that isn’t Nash himself.
But the clearing is empty besides us. That’s when I realize Echo isn’t on his rock. He’s not curled inside my pack either.
I scan the tree line automatically.
“He was gone when I got up,” Nash says, following my gaze.
I frown, trying to remember if my wolf even noticed it during the night. But I slept harder than I have in a while, thanks to—
“He seemed agitated last night. After you and I…” He pauses. “After you fell asleep.”
I look at him. “Agitated how?”
“Going to the tree line. Coming back. Repeat.” He sets his coffee down. “I thought he was just being Echo.”
That might have been a reason, except Echo is never agitated. Excited maybe. Outraged possibly. But not anxious like Nash is describing.
We look at each other for a moment.
Then Echo crashes through the undergrowth at the tree line. Not his usual fluid materializing from nowhere, but urgent, scrambling, his small body practically vibrating. He runs to me, up my leg to my shoulder, and grabs my jaw in both paws to point my face directly at the trees.
His chittering is insistent.
“Okay,” I say. “I hear you.”
He drops back down to the ground and runs toward the tree line, then stops and looks back at us.
I get to my feet.
Nash is already setting his coffee aside to follow.
Echo leads us northeast, away from camp, away from the supply route, up a gradual slope through dense pines and brush.
He moves fast; faster even than his usual theft-oriented pace.
But I follow as best I can, and Nash follows me, and neither of us speaks because the stillness of this part of the woods is already telling me something, and I can’t help but listen.
The smell hits me first.
I stop walking.
Nash stops behind me, and I know he’s registering what I am.
Echo is sitting at the base of a pine twenty feet ahead, wringing his jewelry-thieving hands.
A lump sits half-buried in a pile of leaves between us.
I make myself walk forward.
She’s at the base of the tree. Arranged there. Not the chaotic evidence of a fight but something more deliberate. The worst part is that I know exactly who it is even through the bruises and swelling.
Lena Voss.
She’s wearing a grey jacket with silver buttons.
Three of them are missing.
I stand there, looking at her, for a long moment. The trees are unmoving. The morning light comes through in cold shafts and lands wrong on everything.
Another woman, I think. Another woman who grew up in the shadow of power-hungry men with nowhere safe to land.
She’d come to us because she thought we were the safe option. The new pack. The better leadership.
And some broken, guilty part of me thinks we failed her.
“Mia.” Nash’s voice is quiet. He’s beside me. I don’t know when he moved, but he’s here. Not touching me. Just…present.
“It’s one of the defectors,” I say. My voice sounds like someone else’s. Flat. Factual. The part of me that shuts down in order to function already pulling the levers. “Lena Voss.”
Nash looks at the buttons in his hand. The ones Echo has been bringing him since we arrived. He looks at Echo. Looks back at me with an expression that tells me he’s made the same calculation I just made.
“He’s been bringing them to us,” I say.
“Since we first got here,” he says grimly.
“He was trying to tell us.”
Echo makes a small sound. Not his usual commentary. Just acknowledgment. Like even he understands the weight of this moment.
“Why get so worked up now?” Nash asks. “If he found her days ago.”
Without any answers, I crouch beside Lena.
I don’t touch anything because we’ll need to document this properly for evidence’s sake. We'll need to send reports to Lexi and Grey and Camila. We’ll need to do everything correctly and carefully because she deserves that much. But I look at her. I make myself look.
I see you, I think. I’m sorry I didn’t see you sooner.
“She didn’t die here,” Nash says quietly from above me. “She was placed.”
“I know.” I stand. “Which means—”
“Someone was here recently enough to do that.”
The realization moves through me like cold water.
We’ve been sitting on that hillside in the afternoon light, pressed shoulder to shoulder, thinking we were the ones doing the watching.
We weren’t.
“He knew we were here,” I say.
“Yes.”
“This whole time.”
“Yes.”
The word leak sits between us like something physical. Someone in that meeting room told Ramsey we’d come here. Someone who knew the coordinates, the mission, the timeline. Someone close enough to be trusted with all of it.
I’m still processing the full shape of that when I hear it.
Footsteps. Plural. Deliberate. The specific cadence of intruders who want to be heard. Shifters, I realize as my senses go on full alert. Which means they could move silently if they chose to, which means this is a choice, which means it’s a message.
I straighten and stand shoulder to shoulder with Nash as three gray wolves step out of the tree line to the north. I don’t recognize them, but they’re large and menacing.
Then a familiar male in human form steps into the morning light like he’s the star of the show.
Ramsey looks exactly like I remember him and nothing like I remember him simultaneously.
The thick arms, the cropped golden hair, the mouth that used to smirk at everything because he thought life was a game he was winning.
But the smirk is different now. Tighter.
Like something behind it is working very hard to stay amused.
His eyes find mine immediately.
“Mia,” he says. Almost warm. Almost the Ramsey I used to know. “You look good.”
“Ramsey.” I keep my voice level. “You look like someone I used to respect.”
Something flickers across his face. Old Ramsey would have laughed at that. This Ramsey just files it away for future ammunition.
His gaze moves to Nash. It’s a slow assessment; the kind of look that is meant to diminish a man. But Nash doesn’t shrink.
“Nash Cross,” Ramsey says. “In the company of my enemy.”
Ramsey looks back at me. Something in his expression shifts almost imperceptibly; a recalibration. Whatever he sees here, he’s already decided what to do with it.
