20 Avaline
I rested my shoulder against the doorframe, my palm flat against the splintered pine casing.
The main room was packed.
More than two dozen wolves filled the living room and kitchen.
The pressure from their auras hit my chest before I took a single step into the room. The combined territorial gravity of multiple mated pairs radiating heat like river boulders baked under a high-summer sun.
Reed’s hand settled against the air at the small of my back. He dared not touch me and I dare not let him. Not with the ache still between my legs.
Walk tall, Scribe, my White Wolf growled, pacing the floor of my chest, her phantom fur bristling against my ribs. Let these alphas smell the Founding fire on our skin. We bow to no one.
We’re not here to conquer them, I answered silently, taking a steady breath. We’re here to fight with them.
I pushed off the doorframe and stepped into the room.
Every person in the cabin gave off a distinct, unfiltered scent signature.
Rich loam and green needles. Heavy woodsmoke.
The thick, dusty scent of dry dirt right before a thunderstorm.
Iron shavings and clean sweat. Cutting across all of it, tangled through every pair, moved the deep, impossible signature of completed bonds.
The giant by the stone fireplace—dark-skinned, his forearms webbed in thick, ragged scar tissue where he had clearly thrown himself into teeth and fire—froze with a heavy poker in his grip.
At the kitchen island, a lean man paused with a brass casing pinched between his fingertips.
Two low murmurs by the windows died instantly.
Nobody stepped toward me. Nobody stepped back.
“The fever is banked,” Reed said behind me. His voice was low, stripped of pretense, the tone of a man who had carried a boulder up a ridge and finally let it drop. “For now.”
A single, ragged exhale rippled through the room.
A woman pushed away from the kitchen counter and walked straight toward me. Mid-thirties, brown skin, silver bands glinting across her knuckles, carrying the sharp, no-nonsense carriage of a trauma surgeon who had called times of death and stopped caring about bedside manners.
Nadia.
She jabbed a blunt finger toward my sternum. “Scale of one to ten. One is normal, ten is back in the volcano.”
“Six.”
Nadia held my gaze for another beat, her jaw tight.
“Six keeps you on your feet. Eat half a loaf of bread before this briefing is over or I will shove a ration bar down your throat in front of everyone.” She pivoted back toward the stove.
“Coffee is on the counter. Maren spiked it with dried root compound, so don’t expect it to taste right. ”
Beside the counter, an older woman with silver-streaked hair and skin lined like cured leather lifted two fingers from her mug.
Her other hand never stopped moving, tracing slow, intricate circles in the air that made the morning light warp and shimmer along the windowpanes.
She was holding the perimeter wards with her bare knuckles, running on fumes.
She caught my stare and narrowed her eyes with unmistakable meaning: I’m keeping us alive. Don’t make it weird.
I moved past her, trailing my fingers along the scarred back of a leather armchair.
The man sitting in it leaned forward, elbows on his knees, broad-shouldered and watchful, dark eyes tracking my gait with effortless lethal calm. Perched on the arm of his chair, a woman tightened her grip on a chipped ceramic mug as I brushed past.
My gaze dropped instantly to the loose linen of her shirt.
Beneath the fabric, her belly was rounded in a distinct, unmistakable swell.
The man’s broad hand rested possessively over the curve, his thumb stroking a slow, protective circle over the life growing inside her.
Her scent rolled off her in a warm tide of rich earth, crushed pine, and the sweet, milky cadence of a developing pup.
A pup... the wolf whined, her claws digging a sharp ache into my heart. She carries her mate’s blood. Where are our pups? Where is our den?
Stolen in the dark, I told her, my throat tightening as a sudden, sharp pang seized behind my ribs. We take our future back today.
The woman looked up into my face. A spark flared behind her dark eyes—a sudden recognition that had everything to do with surviving the same cage.
She didn’t speak. Neither did I.
“Santos. Nell,” Reed supplied quietly.
Santos offered a slow, measuring nod. Nell’s chin dipped, her eyes dropping to the bare pulse point in my neck where the mating bite should have been, but wasn’t, before rising back to mine. Whatever judgment she passed, she kept behind her teeth.
Near the fireplace, the giant shifted his weight, the floorboards groaning under his heavy boots. Scent rolled off him in a dry wave. He stood like a stone pillar, the space around him warping under the sheer density of his presence.
