MARKED BY THE ENEMY

CHAPTER 14: THE CROSSING

Elira's POV

The two days passed slower than any two days had ever passed in my life, and then, impossibly, they were gone, and I was standing at the edge of the northern crossing with Kane's hand steady against my back and my heart trying to climb out through my throat.

"Remember what we talked about," Kane said quietly, his eyes scanning the tree line even as he spoke to me. "You stay close. You don't approach him alone. If anything feels wrong, you say my name and you get behind me. That's the whole plan." "I remember."

"I know you remember. I need you to actually do it this time." There was no real anger in it, just the worn edge of a man who'd spent two sleepless nights running every version of this meeting through his head. Behind us, Naya and two other wolves kept a careful distance, close enough to move fast if they had to, far enough that Whitlock wouldn't feel surrounded the moment he showed his face.

Farris had insisted on coming too, standing a little apart from the rest of us, wrapped in a coat too heavy for the mild night, her face unreadable in the dark. She hadn't said much on the walk out. I got the sense she was rehearsing something, the way I'd rehearsed my own words outside the feed store days ago.

Midnight came and went. The forest stayed quiet except for the ordinary sounds of wind and settling branches, and I felt Kane's tension climbing beside me with every minute that passed without a sign of anyone. "He's not coming," one of the wolves murmured, low enough that I almost missed it.

"He's coming," Farris said, with a certainty that silenced the doubt before it could spread further. "He's watching us right now, deciding whether it's safe."

She was right. A shape detached itself from the shadows near the tree line, hands visible, moving slowly enough that even I could tell it was meant to look nonthreatening. Whitlock stopped a good twenty feet away, eyes flicking across the group before landing on Farris and staying there.

Nobody spoke for a long moment. The two of them just looked at each other across the clearing, twenty two years of silence sitting heavy in the space between them.

"You brought the whole council out here," Whitlock said finally, his voice rougher than I remembered from the mill road. "Should I take that as a welcome or a warning." "Neither," Farris said. "I came because I owed you a conversation two decades late, and I didn't want to send anyone else to have it for me."

Something in Whitlock's posture shifted, some of the guardedness easing without fully disappearing. "That's new," he said. "You were never the one who apologized first."

"I'm older now. Sometimes that helps." Farris took a step closer, slow, deliberate, the rest of us staying still around her like we all understood this belonged to the two of them first. "I told the council what happened. What I failed to do when you brought me proof twenty two years ago. I should have said it the night you left. I'm saying it now instead, because now is what I have."

Whitlock was quiet for a long moment, something working behind his eyes that looked almost like grief. "Twenty two years," he repeated. "You have any idea what it's like, watching something you tried to stop happening anyway, from outside, with nobody left. Who'd believe you if you tried to warn them?" "Tell me," Farris said. "That's why we're here."

And he did. Standing in that clearing with the moon low over the trees, Whitlock told a story that took the better part of twenty minutes, about years spent drifting between packs that didn't want an exile with a grudge, about stumbling onto pieces of a trafficking operation almost by accident while trying to rebuild some kind of life on the margins, about realizing slowly, sickeningly, that the operation ran straight through the territory he'd once called home.

"I couldn't come back through the front door," he said. "Not after what happened. So I started feeding information where I could, quietly, to anyone who'd listen without asking too many questions about who I used to be." His eyes moved to me. "Doyle listens. He's been passing warnings to families for months, trying to keep people off that mill road without exposing himself to whoever's actually running things." "Who is running things?" Kane asked, his voice carefully even.

Whitlock's jaw tightened. "A man who calls himself Corbin. Human, not pack, which is part of why nobody's caught him yet, he moves through both worlds without triggering the instincts either side relies on to spot danger. He's been using the mill as a staging point for over a year. Ren was one of his local hands on the pack side, paid to look the other way at certain border crossings." He paused. "I don't know where he's keeping the people he's taken. I've been trying to find that for months and I keep hitting the same wall." My chest tightened. "My sister. Is she still alive?"

Whitlock's eyes came to mine, and something in them, careful, almost gentle despite everything hard about his face, made my stomach drop before he even answered.

"I believe so," he said. "Corbin doesn't waste what he can sell. That's the only mercy I can offer you, and I know it's not much of one." He looked back to Kane, to Farris, something decided settling over his expression. "But I think I finally know how to find out where he's keeping them. It's going to require something I haven't been willing to risk in twenty two years." "What's that?" Farris asked.

Whitlock's gaze swept the clearing, over Kane, over me, over the pack he'd been exiled from for two decades, and something in his face looked almost like relief at finally saying it out loud. "Trusting this pack again," he said, "with something I can't do alone."