The bell rang two hours before dawn, three weeks after the night on the ridge, and I was awake and moving before I'd fully processed what it meant.
Ashgrave's warning bell hadn't rung in my lifetime, not the version of my lifetime I remembered living, not once in seven years of marriage to an Alpha who'd inherited a mostly peaceful territory from a father who'd kept the borders quiet through sheer force of reputation.
I'd only ever heard it in old stories, warriors describing drills from decades earlier, and the sound of it now, low and urgent and endless, sent a jolt of pure animal alarm through a body that apparently remembered danger faster than I could consciously catch up to it.
I was dressed and armed within minutes, moving through the barracks corridor already crowded with warri
