Chapter 35 Breaking Ice
Liza POV
The ice screamed beneath my paws. My wolf caught the deep groan under the noise of the fight.
Avalanche debris and the current had battered the surface, and now two dozen fighting wolves ran across it.
I felt the fractures through the pads of my feet as I ran, hairline splits spreading outward from the place where the slide had struck and the ice was thinnest.
Kurt knew. That was what I saw as I cleared the line of wrecked vehicles and hit the open river at a sprint. His retreat was a lure.
His massive dark wolf moved west across the ice with Everett’s golden form streaking behind him, and behind Everett came the ragged line of loyalists. From the West bank, Dominic’s shape drove through the blowing snow, angled straight at Everett’s flank.
The fractured crust lay between all of them, the current still moving dark and fast underneath. Kurt was pulling them onto it. Both Alphas, one chasing and one intercepting, converging on the weakest stretch of frozen river with enough combined weight to send them all through.
I ran harder than I had ever run in my life.
Dominic saw me coming. His dark head turned, ears flat, momentum already committed.
I hit his right shoulder with everything I had, driving my body into the heavy muscle below his neck, and the impact jolted up through my chest and rattled my teeth.
He outweighed me badly, but I caught him mid-stride and turned his line just enough.
He snarled. I felt his confusion through the fated bond, bright and hot, and my own alarm went back through the connection whether I sent it or not.
Dominic understood a fight better than any wolf I had ever met. He read my hit in the half-second it took him to correct his footing. His head swung past me, past Everett’s pursuing form, and found what I’d found. The fractured band. The trap.
He wheeled and slammed into the nearest East loyalist instead, a big brown wolf who’d been running right behind Everett, and drove him sideways into the packed snow along the bank.
Two more loyalists broke apart as Dominic’s massive form crashed through their line.
The collision shifted Everett’s path away from the thinnest ice and onto the rougher surface where avalanche debris had frozen into the river’s crust, though it did not pull him off Kurt entirely.
Everett saw only Kurt and went after him, unaware of the weakened ice ahead. He should not have been running at all, let alone closing on a wolf who outweighed him and had been eating and sleeping while Everett wasted.
Kurt planted his front paws on the rough ice and spun to face him.
Everett was committed, moving too fast on the slick surface to change direction.
Kurt hit him from the left, driving into the bad shoulder, and Everett’s legs went sideways.
The golden wolf slid across the rough ice toward the fracture line, scrabbling with all four paws, and Kurt kept pushing.
The ice broke.
It sagged first, a wide depression that darkened as water welled up through the stress fractures, and then the whole section gave way in a grinding, rotting collapse that swallowed Everett to the shoulders.
His forelegs caught the edge. He scrambled, claws raking the frozen surface, and every time he pulled himself up the ice broke again under his weight and he slid back into the black water.
The current hit him. I saw his body jerk as it caught his hindquarters and pulled.
Kurt backed away from the edge. Turned. Ran for the stable ice near the West bank, scanning for the next threat, and found none between him and solid ground.
There was my clear line.
He’d started the war. He’d stolen the charges and blown the mountain apart. He’d sent his wolves across the ice to kill and manipulated Everett before that. The fencing and Dominic’s ribs were his doing too, and now he was running for safety on the ice ahead of me.
I turned away from him.
I went to Everett.
The ice groaned and flexed as I reached the edge of the open water.
Everett’s golden head was still above the surface, but barely.
The current was pulling harder, and each time he got his forelegs up, the edge crumbled and he slipped back.
His eyes found me. Even in wolf form, even with the river dragging him under, his gaze locked onto mine with an expression I could read as clearly as language.
He thought this was how it ended, with me as the last thing he would see.
Fuck that.
I dropped to my belly and crawled. The fractured ice flexed beneath me, water seeping up around my legs and soaking through my fur to the skin.
I spread my weight as flat as I could, paws splayed, chest pressed to the frozen surface, and inched forward until I could reach the thick ruff at the back of Everett’s neck.
I clamped my jaws into the dense golden fur and held.
The current pulled. My teeth held. Everett’s soaked body was an enormous weight in the current. My neck muscles screamed. My hind paws slid on the wet ice as the river tried to take us both, and for one terrible moment I thought it would. I’d made my choice, and I might go under with him.
Then Dominic hit the ice beside me.
He dropped flat the way I had, spreading his weight across the fracture zone, and got his jaws into the loose skin below Everett’s right ear.
Behind him, Shane. Three-legged, bleeding, his right foreleg tucked against his chest and his face smeared red.
Shane braced his good shoulder against Dominic’s hindquarters and dug his claws into the rough ice and anchored him.
We pulled.
Everett came out of the river in a rush of black water and broken ice, his soaked fur streaming, his left shoulder hanging at a bad angle. He sprawled across the fractured surface and lay still for two breaths. Then he coughed, a harsh racking sound, and river water poured from his muzzle.
Dominic and I dragged him toward the West bank.
Shane limped beside us, watching the wider fight, and the blowing snow thinned enough that I could see it had shifted.
The East wolves were scattered. Half had made it back to the far bank.
The rest milled on the ice between the wrecked vehicles and the bridge, uncertain, leaderless.
Kurt came back.
I heard him before I saw him. The scrape of heavy paws on rough ice, fast, and then his massive dark shape burst through the snow behind me. His jaws caught my right forepaw and bit deep.
The pain was white and blinding. I felt his teeth hit bone, felt the flesh beneath the pad tear open, and for one instant my vision went completely dark. Then my wolf surged through the pain, furious, and I ripped my paw free and met him.
