MARKED BY THE ENEMY

Chapter 13: Three Days

Elira's POV

The house moved differently after the council meeting. I noticed it within an hour, wolves passing through the halls with a new kind of urgency, low conversations cut short the moment I walked into a room, a sense that everyone had somewhere to be and a clock they were all watching without saying so out loud.

Kane was gone before breakfast, off with a small group to scout the border crossings Whitlock had used before, and I spent the morning alone in the kitchen with Toby, who seemed to have appointed himself my unofficial keeper whenever Naya was occupied elsewhere.

"You did something in there," Toby said, watching me over a bowl of cereal he'd been eating slower than necessary, clearly hoping to keep the conversation going. "Farris hasn't spoken about Whitlock in the whole six years I've been pack. Not once. Whatever you said in that room cracked something open." "I just told the truth."

"That's usually all it takes to c***k something open that's been sealed shut too long." He said it lightly, but something in his eyes suggested he meant it more seriously than the tone let on. "This pack's been carrying old wounds nobody talks about since before I was born into it. Farris finally saying something out loud, that's not small."

I turned that over while I finished my own breakfast, thinking about Kane's face in the hallway, the raw edge in his voice when he'd talked about his father. Twenty two years was a long time to carry a silence, and I was starting to understand that everyone in this house was carrying some version of it, wounds passed quietly from one generation to the next until someone finally said the thing that had been sitting unsaid too long.

Naya found me an hour later with a map spread across the kitchen table, the border marked in careful red lines, three points circled where scouts had confirmed sightings of Whitlock crossing over the last two months.

"He has a pattern," she said, tracing a finger along the marks. "Not obvious, but real. He never crosses the same point twice in a row, and he always moves at night, but the timing lines up with something. Every crossing falls within a day or two of a new moon or a full one." She looked up at me. "That's not coincidence for a wolf. That's someone timing his movements around when he's weakest or strongest, which tells us he's still thinking like pack even after twenty two years away."

"What does that mean for finding him?"

"It means Farris thinks she knows where he'll be two nights from now, if the pattern holds." Naya's expression turned careful. "It also means we have very little room for error, and even less time to plan around it."

The rest of the day passed in a kind of tense preparation I mostly stood outside of, scouts coming and going, low strategy conversations I wasn't invited into, Farris arriving in the early afternoon looking older and more worn than she had at the council table, like the weight of the decision she'd made had settled into her overnight.

Kane didn't return until after dark, mud on his boots and exhaustion carved into every line of his face, but he found me before he found anyone else, pulling me aside into the quiet of the back porch where we'd stood together once before.

"We think we know where he'll be," Kane said without preamble. "Two nights from now, near the old crossing north of the mill. If Farris is right about the pattern."

"Then what happens?"

"Then I go, with a small team, and we try to make contact before anyone else does." He rubbed a hand over his jaw, and I could see the calculation still running behind his eyes, the weight of a decision he hadn't fully made peace with yet. "I want you there."

That surprised me more than anything else he could have said. "Why? You spent the last week trying to keep me as far from danger as possible."

"Because he trusted you once already, in the dark, at real risk to himself. If he sees me first, with wolves at my back, he might run before we get a word out. If he sees you." Kane's jaw tightened slightly. "He might stay long enough to listen." "You're using me as bait."

"I'm asking you," he said, and there was real weight in the correction, "because you're the only person in this entire situation he's chosen to trust so far, and I would rather ask you honestly than pretend there's a version of this plan that doesn't need you in it." He held my gaze steadily. "If you say no, I respect that completely, and we find another way. But I'm not going to lie to you about how much better our odds are if you say yes."

I thought about Whitlock's face in the dark, the fear underneath the hardness, the warning that had cost him time he didn't have to spare. I thought about Mara's bag with her handwriting on the tag, about a mill full of men doing something in the dark that had nothing to do with grain.

I thought about a version of myself from two weeks ago who wouldn't have recognized the woman standing on this porch now, weighing a request to walk toward danger instead of away from it. "Yes," I said. "I'll go."

Something in Kane's shoulders eased, just slightly, relief and worry tangled together in a way that told me this decision had cost him something too, asking me at all.

"Two nights," he said quietly. "Whatever happens after that, I need you to know I'm not going to let anything happen to you out there. Even if it costs me something I'm not supposed to be willing to pay." "What would it cost you?"

He looked at me for a long moment, something unguarded moving behind his eyes, and when he finally answered, his voice had dropped low enough that the words felt like they belonged only to the two of us and the dark porch around us.

"Everything," he said simply. "It would cost me everything, and I've stopped pretending that scares me the way it should."