Chapter 28 – Cracks in the Story
1184 Words
By morning, the bruised heat in Amara’s shoulder had settled into a steady, mean pulse.
Nira cleared her for “light duty” with the same expression she used for wolves who tried to train with sprains. “Light duty means no patrols, no sparring, and if I catch you lifting anything heavier than a kettle, I will sedate you myself,” she said.
“So I’m sentenced to meetings,” Amara muttered.
“Congratulations,” Nira replied. “Welcome to hell.”
The war room was already full when Amara slipped in. Maps covered the table, red strings connecting points across Silverpine, Blackridge, and the neutral strip between. Coffee steamed in half a dozen mugs; no one looked rested.
She took a place along the wall. Sorrel hovered nearby on the Blackridge side; Tamsin was missing, banished by Nira to bed and enforced sleep.
Rowan stood at the head of the table with Gideon and Lyra. Elias and Lysander flanked the opposite side. The air hummed with tired anger.
“Vanguard Solutions,” Rowan said, tapping a point on the map. “On paper: security consultancy, risk assessment, some ‘wildlife mitigation work.’ In practice—”
“Garbage disposal for anyone with money and a supernatural problem,” Lyra said.
Elias slid a folder across the table. “We’ve crossed their name twice before,” he said. “Once near the lab where your people were caged,” a nod at Gideon, “and once on a contract to ‘deal with aggressive coyotes’ near a pack we know isn’t coyotes.”
“So they’ve been circling the edges of our world for a while,” Lysander said. “We just never made them central. That’s on us.”
“And now they’ve made us central,” Rowan said. “Subject Zero. Target valuations. Extraction windows.”
At that, a few eyes slid toward Amara, then away again too quickly.
“Say it plain,” she said. “They built a story where I’m the prototype.”
No one argued.
“We’ve looked at their public records,” Lyra said. “Subsidiaries, contracts, tax filings. Nothing jumps out as ‘secret lab’ unless you already know what you’re looking at.”
“So we do what?” someone from the back asked. “Sit on our hands while they send more trucks up our mountain?”
“No,” Rowan said. “We change the angle.”
His gaze swept the room, then landed deliberately on Amara. “Right now they think they’re the only ones who can watch. They’re wrong. Humans aren’t the only ones who can use cameras and records.”
“You want to film them back,” Amara said.
“Not just them,” he said. “Us. On our terms.”
Murmurs rippled. A few older wolves bristled.
“You want to put us on video?” one demanded. “Have you lost your mind?”
“Right now,” Rowan said, “the only footage of us they have is blood and teeth and halfshifts in the dark. If that’s all the human world ever sees, we’re dead the second someone leaks it outside a sheriff’s inbox.”
“So we give them… what? A documentary?” Amara asked, half bitter, half curious.
“We give them context,” Lyra said. “If we can get eyes into a Vanguard facility—human eyes, maybe—and pull records, footage, anything that shows wolves as victims, not monsters? That changes what their files look like.”
“And we start building our own,” Elias added. “Cases, patterns, names. Something more than rumors when we go to other packs and ask them to cut Vanguard off at the knees.”
“You want to go to humans with this?” someone asked, horrified.
“Not yet,” Rowan said. “But I’d rather have the choice than sit here counting how many of ours disappear into their ‘field tests.’”
Amara shifted her weight. Her shoulder twinged; her wolf pressed against it, impatient.
“What do you need from me?” she asked.
Rowan looked at her, and this time there was no flinch. “Everything you can remember about that note,” he said. “The symbol. The phrasing. Any detail that felt… corporate.”
“That’s all?” she asked. “No more walking into nets this week?”
His mouth twitched, humorless. “You’re benched from being bait for now,” he said. “That’s an order. You still have a bounty on your head. They’ve just learned how far we’ll go to collect anyone they touch. That makes you a more expensive problem to steal.”
“Great,” she said. “I always wanted to be high‑maintenance.”
“Also,” Lyra added, “you and Tamsin are the only ones who’ve heard Vanguard’s people talk when they thought they were winning. Any words, phrases, anything you recognized? Jargon?”
Tamsin, for once, was not there to fill silence with jokes. The space where she should’ve been felt big.
“They kept saying ‘asset,’” Amara said. “Not ‘wolf,’ not ‘subject’ when they talked about Rowan. Asset, Alpha asset, high‑value extraction. Like they were already thinking in insurance numbers.”
Lyra scribbled something in a notebook. “That tracks with their human contracts.”
“And ‘phase one,’” Amara added. “Window. Viable. All clean, bland words that say nothing unless you’re inside.”
Rowan nodded slowly. “Then we find someone inside.”
“You want an informant,” Gideon said. “From a company that kidnaps wolves for research. Sounds fun.”
“We know they use human freelancers,” Rowan said. “Drivers, hunters, people like our friend in the chair last night. Somewhere in that chain is someone with less loyalty than fear.”
“And if there isn’t?” Lysander asked.
“Then,” Rowan said, “we go old‑fashioned. Break in, tear their toys apart, and drag home whoever looks most likely to talk.”
The room hummed with a dangerous kind of approval.
Amara didn’t smile.
She watched his face, the set of his shoulders, the way his hands flattened on the map like he wanted to claw straight through it to the people on the other side.
He’d chosen to cut their bond. He’d stood in her hall and called her pain wishful.
But now, when he talked about Vanguard, when he said ours and any of ours they touch, something in her wolf recognized the shape of that anger.
It matched her own.
“Fine,” she said. “You hunt the company. I’ll hunt patterns on our land. But next time they try a ‘window,’ we don’t just slam it. We drag whoever’s on the sill through.”
Rowan met her eyes and, for once, didn’t look away.
“Agreed,” he said. “And this time, we make sure the camera’s pointed at them.”
- Writer
