Chapter 15 At the Enemy Gate
Everett POV
The bridge was longer than I remembered.
I’d crossed it once as a kid, and never since.
Now every step cost something. My boots found ice beneath the blown snow, and I had to plant each one carefully or risk going down, which would have been exactly the kind of entrance I could not afford to make.
An Alpha crawling on his hands and knees toward the enemy gate.
The image alone turned my stomach, though it had been turning for weeks now regardless of what I fed it.
The cold did not help the sickness. It never did.
Sweat froze on my temples before I reached the halfway point, and my hands shook inside my coat pockets badly enough that I kept them balled into fists, which at least gave the tremor somewhere to hide.
I walked west in the thin afternoon light with no insignia on my chest, no escort behind me, and Kurt’s version of the night still ringing in my ears.
Kurt had come back to the lodge at dawn, his right ear torn and crusted dark, his wolves roughed up but walking.
Stood in my kitchen with blood on his neck and told me that West wolves had jumped an East patrol at the south fence.
Told me his men answered under the border orders I’d given.
Told me he’d taken care of it, the way I’d told him to take care of things.
Handle it.
My own words. I’d handed him a blank page and told him to write whatever he wanted on it, and now I was walking across the bridge to read what he’d written.
The West gate waited where the bridge ended.
A heavy timber frame with a steel crossbar, functional and ugly, the kind of thing built to stop trucks rather than impress visitors.
The snowmobile garage sat behind it, and beyond that the lodge, windows catching the low sun. Smoke rose from every chimney.
Dominic Salvi stood at the gate.
He was bigger than I wanted him to be. That was always the problem with Dominic.
In my head he was a regional Alpha with more land than polish, someone I should have been able to outmaneuver with better presentation and sharper politics.
In person, his size dominated the gate. His dark beard, dark eyes, and broken nose made his whole face look harder.
He wore a heavy canvas jacket. I could tell there was a bandage underneath from the careful way he held his left arm against his body to protect an injury that hadn’t finished healing.
That arm placement told me more than Kurt’s entire report.
Shane Tolliver leaned against the gatepost with his arms crossed and his green eyes fixed on me the way a dog watches a coyote approaching a henhouse. The grin and the easy slouch were gone.
I stopped on the road, close enough to speak without shouting.
“I’m here to talk,” I said. “No escort. No weapons. I came to—”
Movement behind them. A figure coming down the slope from the lodge, moving with a hitch in her stride that pulled at something deep behind my ribs.
Liza.
She wore a dark blue patrol jacket, and the place above her heart where a pack patch would sit was bare.
Her black hair was loose over her shoulders, the scar pale against her skin.
She favored her left leg. Each step on it was short and controlled, every part of her stride adjusted around the pain.
The demand I’d rehearsed on the bridge was already forming. Your wolves attacked my patrol. I want the ones responsible, and I want Liza returned to East Valley territory where she belongs.
The words sat in my mouth and tasted like rust.
“What happened to your leg?” I asked instead.
Liza stopped beside Dominic. The bond between them showed in the way they stood without touching. Dominic’s shoulder angled slightly toward her even though his eyes never left me.
“You want to know what happened?” Liza said.
Her voice was level, stripped of anger. “Kurt brought four wolves across the river last night. They tore the fencing apart with their teeth. One of our workers was sheltering in the patrol hut. Abe Hessler. He hid inside and whispered for help on the radio because he could hear them outside.”
The name hit me first. A worker with a name, not an enemy patrol.
“Kurt shifted in front of me,” Liza continued. “He let me see his face before he changed. Then he went for the door. He was going to kill whoever was inside, Everett. He was going to rip that door off its hinges and go through Abe Hessler like he was nothing.”
Shane’s jaw tightened. Dominic said nothing.
“I shifted to stop him,” Liza said. “Shane came in on his snowmobile and held off two of your wolves. Dom came from the tree line and took Kurt down before he could get in.” She gestured at Dominic’s careful arm. “Kurt ripped open his side. Three tears from his armpit to his hip. I saw bone.”
The horror in my gut had nothing to do with the sickness.
“And my leg,” she said, tugging up her left pant leg to expose the stained bandaging around her calf. “Fence wire. Broken and buried in the snow. I tore free to keep fighting.”
The demand died in my throat.
Kurt’s entire version of the night crumbled in the space between Liza’s words and the wound she showed me.
He’d lied. My Beta had walked into my kitchen with blood on his neck and lied to my face, and I had believed him because believing him was easier than looking at what I’d done.
And he could lie to me like that because I had already told the whole pack what Liza was worth.
I heard it then. My own voice, carrying across the ceremonial hall on the night of my ascension.
An Alpha’s Luna cannot be a distraction.
The silence afterward. The way I’d directed every eye in the room to her scar.
I had announced to my pack that Liza Mallory’s face made her unfit to stand beside me, and Kurt had filed that announcement away and used it.
If the Alpha said she was worth nothing, then the people she fought beside were worth nothing.
If her sacrifice counted for nothing, then the boundary she defended was just a fence to be torn down.
“Kurt went past his orders,” I said.
The words came out before I could shape them into something more strategic. Dominic’s dark eyes measured me. Shane’s hostility sharpened.
“And the orders were mine,” I added. “I told him to push patrols to the river. I told him to challenge any West wolf on the East bank, and if they didn’t retreat—” I stopped.
My throat was dry and the sickness was rolling through me in long, ugly waves.
“I told him to handle it. I didn’t set a limit. That’s on me.”
Silence. Wind pushed snow across the road between us, and the gate’s timber frame creaked.
“Liza.” I looked at her. Just her. “Can I have a word? Privately. I know I don’t deserve it, but I’m asking.”
