10 Tommy
The tunnel spat us out into open night and I nearly went down in the loose scree.
My feet hit a different world—the whole black bowl of the ravine opening above me with stars jammed into it edge to edge—and the air that came off the mountain went into my lungs like the first water after a burn.
Pine pitch. Wet rock. The clean dry smell of a forest halfway through fire season, holding its breath for fall.
After five days of breathing lavender pumped through a vent to cover the smell of what they did down there, it tasted like getting my body back.
Before I carried her down the slope, I looked back.
The compound sat high on the ridge, its soft-focus lighting and hand-stacked stone walls glowing like a five-star spa against the dark.
But down at the sub-basement level, a single reinforced window was lit with an unearthly, weeping blue light.
I could feel the cold wrongness of it radiating through the trees, a heavy, sick pressure that smelled of cracked bone and the metallic tang of something ruined.
The Inner Circle was in there. The beautiful aesthetic of the wellness center above was nothing but a thin coat of paint over a slaughterhouse.
Kaia burned against my chest. She’d gone quiet, her face slack in the hollow of my throat, her pulse going like a trapped bird where her temple pressed my collarbone, and every fourth breath she made that small wet sound again and the sound put a hook in me and dragged.
Ahead, the dormants we’d freed were already running for the lights.
Headlights. Three sets, four, the high amber rack of the crew buggy and the low wide beams of the pickups, all of them angled down into the mouth of the spillway like a landing strip.
But only three men from my crew stood in the glare.
Brann, Santos, Levi. The mated wolves.
The only ones who could handle fifty dormant women without their inner wolves snapping their leashes.
Brann stood at the near buggy, hauling a sobbing woman up over the wheel well with both hands, his deep voice carrying over the rumble of the engine: “You’re safe now.
Step up, I’ve got you.” Santos waved the next three in, his movements calm and rhythmic: “Watch your step on the tailboard. Go on inside, we have blankets.” Levi stood at the tree line with his arms full of another, cradling a dormant who couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds.
The rest of the pack—the unmated ones, including Reed, Finn, and Beto—were pushed back into the deep shadows of the pines, completely out of sight.
Through the pack link, Reed’s voice bellowed, loud and harsh, cutting through the mental static: Containment! Keep your distance! Nobody steps out of the shadows!
I could feel the brutal, agonizing push and pull of the rest of the crew vibrating through the link.
They were pacing in the dark, their wolves whining, clawing to get closer.
Fifty dormant women—a huge pool of potential mates the Order had stolen from our kind—were walking out of a hole in the ground in front of a pack that had spent too many years alone.
The unmated wolves were starved, yearning, desperate to know if their fated female was in that group.
But they couldn’t risk getting close. If one of their mates was in that crowd, their presence could trigger her catastrophic Heat before she was safe. It could kill her.
A painful whine echoed through the woods. Finn.
Shut it down! Reed barked through the link, cutting the sound off instantly. Maintain discipline! We are hotshots, not wild animals. We do this by the book.
Then Reed’s voice targeted me directly down the link, sharp as a command:
Tommy. Report. Where the hell are you?
Coming out now, I sent back through the link, carrying Kaia as my legs burned.
Stay clear of the main staging, Reed commanded. The mated guys will handle the trucks. The rest of us are staying back.
I hurried past the buggies, keeping my eyes down, and carried Kaia straight toward the dark wall of the forest where Reed was waiting.
I wanted to laugh. The relief came up that fast and that stupid, the way it always did at the worst moments, the pressure in my chest looking for the absurd door out. We did it. We actually got them out.
I crossed the tree line, stepping into the shadow where Reed stood, and the physical distance between us closed as I came face-to-face with my alpha.
Reed turned first.
I saw it happen on his face—the welcome, the relief, Tommy, you made it, you crazy bastard, all of it forming up in his eyes—and then his nostrils flared and the welcome died.
He gagged.
Reed Vásquez, who’d pulled charred bodies out of structure fires without flinching, who I’d watched fight Thalakor without so much as wrinkling his nose, took one breath of the woman in my arms and his head snapped sideways like he’d been hit, his hand coming up over his mouth and his lip peeling back off his teeth.
I knew what he smelled. I’d been buried in it for an hour and gone nose-blind, but I knew.
