CLAIMED BY MY SWORN ENEMY ALPHA

Chapter 3: The Valley Road

We left Silverwood at first light, the way my father wanted, with the mist still sitting low over the fields and the whole pack too smart to come out and watch us go. Send-offs were for weddings and funerals, not border patrols. I preferred it that way. I did not need an audience for this one.

Torren rode beside me, Garrick just behind, and six others strung out in a loose line that would tighten the moment we crossed into contested ground. The eastern road ran two days out from the pack house before it touched the disputed stretch, and I spent most of that first day going over the terrain in my head instead of talking, which Torren eventually noticed and decided to comment on.

"You're quiet."

"I'm thinking."

"About the mission, or about Kellan's face when you left without saying goodbye properly?"

"About the mission." That was mostly true. Kellan had come to see us off before dawn, standing at the stable door with his arms crossed and an expression he was trying very hard to make look unbothered. I had told him I would see him before the new moon, and he had said he knew, and neither of us had believed the other completely.

"He'll survive a few weeks without you," Garrick said, from behind, in the dry tone he used when he thought a conversation had gone on long enough. "So will you focus on the road."

I focused on the road.

By the second evening we had reached the edge of what the maps called neutral ground, though nobody who lived along that stretch would have called it neutral. Burned-out way stations. A bridge my father's generation had rebuilt twice because Blackthorn kept finding reasons to damage it. The eastern trade road cut through a shallow valley there, forest pressing close on both sides, and I did not like how little warning we would get if something came at us from the tree line.

"Two more raids this season through here," Garrick said, reading my face as easily as he read weather. "Same pattern. They hit the caravan, take what they want, and vanish before our patrols can respond."

"Not this time."

"No," he agreed. "Not this time."

We made camp that night with a full watch rotation and no fire, which meant a cold meal and colder ground, and I lay awake longer than I wanted to, listening to the forest instead of sleeping. There was a particular quality to the silence out there that made my skin prickle, though I could not have said why. My wolf had never given me instincts to trust. Whatever this feeling was, it did not come from her.

I told myself it was only nerves. Mostly, I believed it.

The caravan met us at dawn on the third day, a dozen wagons loaded with grain and iron and the kind of goods that mattered enough to fight over, and their lead merchant looked relieved in a way that told me exactly how badly he had wanted an armed escort. We fell into formation around the wagons, Garrick and two others at the front, Torren and I taking the rear, and started the slow crawl through the valley toward safer ground on the far side.

We made it four miles before the forest changed.

I felt it before I understood it, a shift in the birdsong, or the absence of it, the kind of quiet that meant something else was paying very close attention to the same stretch of road we were. Torren felt it too. I saw his hand drift toward his blade without either of us saying a word.

"Garrick," I called, low.

He had already slowed his horse, already scanning the tree line with the flat, careful attention of a man who had survived thirty years of exactly this kind of morning.

They came out of the trees without any warning at all, which told me everything about how long they had been waiting for us. Blackthorn guards, a dozen of them at least, black wolves and men in equal number, moving with the kind of coordinated speed that meant a leader I would need to find fast if I wanted this to end quickly.

"Hold the caravan," I shouted, already turning my horse toward the nearest threat. "Garrick, front line. Torren, with me."

The fight that followed was fast and ugly in the way real fights always were, nothing like the clean drills in the training ring back home. A guard came at me on foot, blade first, and I met him with the flat of my own sword before he got close enough to do damage, knocked him sideways, followed through with a strike that put him down hard. Another came from my left. I turned into it instead of away, the way Garrick had drilled into me a thousand times, and put him down too.

For a few minutes it felt like we might actually hold them.

Then I heard Torren shout my name, and turned too late to fully avoid the blade that caught my leg instead of my side, a shallow, burning line of pain that told me I had been careless for exactly one half-second too long. I stayed on my feet. I made the guard who had cut me regret it within seconds, but the blood was already running warm down my calf, soaking into my boot, and some distant clinical part of my mind noted that the smell of it seemed to be doing something strange to the air around us.

The Blackthorn guards were pulling back.

Not retreating. Not exactly. But something had changed in the rhythm of the fight, a hesitation that had not been there a moment before, and I did not have time to wonder why because Torren was pulling at my arm, shouting something about the pack house, about the alpha, about a sound coming from deeper in the trees that did not belong to any wolf I had ever heard.

I turned toward the sound anyway. I could not have said why, except that some quiet, unplaceable part of me had been waiting for something since the moment we crossed into this valley, and some instinct older than training told me it had just arrived.

The last thing I remember clearly is the smell. Copper and pine and something underneath both of them that I had no name for, something that made my pulse stutter in a way pain alone had never managed. Then the trees moved, and something with eyes the color of fresh blood came through them, and every plan I had walked into that valley with stopped mattering at all.