Chapter 13
1191 Words
They pulled every rogue apart before dawn.
Not out of anger—though there was plenty of that—but out of necessity. Every body stripped, every ruff and joint checked. Amara spent most of the night at the edge of the trees with Gideon’s team, the cold biting through her jacket, the damp seeping into her boots.
“Third one clean,” Jace called, dropping another torn collar into a plastic tub. “No tech. Just scars.”
“Fourth,” another guard added.
“Fifth,” Lyra said, flipping a carcass with her boot. “Teeth, bad attitude, nothing else.”
Gideon grunted. “So it wasn’t a matched set.”
Amara crouched beside the tub, peering down at the single black device bagged in a clear pouch. The tiny lens stared up at her, blank.
“One camera,” she said. “On one rogue.”
“Test run?” Lyra asked. “See if the toys work before they waste more?”
“Or signal,” Gideon said. “You don’t need six cameras to prove you can get one into a pack yard. You just need enough footage to scare the right people.”
Amara’s fingers twitched. She shoved them into her pockets before she could do something stupid, like reach for the bag and crush it.
“Either way,” Gideon added, “someone handled that wolf long enough to strap it on. Someone with tools. Hands.”
“Humans,” Jace muttered.
“Or wolves working with them,” Amara said. The idea sat sour on her tongue.
They fell quiet.
The forest felt different now. Same trees, same snow‑patched ground, same old marker posts—and yet she couldn’t shake the sense that they weren’t the only ones looking out from the shadows tonight.
“Enough for now,” Gideon said at last. “We’re not going to smell anything new with this much blood in the air. Rotate, eat, sleep a little. Daylight might show what we’re missing.”
He dismissed the others with a jerk of his head, then caught Amara’s eye. “You. Walk.”
She followed him along the edge of the pines until the lights of the house softened behind the trunks and the sounds of tired, angry wolves faded.
“Your Alpha loves his speeches,” Gideon said quietly. “But it wasn’t just his back that was exposed in that hall.”
Amara let out a breath that showed white in the air. “You heard him.”
“Heard him,” Gideon said. “Watched you walk out. Smelled how bad it hurt.”
She stared at the ground. “You going to tell me he did it for the greater good?”
“No,” Gideon said. “I’m going to tell you it was ugly and necessary for something he thinks matters more than either of your lungs. And then I’m going to tell you this: I’ve seen him break his own bones for this pack. I’ve never seen him do that to someone else up close.”
“Congratulations to me,” she said flatly. “First place.”
Gideon’s mouth twitched like he wanted to smile and thought better of it.
“You saved Milo,” he said instead. “That’s not nothing.”
“It’s my job.”
“Lots of wolves have jobs,” Gideon said. “Fewer actually do them when their hearts are on fire.”
Silence stretched between the trees.
Amara leaned her shoulder against a trunk, let the rough bark press into her back.
“It doesn’t feel like a bond anymore,” she said. The words came out before she could swallow them. “It feels like a scar someone left a knife in.”
Gideon nodded, slow. “He cut his side of the rope. Yours will take longer.” He hesitated. “You want me to hit him for you? Strictly as a concerned beta?”
A sharp, startled huff of air escaped her. “You think you could?”
“I could try,” he said. “It’d be entertaining for the kids, at least.”
She shook her head. “No. I don’t want him bruised. I want him… right. And I don’t know if those things can happen at the same time.”
They stood there until the cold finally drove the ache deeper into her bones.
“Get some sleep, Frost,” Gideon said. “Tomorrow we start asking who wanted that camera here. And why.”
“Whoever it is,” she said, “they’re not going to be happy with what they caught. A hall full of wolves listening while one Alpha lies through his teeth.”
“Don’t underestimate what people can do with that,” he said. “Cut it right, and you can make any story you want.”
She thought of the rumor already twisting her own truth inside Silverpine. Of humans somewhere, maybe, watching a blood‑blurred clip of wolves fighting in their yard and slotting it neatly into whatever nightmare they already believed.
“Then we get there first,” she said.
Gideon’s eyes flickered, approving. “There she is.”
By the time Amara made it back to the house, the sky had gone from black to a bruised, uncertain grey. She slipped in through a side entrance, meaning to head for her room and maybe an hour of sleep before someone dragged her back out again.
She didn’t make it that far.
Halfway up the back stairs, Milo appeared from nowhere and attached himself to her leg.
She staggered, caught the railing. “Easy, pup.”
He looked up at her with huge, shadowed eyes. “They said you bit the bad wolf.”
“Did they,” she said.
He nodded solemnly. “Mom said I’m not supposed to bite anyone. But I think it’s good when you do.”
Warmth cracked something tight inside her.
“I only bite when I have to,” she said. “You don’t have to. You’ve got people for that.”
His little hand tightened on her jeans. “You’ll bite them if they try again?”
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “I will.”
He nodded like that settled the matter, then scuttled off down the stairs, already shouting for someone to watch him jump the last three steps.
Amara watched him go, chest aching in a different way.
At the top of the stairs, she turned toward her room—and stopped.
Her door was halfway open.
She clearly remembered closing it last time she’d been here.
The house was mostly quiet. Most wolves were either outside or asleep. No one stood in the corridor. Nothing moved.
Her wolf lifted her head, ears pricked.
Amara pushed the door fully open with two fingers, every muscle tight.
Her room looked the same. Bed unmade, boots abandoned by the chair, map of the territory pinned crookedly above her desk.
Except—
A tiny red dot glowed, faint but steady, in the corner of the ceiling.
- Writer
