25 Kaia
The retreat was burning, and I could not stop watching it.
We’d come up the eastern fire road far enough that the whole compound lay spread out below us, and from here the buildings I’d lived inside were going up one wing at a time, orange light pulsing out through the windows where lavender oil had burned in a hundred braziers, the roofline already sagging where the south wall had finally let go.
The sorting bay. Dormitory B. The welcome studio where I’d circled my own cuff in the dark when the static got loud.
All of it catching, all of it folding inward, all of it turning to ash on the cold black air.
Purifying ash, some old part of me wanted to call it, reaching for the doctrine even now—fire governs trial, purification, renewal—and I let the phrase come and then I let it go, because it wasn’t the Order’s words anymore. It was just true.
The cage was burning and I was standing on a mountain in my mate’s scorched shirt watching the place that built me come apart, and the only thing holding me to the earth—
Mate.
Tommy hadn’t said anything in a while.
The man had narrated a windowless van ride until a stranger wept.
He’d talked his way through a fortress, through a basement, through the end of the world.
And now, when there was so much air between us that he could have filled it with a hundred jokes about the architecture or the smoke or the truly heroic ugliness of my crying, he’d gone quiet, and he’d stayed quiet.
He was simply there. A banked fire, tended, giving back exactly as much heat as I could take and not one degree more.
I leaned the smallest amount into the brush of his arm.
He felt it. I knew because the low sound started up in his chest, a rumble I felt more than heard. It threaded down the open bond between us, a golden line connecting our minds, and settled the worst of the shaking in my hands.
I’ve got you, his voice slid into my mind, deep and warm and thrumming with the vibration of that rumble. I’m right here. Just breathe, sweetheart.
Underneath his voice, I felt the sheer, overwhelming pressure of his inner wolf pressing against mine, a dark shape circling restlessly, projecting a single, thundering demand into the bond: Protect mate. Keep safe. Mine.
Mine, my own wolf purred back, leaning into the warmth of him. Safe here. Found.
I’m breathing, I told him through the bond, marveling at how easily the thought transferred. Thank you.
I made myself turn from the fire and look at who we’d saved, because the Steward in me—the part I was learning I got to keep and re-aim—needed to count.
Two hundred and fifty. More than that when including the staff who had listened to my intercom message.
They were all down there now on the wide gravel turnaround below the ridge, wrapped in those crinkling shock blankets that threw back the headlights in sheets.
More than two hundred and fifty people in white cotton and silver foil, many of them dormants, some just human but unlucky enough to get caught in this mess, sitting in the dirt under the open sky for the first time in months or years, breathing free air.
The operation around them was enormous and it was strange.
There were more wolves on this mountain than I had ever imagined existed.
Not just Tommy’s pack—the soot-streaked hotshots I’d watched come up like vengeance with a payroll—but others, dozens of others, allied packs that had answered some call I hadn’t heard, ranged out across the slope in loose disciplined knots.
And between them and the huddled dormants ran a line.
A ward line.
I could see it the way I could now see most things, a faint disturbance in the air, a seam, and along it the witch and a handful of others had set small buried jars that made my new skin prickle when my attention crossed them.
And only certain wolves were allowed past it.
I watched the protocol work itself out. Women. The female wolves moved freely through the sea of blankets, crouching, checking, pressing water bottles into shaking hands.
And the men—only certain men crossed.
Brann. The big quiet one, Levi, with his careful gentleness. Santos. Other males from other packs who must already be mated. They could walk through and not set off any dormant’s catastrophic Heat against her will.
The rest of the wolves held the outer line.
And the outer line was suffering.
I’d spent my whole life learning to read a body for the thing it was hiding, and the unmated wolves on that perimeter were hiding the same thing, all of them, and none of them well.
There was a young one—Tommy called him Beto—pacing a circle so tight it was barely a circle at all, six steps and a turn and six steps back, his head up, his nostrils working at the wind coming down off the slope.
Reading scent. Reading the two hundred and fifty unclaimed women breathing in the dark below him.
Dozens of allied wolves did the same dance.
It came off all of them in a wave I could feel against my skin. A low restless hum. A phantom ache.
