66. Sam
Chapter sixty-six
Sam
I’d been fighting for forty-three minutes since the drones rose, and I knew the exact number because my wolf had been counting every one of them.
Not consciously. He didn’t have a watch.
But somewhere in the animal part of my brain, a clock was running, ticking off the seconds since artificial howls had ripped our formation apart, since my people started dying for sounds that weren’t real, since the war we’d been winning became a war we were surviving.
Forty-three minutes. Felt like forty-three years.
The bridge was a slaughterhouse.
We’d fortified our end of the main crossing the way Derek’s plan dictated: sandbags and rubble packed behind the stone parapets, firing positions dug into the bank on either side of the approach.
The bridge itself was a kill zone. Kane’s forces needed it intact to get an army across the Coldbrook, and we needed it intact because a demolished bridge wouldn’t stop soldiers with boats and ropes.
It would just scatter them across a dozen crossing points we couldn’t all cover.
So the bridge stayed, but the only way across it was through us.
Early on, that hadn’t been enough. Kane’s soldiers had tried the obvious play first: suppress from the far bank, pin us in cover, walk the bridge under fire. Rifles, grenades, incendiaries lobbed at our positions. Standard doctrine. It should have worked.
Esme’s wards stopped it.
She’d anchored them to the bridge stones, shimmering barriers at each chokepoint that ate bullets and swallowed shrapnel before it reached us.
Kane’s people had burned through a staggering amount of ammunition learning that lesson.
After the first fifteen minutes, they’d stopped wasting rounds on a wall they couldn’t see and switched to wave assaults instead, sending soldiers across the bridge in disciplined rushes, trying to overwhelm us at close quarters.
Which was exactly what Derek wanted.
Three abreast, bodies piling up at the bridge’s edge.
At close quarters, a wolf with enhanced speed and strength against a human in tactical gear wasn’t a fair fight.
It wasn’t supposed to be. Let the wards strip them of their ranged advantage.
Let the bridge strip them of their numbers. Let our wolves do what wolves do best.
It had been working. Right up until Derek’s voice came through my earpiece six minutes ago with three words that changed everything entirely.
Esme’s down.
Her wards in the western sectors had collapsed when her magic blew.
The bridge wards were still holding—she’d anchored them separately, built them to sustain without her—but we didn’t know how long that would last. Five minutes?
Ten? Without Esme to maintain them, they were a battery with no charger, burning through whatever reserves she’d stored in the stone.
And Kane’s soldiers were still throwing themselves at the bridge in wave assaults, still treating our position like a close-quarters problem, because the last time they’d tested the wards with bullets, the bullets had died.
Nobody on the far bank had thought to test them again.
Yet.
Every minute they didn’t check was a minute we survived.
Every wave assault they sent across the bridge, instead of a volley of bullets, was another group of soldiers we could put down because we held the advantage.
It was a race; kill enough of them, hold long enough, before some sharp-eyed officer on the far bank thought to put a round through the space where the ward used to be and watched it sail clean through.
When that happened, we were dead. Every wolf behind these parapets, exposed to suppressive fire with no magic left to stop it.
Don’t think about it. Fight the one in front of you. Then the next one.
I caught the next one with a fist to the throat, the two-inch gap between chin guard and chest plate that no tactical gear in the world covers properly.
His windpipe compressed under my knuckles, and he folded, both hands going to his neck, and I drove my knee up into his face on the way down.
Felt the nose go through the helmet’s open visor.
He hit the stone, choking on blood, and I turned to scan the line.
Two Shifters to my left had their hands clamped over their ears, weapons abandoned, the drone-spell eating their concentration, pulling them toward phantom distress calls that screamed of Packmates dying.
The gray-muzzled veteran, Oscar, who’d held my right flank for the last twenty minutes, was gone.
I didn’t know where. Whether he’d broken or been pulled or died.
I pushed calming pheromones outward. Steady. Hold. Stay. It was the one trick I had that could talk a panicking wolf off the ledge without a single word.
It worked. On the wolves closest to me, it always worked. Their breathing slowed. Their eyes cleared. One woman set her feet and drove back the attacker who’d been about to gut her.