The woman pressed against his ribs had pale skin, striking gold irises, and the bone-deep stillness of someone who had learned that motion drew violence.
Her soft knitted sweater was pushed tight against a gentle, early curve at her waist. She was starting to show, her fingers resting unconsciously over her lower abdomen.
“Levi,” Reed said. “And Genny.”
Levi bowed his head once. A minute gesture, but it landed with the finality of an iron gate dropping.
Genny met my eyes across Levi’s thick forearm.
Her gaze dropped to my chest, zeroing in on the faint, incandescent heat shimmering beneath my skin.
She didn’t offer a polite smile. She simply gave me a slow, solemn nod—the quiet acknowledgment of a woman who had also clawed her way out of a laboratory, found her mate, and was now carrying tomorrow beneath her ribs.
Another one, the wolf snarled, a bitter, envious fire curling in her belly. They built tomorrow while we froze in a cellar. It burns.
Direct the fire where it belongs, I commanded her, holding my chin high. Not at our sisters. At the butchers.
At the kitchen island, the lean man finally seated the brass round into the magazine with a sharp, metallic clack. His eyes lifted, and he smiled. Beside him, a woman stood with hands folded neatly over the edge of the counter.
She wasn’t showing yet, but as I looked at her, the early signs were unmistakable. A luminous golden glow radiated from her skin, and her scent carried that subtle, unmistakable shift—sweet, rich, nascent life humming quietly in her blood.
“Tommy,” Reed said. “Kaia.”
I shook my head once when Kaia lifted a blackened coffee pot in offering. My blood was already running hot enough without caffeine. Kaia set the pot back onto the iron trivet with a faint clink. Tommy exchanged a long, heavy look with Reed.
“Good,” Tommy muttered, snapping a fresh magazine into his sidearm before setting it on the table.
At the far end of the long wooden dining table stood Brann.
The knot between my shoulder blades eased a fraction at the sight of a familiar face. He looked as controlled and unyielding as he had yesterday in the doorway: a leader carrying the fate of an entire species without letting his hands shake.
Beside him stood the woman who anchored him.
She was the most heavily pregnant woman in the room—her belly huge, high, and round beneath her dark tunic, looking as though she were due any day. She kept one palm anchored over the massive curve, her knuckles shifting as the royal Sovereign pup kicked hard against her skin.
“Brann,” Reed said. “And Wren.”
Wren pulled out a heavy wooden chair beside her and angled it toward me. No commands, no grand gestures—just a deliberate space cleared at the table by someone who knew what it was like to walk into a room full of wolves as an outsider.
The breath backed up in my throat.
Every single woman in this room was carrying a pup.
Twenty years! my wolf howled in silent, agonizing fury, throwing her head back in the dark of my mind. Twenty years without the moon! Without four paws in the dirt! I want to run! I want the shift!
Hold the line, I ordered, my fingers digging into the back of the oak chair until the wood creaked under my grip. We take the Caldera, we finish the bond, and then we run.
But the sheer, staggering weight of what had been stolen from me slammed into my chest with the force of an avalanche.
Twenty years of golden sunshine I had never felt on my skin.
Twenty years of running through pine forests on four legs, of tasting the mountain wind, of answering the moon’s call in the wild.
Wolf shifters live for centuries, I reminded myself fiercely. We have time. We have lifetimes ahead of us.
The rational thought did nothing to soothe the hollow in my core.
I was forty years old and I had never completed my First Shift.
My White Wolf was awake inside my marrow, but she was still locked behind the barrier of an unconsummated bond.
I had no mating bite on my throat. I had no seed in my womb.
I was standing in a room full of mothers and mates, shivering with the baseline fever of an ungrounded Heat, fighting back envy that made my teeth ache.
I clamped my jaw shut and forced the Scribe’s cold discipline over the pain. I couldn’t afford grief today. Not when a thousand dormant sisters were counting on us to break their cages.
In the center of the table, over a cluster of marked maps, stood the final pair.
The man was broad, his features settled into a hardened mask of operational focus.
His fingers were laced tightly with those of his mate.
She, too, carried that distinct, luminous glow of early pregnancy, her scent rich with the secret bloom of new life beneath her grief.
She stared at two empty chairs at the far corner of the table, her expression stark with sorrow she refused to hide or apologize for.
“Finn,” Reed said. “And Sloane.”
Finn met my eyes and offered a curt, formal nod.