Their mates might be down there. Right there. Wrapped in foil, weeping into the night—and Reed’s and Brann’s orders combined were the only things holding them back.
I understood it now from the inside. I’d been the static in someone’s blood. I’d been the door they couldn’t stop knocking on. And now I watched these enormous dangerous men hold a line against their own bodies for the sake of frightened strangers.
“They can’t go in,” I said. My voice came out rough, scraped raw from the crying I’d done into Tommy’s shirt. “Any of them. Can they?”
“No.” Tommy’s rumble had quieted. He followed my eyes down the line.
“Not until the women are stabilized and moved and Nadia clears the ward. They’ll be given the choice to see who wants to know if their mate could be—out there.
No dormant will be forced against her will.
” He was quiet a beat. “Reed’s order. Hardest one he’s given in a while, and they’re all keeping it, and it’s eating them alive.
That’s the pack you married into, sweetheart.
Bunch of guys standing in the cold not breathing too deep on purpose. ”
A shiver of heat ran down my spine.
I didn’t correct the married into. I found I didn’t want to.
*\*\*\*/*/*/*
Eli was at the command truck.
I saw him before he saw me—him and Livia and Kyle and Marisol, the four of them clustered against the truck’s front wheel well, blankets around their shoulders, Cora’s chair parked beside them with Cora in it gripping a paper cup of something steaming.
I crossed to them with Tommy a half step behind me, close, not touching, the heat of him a constant fact at my back.
Eli looked up.
I watched him take it in—the soot, the dried blood I hadn’t cleaned off my chin, the man’s shirt swallowing me. Now he looked at me with the gold long gone from my eyes and the wolf folded quiet inside me. His face did something complicated and young and unbearably trusting.
“Steward,” he started, and then stopped, because the word didn’t fit anymore and he knew it.
“Kaia,” I said. “Just Kaia. There’s no Steward, Eli. There never really was. There was just me, lying to you to keep you alive, and I’m sorry for the lying and I’m not sorry you’re alive.”
His chin crumpled. Livia’s hand found his shoulder.
“Are they going to hurt us?” Kyle, low, his eyes going to the wolves on the line. “They’re—the things that came through the wall. The eyes. Are we—”
“No.” I said it in the old Steward register before I could stop myself.
“No. They came to take the place apart and get you out. Every one of them up here would walk back into that fire for you and most of them don’t even know your names yet.
That’s—” I searched for it. “That’s what they are.
It’s the opposite of what we were taught a wolf is. ”
The witch arrived at my elbow without my hearing her come, which I was beginning to understand was simply how she moved.
Small, all economy, silver rings stacked to the knuckles, the sleeves of her black dress shoved up and her bare hands smelling of bitter herbs and something green-medicinal that cut clean through the smoke.
She had a cloth in one hand, hand-drawn, gridded with markings I didn’t recognize, and she crouched in front of Cora after asking permission and laid two bare fingers against the woman’s wrist.
“Pulse is fine. You’re not shifting tonight or any night soon.
Your line’s clean dormant, no suppression load I can read.
” She said it flatly, the bluntness itself a kind of mercy—just the truth handed over like a tool.
“You’re going to feel like garbage for about a week while your body figures out it’s safe.
That’s normal. That’s not a relapse and it’s not a punishment, whatever they told you it was. ”
Cora’s eyes filled. Nadia had already moved to Livia’s wrist.
“Your potions worked,” I said.
Nadia’s dark eyes flicked up to me, took inventory in about a second and a half—the blood, the shirt, Tommy at my back—and came back down to her work. She tied off the reading cloth and stood, brushing her hands. “Of course.”
“Your wards. Are they for my people too? People who worked there but didn’t know—”
“They’re under my protection, Kaia. You have my word, for whatever a witch’s word is worth to a wolf. They sleep inside my wards and the first person who tries anything loses a hand.”
“Thank you,” I said, and it came out plain, and small, and entirely mine.
Eli was watching my face. And whatever he saw there—he gave me a nod, a trembling one, full of a trust I had never earned and was going to spend the rest of my life trying to deserve.
I smiled at him.
It felt strange on my face. Like a muscle I’d been forbidden to use.
That was when Finn came off the line.