She didn’t flinch, look away, or even shift her weight despite the injured leg.
“No,” she said.
“I want to repair what I—”
“No.”
She said it with the finality of a choice that cost her nothing. It carried none of the fury of her answer in my own hall. That fury I could have worked with. Fury meant the wound was still open, still bleeding, still connected to me by the pain I’d caused.
Her calm meant she no longer needed me to understand what I’d done.
The bond told me the same thing. I could feel her through it, as I always could, but no anger or grief surged across the connection.
I swallowed against the nausea. The sickness had exhausted me, and the afternoon cold cut through my coat. I was shaking badly enough that hiding it took constant effort.
Think. Think.
If I walked back across that bridge, I’d arrive at the East lodge after dark, sick, alone, with Kurt’s lie exposed and half the enforcers answering to Kurt’s voice instead of mine.
I’d given him the border orders. And now that his story had fallen apart, what stopped him from deciding the Alpha who gave those orders was too weak to keep giving them?
I would face a challenge on the East bank. It might not come tonight or even this week, but Kurt had learned how it felt to wield an Alpha’s authority without the title. He had a torn ear, a grudge, and a pack full of wolves who had followed him across a river.
If I lost a challenge in this condition, if I couldn’t even keep water down and my hands were shaking in my pockets like a drunk’s, the pack would be Kurt’s by nightfall. From the East bank, with Kurt as Alpha, I could not put myself between Liza and whatever he decided to do next.
The bond and every cell in my body still called her mine. She had just made it clear that she wasn’t. But I had given Kurt the freedom that put her in danger, and I would not leave her exposed to whatever he did next.
Kurt would cross that river again. I was certain of it. And I could not stop him from a sickbed in East Valley.
I looked at Dominic Salvi. My rival. The man whose bed Liza had chosen. The man who had fought Kurt at her side.
“I’m requesting entry,” I said.
Shane pushed off the gatepost. “You’re what?”
“As a supplicant. Lodge rules. A wolf who presents himself alone and unarmed at another pack’s gate can request shelter under their authority.
” I kept my eyes on Dominic because this was his call, not Shane’s, and we both knew it.
“I’m not asking for status. I’m not asking for trust. I’m asking for a bunkroom and a guard on the door, and I’ll stay as long as you’ll have me or until I can deal with what’s happening on the East bank. ”
“You’ve got a hell of a lot of nerve,” Shane said.
Dominic raised a hand. Shane went quiet, but his hostility did not ease.
“Did you come here to demand she go back with you?” Dominic asked.
“Yes.”
“And now you’re asking me to let you stay.”
“Yes.”
He weighed the risk against whatever advantage my presence might give his people. A weakened East Alpha under his roof was leverage. I was also a target and a liability, and Dominic had earned his reputation by knowing the difference.
“Bunkroom,” Dominic said. “Guarded. You’re a guest and nothing more. You don’t give orders, you don’t approach my people without someone beside you, and you don’t touch her.” A pause. “Are we clear?”
“We’re clear.”
“Shane.”
“Dom, this is—”
“Open the gate.”
Shane’s jaw worked. He looked at Liza, who stood watching me with that terrible calm, and then he unlatched the crossbar and pulled the gate wide enough for one man to pass through.
I stepped onto West Valley ground for the second time in my life.
I’d first come here at twelve with my father for a boundary talk that went nowhere.
I remembered the way Dad had kept his chin up and his shoulders square the entire time, performing strength for an audience that already knew who held the bigger territory.
Now I walked through a gate held open by a man who wanted to slam it on my fingers, toward a lodge where I would sleep under guard while the woman I’d rejected slept in my rival’s bed, and my own pack would call it weakness.
Liza watched me pass. I could feel her attention through the bond, a brief flicker of curiosity, perhaps, or the detached interest of a woman watching a man she used to know do something she hadn’t expected.
I wanted to stop. I wanted to tell her that I’d been wrong, that the scar was proof of something I should have knelt before instead of turned away from, that for weeks I’d felt her happiness with another man and it was killing me in ways the sickness couldn’t match.
I kept walking.
The lodge door opened ahead of me. Warm air pushed out, carrying the smell of woodsmoke and cooking and people who belonged here. Shane fell in behind me, close enough that I could hear him breathing. A guard, already.
Inside, West wolves looked up from tables and doorways and the long kitchen counter. Their eyes found me the way eyes always find the thing that doesn’t belong. The assessment was plain. I stood alone in a coat with no insignia, sick and pale, my hands shaking and exhaustion showing on my face.
A woman at the kitchen doorway set down a coffee mug and watched me. Recognition moved across her face, then something harder. She knew who I was. Everyone in this room knew who I was.
Shane pointed me toward a corridor past the common area. “Last door on the left. There’s a cot and a blanket. Bathroom’s across the hall. Don’t wander.”
I nodded.
The bunkroom was cold. A cot against the far wall, a blanket folded at its foot, a window that looked out on pines and the failing afternoon light. I sat on the cot and put my face in my hands and listened to Shane’s boots settle into position outside the door.
Through the bond, Liza’s emotions remained steady, unchanged by my arrival on her side of the river.
The nausea rose. I swallowed it back, tasting bile, and pressed my palms hard against my eyes until I could breathe evenly again.
Beyond my door, voices murmured in the common room.
Someone laughed. Dishes clattered in the kitchen.
The ordinary sounds of a pack moving through its day reached a sick man sitting alone in a borrowed room.
Afternoon light lay across the pines outside the window. Somewhere beyond my door, Liza moved through the life she’d built here without me, and none of her steps led back.