“You know what they say. The enemy of my enemy…” Nash doesn’t bother to finish the phrase.
Ramsey’s eyes narrow, but it’s aimed at me. “You’re a long way from home.”
“So are you,” I tell him.
His smirk returns—like he knows I’m fishing for where he’s been staying. “I have many homes these days.”
He steps toward us.
Nash presses closer to my side.
Ramsey’s wolves snarl, but they hold their positions.
“I heard you were looking for me,” he says.
I toss out a smirk. “We followed the smell of rot and shit, and it led us straight to you, stronzo.”
The almost-warmth in his expression cools by a degree. “You always did have a mouth on you.”
“You always did hate that about me.”
“I loved it about you,” he says, and for a second, I can hear the truth of it underneath the bitterness, the old Ramsey who used to laugh at my Italian profanity and tell me I was the only person in the pack who made Grey work for his position as our leader. “That’s why I want you on my side.”
“I know why you want me,” I say. “The answer is the same as it was on the phone.”
“You haven’t seen what I’ve built yet.”
“I’ve seen what you’ve destroyed.” I look deliberately at Lena Voss at the base of the tree. Then back at him.
His jaw tightens. The first crack in the control. “That was unfortunate.”
“She wasn’t part of this.”
“She made the choice.”
“She was scared,” I say, and my voice comes out harder than I intend. “She was a young woman in a pack she didn’t fully know yet, who got targeted by someone who knew exactly how to spot the vulnerable ones.”
“Not vulnerable enough. The bitch came all the way out here and then got cold feet. Refused to give me anything.”
“And then when she changed her mind, you—” I stop.
Ramsey looks at me for a moment. Something behind his eyes that might be regret or at least the shadow of it flashes quickly before it’s gone again.
“War has casualties,” he says.
“You’re disgusting.”
He flinches but otherwise ignores the slam. His voice even, he says, “You want to protect people like her? Do it from a position where you actually have the power to.”
Now it’s my turn to flinch. We both know I’ve spent my life protecting people like her. “I have power.”
His gaze flicks pointedly to Nash as he says, “You have proximity to power. It’s not the same thing, and you know it.”
The words land because he knows exactly where to aim them. He always did. Ten years of watching me fight for a seat at a table that kept adding chairs for everyone else but me. He has that whole history, and he’s using every inch of it as ammunition now.
“Grey gave me a seat at the head of his table,” I say.
“Grey gave you a job,” Ramsey says. “I’m offering you a throne.”
“I don’t want a throne. I want people like Lena Voss to stop ending up dead in a pile of leaves.” I hold his gaze. “And you can’t give me that. You’re the reason she’s there.”
The bitterness breaks through fully then.
Just for a second, just a flash of the old wound underneath all the control.
“My whole life, I waited for this pack to be something worth dying for,” he says, low and furious and raw in a way I haven’t heard before.
“I waited for Grey to come back and be who he was supposed to be. I waited for the city to change. And instead, I got exactly what I always got: left behind while better-connected wolves moved up and the rest of us—”
He stops, and I know he’s thinking about his father. The way Franco shot him in front of all the generals. For nothing except his own ego and entertainment.
“Ramsey.” My voice is quieter now. Because I can hear him. The real him, under all of it. Not just rage. Grief. “I know you’re angry. I know what your father’s death did to you. I know what it felt like to be overlooked and dismissed and—”
“Don’t,” he says sharply. “Do not patronize me.”
“I’m not patronizing you. I’m telling you I understand. And I’m telling you that what you’re doing with your anger is going to destroy you.” I pause and then add softly, “I don’t want that.”
For exactly one second, something in his face goes young and lost.
Then it closes.
In its place is a ripple that brings a new awareness. His wolf is stronger than I remember. More dominant.
An alpha but… wrong somehow. Chaotic and unsettled. My wolf doesn’t trust it—or him. Nash is right. Ramsey took the serum; I know that without even needing to ask. Somehow, he muted it when he first walked up, but he’s not bothering to hide it anymore.
“Last chance, Mia,” he says. Quiet. Back to clinical. “Join me, or become a liability I can’t afford.”
“My answer hasn’t changed,” I say.
A sinister chill settles on his face then. And in his blue eyes, there’s a glacierlike coldness. “So be it.”
The three wolves at Ramsey’s back stir restlessly, and I brace for an attack. Because this is it. I’ve finally refused Ramsey, and now he’ll follow through on his threat to destroy me for it.
Then Nash moves.
Not aggressively. He simply steps forward and to the left, putting himself between Ramsey and me.
“We’re done here,” Nash says. His voice is completely level. “You’ve made your offer. She’s declined. Just as I did. If you’d like to discuss terms of your surrender to the Giovanni pack, I'm available for that conversation. Otherwise—”
“Otherwise,” Ramsey agrees, almost pleasantly. He takes one step back. Then another. His wolves mirror him. “I’ll be in touch, Mia. One way or another. Your alphas won’t be safe in their castle much longer.”
He turns and walks back into the trees.
His wolves follow.
Nash moves like he’s going to chase after them, but I grab his hand, holding him here with me. My heart slams against my ribs. It’s four against two. And even though I’d like to think I could put Ramsey in the dirt all by myself, now’s not the time.
Not with Lena lying in the leaves.
Instead, we watch them go until the forest swallows them like they were never there.