MARKED BY THE ENEMY

CHAPTER 9: SAY MY NAME

Elira's POV

I stood frozen on the mill road for exactly as long as it took my body to remember Kane's instructions, and then I was moving, cutting toward the border at a dead run, the name climbing up my throat before I'd even fully decided to say it out loud.

"Kane." My voice cracked on it, barely more than a gasp between breaths, swallowed almost instantly by the trees. It felt absurd, screaming a name into an empty forest like it was a spell instead of a sentence. "Kane!"

I didn't hear anything. No crashing brush, no answering shout. For one terrible stretch of seconds I thought Kane had lied, or exaggerated, or that whatever bond let his wolves hear a name on the wind only worked on his own land, not here, not this close to a mill full of men who'd just tried to run me down in the dark.

Then the trees exploded open thirty feet to my left, and Kane was there fully human, fully furious, closing the distance between us in three strides and pulling me against him so hard the air left my lungs.

"You said you'd stay open," he said, voice rough, his hands moving over my arms, my shoulders, checking for damage before either of us had said anything else. "You said you'd say my name if anything felt wrong." "I did say your name."

"After you'd already been running from someone for ten minutes." His jaw was tight, something dangerously close to fear underneath the anger, and I understood, distantly, that he'd heard more of the last twenty minutes than I'd realized, heard me running, heard voices, heard everything except the words that would have told him I was safe. "Elira. What happened."

I told him. All of it, the van, the two men, the branch that gave me away, the stranger who'd hauled me sideways into the dark and pulled me off my own escape route. Kane's expression shifted through something complicated as I talked, fury and relief and a kind of focused stillness I recognized now as the same look he'd worn right before the execution in the clearing.

"He said his name was Whitlock," I finished. "He told me to ask you about him."

Kane went very still."Say that again." "He knew you were hunting him. He knew exactly who I was, why I was asking Doyle questions.

And he pulled me out of danger instead of handing me to the men chasing me." I searched his face, looking for whatever had gone tight and careful behind his eyes. "Kane, who is he?"

Kane didn't answer right away. He looked past me, toward the mill, toward the border, some calculation running behind his eyes that I couldn't follow. When he finally spoke, his voice had dropped into something low and controlled in a way that scared me more than anger would have.

"Whitlock used to be a pack," he said. "My pack. Before my time as Alpha my father's Alpha years. He left under circumstances nobody talks about anymore, not even Naya, and I've spent four years assuming that was the end of the story." His jaw worked.

"If he's the one running point on this operation, that changes things I thought I understood." "He didn't act like the one running it," I said slowly, replaying the conversation. "He acted like someone caught in the middle of it. Scared, even. He warned me off the same way Doyle did like he wanted me to stop pulling this thread, not because he wanted to protect whatever's behind it, but because he was afraid of what happens to me if I keep pulling."

"Or he's very good at sounding like that," Kane said, but there was less conviction in it than I expected, like part of him wanted to believe the version I was describing and didn't fully trust himself to."You knew him," I said. "Before whatever happened. Didn't you."

Something crossed Kane's face, old, complicated, the kind of history that doesn't fully leave a person no matter how many years pass. "He taught me to fight," he said quietly. "Before he left. I was twelve. He was the closest thing to an uncle I had growing up, and then one day he was gone, and nobody would tell me why, and I stopped being allowed to ask."

His eyes came back to mine, sharp again, present again. "That was a long time ago. People change, circumstances change people. I can't let history make me careless about what he might be now." "But it matters," I said. "That he knew you. That's not nothing."

"No," Kane agreed. "It's not nothing." He reached out, tucking a strand of hair back from my face with a gentleness that felt entirely at odds with everything I'd learned about him in the clearing five nights ago, his hand lingering a half-second longer than the gesture required. "But right now, what matters more is that you almost died tonight doing exactly the thing I asked you not to do."

"I found something. That has to count for""It counts," he said, cutting me off, though not unkindly. "It counts, and I'm furious about how you found it, and both of those things are true at once." His hand moved to my jaw, tilting my face up toward his, and whatever careful distance he'd maintained since the kitchen four days ago had entirely burned away in the last twenty minutes.

"I told you I wasn't losing you again. I meant that. I need you to start believing I meant it." The forest had gone very quiet around us, or maybe I'd simply stopped being able to hear anything except my own pulse and the low, rough edge in his voice. "I believe you," I said, and it came out quieter than I meant it to, closer to something true than I was entirely ready to admit out loud.

Kane looked at me for a long moment, something warring behind his eyes control against instinct, caution against whatever this had become between us somewhere in the last five days without either of us naming it. Then his hand tightened slightly at my jaw, and he leaned down, and for one suspended second I thought he was going to close the last inch of distance between us entirely.

A twig snapped somewhere in the trees behind him, and he pulled back instantly, every line of him going alert, protective, the Alpha again instead of the man. "Later," he said, low, rough, a promise more than a deferral. "Right now, I need to get you back across the border before whoever's still out there regroups and comes looking."

He kept one hand at the small of my back, steering me toward the tree line, but his eyes stayed hard on the dark behind us the whole way. "And then you and I are going to have a very long conversation about what 'stay open' actually means." "I said your name." "Eventually," he said. "Next time, it's the first thing you do. Not the last."

I didn't argue. I was too busy trying to understand why the last twenty minutes of near-death and fury and half a confession had left me feeling more certain of something than I'd felt in five years of a life that had made sense right up until the night I crossed a creek I wasn't supposed to cross.