Blood ran from the torn pad and left dark prints behind me. I didn’t care. Kurt had put Everett in the river, and he was not getting past me to finish what the current couldn’t.
I drove him back.
Step by step, snapping at his muzzle, feinting at his flank, forcing him to give ground toward the open water he’d made.
He had size on me, and strength. But he’d spent weeks sending other wolves to fight his battles, and I’d spent years running the mountain, digging out avalanche victims, and building a body that could work all day in deep snow and still have something left.
I was faster on the slick surface, and I was angrier, and every time he tried to circle to my injured side I cut the angle and drove him back another step.
The open water was close behind him when Shane hit him from the right.
Shane’s three-legged charge caught Kurt across the hindquarters and staggered him sideways.
Kurt snapped at Shane’s face and missed.
I lunged for his flank and got a mouthful of fur and muscle and tore.
Kurt yelped and spun, and Dominic was there, blocking the path to the West bank with his body.
The three of us closed around him in a tightening half-circle with the fractured ice and open river at his back.
Kurt looked at me. His pale eyes, silver even in wolf form, narrowed as he measured the gap, the open water behind him, and the stable ice on the far side.
He jumped.
The leap carried him over the open channel, and I thought he would make it. His front paws hit the far edge of the ice. The surface held, then collapsed beneath his weight, and Kurt dropped through.
The river took him fast. The current was stronger here where the avalanche had changed the channel, and the water closed over his dark head in two seconds. His pale eyes flashed once beneath the surface. Then the broken slabs rolled together over the spot, hiding the black water, and he was gone.
On the East bank, wolves watched from the tree line where they’d retreated, some in fur and some in human form. They saw their former Beta go under the ice, and they saw the river close over him.
Nobody howled.
Everett lay on the West bank in a pool of river water that was already turning to slush in the cold. His golden fur was plastered flat, and his breathing came in harsh, shallow gasps that I could hear from the ice. West wolves gathered around him.
I limped toward the bank with the torn pad folding under me every time I set it down, and each time it sent fresh pain up to my shoulder. Dominic stayed between me and the open water until I reached the snowbank, then followed.
Everett shifted.
The change was ugly. His body fought it, the wrenched shoulder grinding as bones reformed, and the sound that came out of him was more scream than anything else.
He came through naked and blue-lipped and shaking so hard his teeth chattered, his left arm hanging uselessly at his side, river water running off bloodless skin.
Two West wolves stripped off their coats and wrapped him before he finished coughing up the river.
I shifted beside him.
The pain ripped through my right hand first, because the torn pad became a torn palm, and the cold hit everything else at once.
I came through naked, wet from the ice I’d crawled across, and bleeding from a gash that ran from the base of my right thumb to the center of my palm.
Someone put a blanket around my shoulders. I pulled it tight and stood.
The blowing snow had thinned. I could see the river now, both banks, the scattered wolves, the wrecked vehicles with civilians still sheltered behind them, the dark shapes of wounded animals lying on the ice between the two sides.
The fighting had stopped without an order.
Kurt was gone, and the wolves who’d followed him were watching the place where the ice had swallowed their leader.
I turned to face the East bank.
My voice came out raw, roughened from the shift and the cold and the effort of holding Everett above the current with my teeth.
“You saw what happened.” I raised my voice. The wind had died, and the river carried sound. “Kurt attacked both Alphas. He drove Everett through the ice and ran. He left him drowning.”
Silence. The East wolves stared.
“I held his head above the water while Kurt ran.” I held up my bleeding right hand so they could see the blood. “That’s what your war was for. A man who’d leave an Alpha to drown while he saved himself.”
Rosa stepped out of the East group, past two shifted wolves, and halted at the tree line with her arms at her sides and her eyes on mine.
The woman who’d held my hand while my face was stitched and brought me soup for a week, then looked at the floor while Everett rejected me, stood silent at the front as the East wolves stood down.
One by one, the shifted East wolves sat. The ones still in human form let their hands fall open at their sides, stepped back from the bank, and waited.
Behind me, Dominic shifted.
The sound of his change was controlled, the pain kept in check even with three healing scars down his left side.
He came through standing, naked in the cold, bleeding from where the day’s violence had torn open the wound Kurt had given him at the riverside hut.
He looked at the East bank and the sitting wolves and Rosa’s still figure at the tree line.
“Let them come,” Dominic said. His voice carried across the ice, level and sure. He meant it for his own wolves. “Let them take up their wounded. Nobody touches them.”
West wolves stepped aside. The path across the ice opened. And East wolves came.
They came carefully, in ones and twos, crossing the stained ice toward the dark shapes of the wounded.
A young East wolf in fur, one ear ragged from the fight, reached a downed West wolf first. He lowered his head and whined, and two West wolves helped him drag the unconscious animal toward the bank.
I watched it happen from inside the blanket with blood dripping between my fingers. Everett sat in borrowed coats on the frozen ground beside me, shaking so hard he couldn’t hold the tin cup someone had given him. I took it from his hand and held it to his mouth so he could drink.
Dominic stood naked and bleeding in the snow and watched his wolves and Everett’s wolves move across the ice together after the wounded.
I could feel his exhaustion and his pain through the fated bond, and his iron refusal to let either of those things show.
And underneath all of it, something quieter.
Something that had been there since the first time I touched his hand and the flash lit up the morning.
He trusted me.
I looked at Rosa. She hadn’t moved from the tree line. Her eyes were wet, though she was too stubborn to let the tears fall.
“Rosa,” I said.
She nodded once. Then she turned and walked out onto the ice to help carry the wounded.