But the pheromones had a range, and the line stretched further than I could reach, and beyond my influence, wolves were still scattering. Running toward fake distress calls. Running into Kane’s kill zones.
Forty-four minutes.
“Sam, eastern ridge, new contacts. Third wave.” Derek’s voice through my earpiece. “Estimate thirty. Heavier armor than the first two pushes.”
“Wonderful. I was starting to think Kane didn’t take us seriously.”
Mason’s voice cut in from the southern ford. “Two more casualties here. Non-fatal. I’m pulling them to the fallback point. Southern line’s thin but holding.”
“Ryan?” I asked.
A growl came through the comm. Still in True Wolf form, then. Mai with him, I could hear her in the background issuing commands.
Forty-four minutes of holding the line, and we were still here. Battered, bleeding, running on fumes and stubbornness and wards that might fail any second, but here.
Through the bond, I felt Annabella—distant, tangled in something vast and desperate.
She was fighting too, somewhere in the western sectors, and the effort it was costing her bled through our connection in waves of exhaustion and fierce concentration.
My wolf whined. Wanted to run to her. I told him to shut up and hold his position.
She’s fine. She’s handling it.
I had to believe that, because the alternative was abandoning this bridge, and if the eastern line fell, Kane’s forces would take the territory.
That’s when Talia Johnson appeared at my shoulder like she’d been delivered by a particularly well-dressed courier service.
“Sam Shaw,” her voice carried that specific Talia Johnson quality—the one that said, “I am aware there is a war happening, and I have decided it is secondary to this conversation.” “Your pheromone output is destabilizing.”
I caught an incoming attacker by the front of his vest, used his momentum to swing him into the railing, and felt something in his collarbone give. “Little busy, Talia.”
“Your distress is contaminating your calming broadcast. The wolves within your radius are receiving conflicting signals—reassurance layered over fear. It’s making them more disoriented, not less.
” She drove the heel of her hand into a soldier’s temple.
The man fell, and she stepped over him without looking down.
“Control your emotional state or stop broadcasting entirely.”
She was right. I hated that she was right.
“Thanks for the performance review.” I adjusted, pulling my pheromones back to a tighter radius, concentrating on calm-steady-hold instead of the ragged mess I’d been throwing out. The wolves nearest me responded immediately; steadier, more focused. “Anything else, or can I get back to the fight?”
“Those from the Council I managed to round up are holding the southern bank. Bethany Rose is coordinating our contingent with your brother’s tactical plan.
” Talia blocked a strike from a soldier who’d come at her from the left.
Smooth, economical, the kind of combat training that said she’d been doing this long before she started wearing pantsuits.
Then the third wave hit the bridge, and there was no more time for talking.
I knew before comms told me.
It hit the wolves around me first. A ripple that moved through the fighters on the bridge like a shockwave, heads lifting, bodies flinching, a low sound rising from a dozen throats at once.
Not a howl. Something worse. The involuntary keen of wolves feeling a thread in their Pack bond snap.
Another name gone from the web. Another heartbeat that had been there a second ago and wasn’t anymore.
The fighters absorbed it. They’d been absorbing it all morning, every death on the field registering as another severed thread, another absence in the network that connected them.
One more loss in a battle full of them. They flinched, and they kept fighting, because that’s what wolves did when the Pack was at war.
You grieved later. If there was a later.
Then the mate bond detonated.
Annabella’s grief came through, and I staggered.
Lost my grip on the soldier I’d been fighting, and he twisted free.
I didn’t care because the world had narrowed to the bond and the grief pouring through it.
My wolf threw himself against my control, every protective instinct firing at once, screaming at me to run, to find her, to put myself between whatever had just broken something inside her.
Who? Who did she lose?
The soldier came back at me with a knife. Talia intercepted, caught his wrist, and drove him sideways off the bridge. She didn’t ask if I was alright. She just covered my position while my body remembered how to move.
I got myself together. Locked the grief down—not mine, can’t feel it right now, can’t afford it—and forced my hands to work and my legs to move and my brain to think.
Derek’s voice in my ear. “We’ve lost Carlito. Western line’s gone.”
Carlito.
Fuck!
“Derek, where’s Annabella?”