The burn of suppressant cooking out of her all at once.
Worse than what the other dormants smelled like.
A hot chemical reek like wiring left to scorch in a wall.
Under it the wrongness of her broken biology eating itself, the rot of a system tearing down a lifetime of poison meant to suppress an active wolf—not a dormant.
And over all of it, fresh and bright and unmistakable to anybody with a wolf in their chest—Warden Miller’s blood, dried brown to her wrists and crusted in the creases of the hands she’d folded against me like a prayer.
To me she smelled like the only thing in the world. To them she smelled like the enemy bleeding out the enemy.
The hackles went up across the whole tree line. In the shadows, Finn found the small of his back where he kept his knife. Santos set the woman he was holding down too fast and stepped clear of the buggy. Beto stopped counting.
“Tommy.” Reed’s voice came out low and flat, the bottom register, the one that meant the joking was over for everybody.
His eyes were fixed on Kaia—not on her face, not on the wreck of her, but on the gray rags of an Order uniform and the blood and the gold I could see he’d caught flickering under her lashes. “What is that?”
Not who. What.
“Reed—”
“That’s a Steward.” He took a step toward us and the pack flowed with him in the dark, a half-step, an instinct, the formation tightening. “That’s one of theirs and it’s covered in one of theirs and you’re carrying it out of a hole at a dead run.” His chin dropped. “Put it down.”
The word it went into me like a splinter under the nail.
No. The wolf came up the back of my throat so fast I tasted copper. No. No. Mate. MATE. He does not get to—
“She’s not—” My arms locked. I felt my own grip crank down around her and made myself ease it before I hurt her.
She stirred against me and burrowed her flushed face deeper into my neck, and the trust in that, the helpless animal trust of my mate, lit something in me that I’d kept banked my whole life.
“Reed. Listen to me. She got us out. She opened the door. She killed the Warden who was going to crack me open on a table downstairs—that blood, that’s not hers, that’s the guy who put a hex-patch on my neck and told me they don’t waste an opportunity—”
“I don’t care whose blood it is.” Reed’s hand came out, palm down, the calm-the-crew gesture, except his voice had gone to gravel and his own eyes were bleeding amber at the edges.
“I care that it stinks of that place and it’s twitching in your arms and half this crew has a knife out on instinct.
Set her down, step back, and let me figure out what walked out of that compound before she wakes up and does to one of us what she did to him. ”
Behind him, nobody moved to argue.
That was the part that hollowed me out.
Not Reed—Reed was doing his job, he was reading the only data his nose would give him and trying to keep his people breathing. It was the rest of them. My pack. Standing in the headlights looking at the other half of my soul like she was something that needed to be put down before it bit.
And not one of them could smell what I smelled, and there was no joke in the world fast enough to fix the distance between what they saw and what was true.
So I stopped reaching for one.
I felt it go. The loose shoulders, the ready grin, the whole bright deflecting costume I’d worn so long I’d half-forgotten there was anybody underneath it—Thomas from California, Tommy who keeps the crew laughing, the guy who finds the absurd angle and resets the room.
It slid off me into the mud at the tunnel mouth and I let it lie there.
Now, the wolf said. Not a snarl. A command. Now we are the other thing. Now we are the shadow.
I’d spent years terrified of this. My family wasn’t the kind of royalty that wore gold crowns and sat on velvet cushions.
We were the Midnight Wolves—the designated shadow-keepers of the First Pack, the royal spies and hidden blades who did the work the King couldn’t put his name to.
My grandmother had folded my hands around the title like she was handing me a live coal, warning me that a Midnight Wolf has no home but the dark, no truth but the mission.
I hated it. I hated the stiff, joyless faces of the ancestors in the old photographs, men and women who had spent their lives playing the fool in public while serving as executioners in the dead of night.
So I ran. I buried the royal bloodline under deflection, a California grin, and a hotshot’s yellow Nomex shirt. I wanted to fight fires in the bright, screaming open, not hunt monsters in the midnight shadows.
But the compound had demanded the spy. The Midnight Wolf had gone in, played the docile dormant, mapped the corridors, and left a dead Warden on the floor.
And now my secret mate was burning up in my arms, and it was time to stop hiding.