THE ALPHA WHO REJECTED HIS FATE

Chapter Thirteen

Zane POV

Half a mile isn't far. Not for wolves. Not on a night when everyone in this settlement had already run further than that, carrying worse things than fear.

"How many," Kael said, already moving toward his horse.

"I don't know. I didn't get close enough to count. I got close enough to see torches." I fell into step beside him, ignoring the ache settling into my split knuckles, the deeper ache in my shoulder where a blade had caught me sometime in the last hour and I'd stopped noticing. "It's not a raiding camp, Kael. It's too organized. Tents in rows. It looks like they were planning to stay."

Vexara's face did something complicated, fear and fury arriving at the same time. "Reinforcements. In case the first wave failed."

"Or in case it succeeded," I said, "and they needed somewhere to hold whatever they came here to take."

No one said what we were all thinking. We didn't need to. Every wolf standing in that courtyard understood exactly what, or who, a second wave of this attack would have been sent to hold.

Kael POV

I looked back once, toward the healing quarters, toward the door I had walked through less than an hour ago and still hadn't fully let myself believe it was real. Seraphine was inside. Lyra was inside. Nyx was bleeding against a wall there, and Wren was somewhere tending wounds that would take days to finish counting.

Every instinct I owned told me to stay. To put myself between that door and whatever was coming next and not move again until I was certain nothing could reach them.

Vexara read my face before I said a word.

"If there's a second wave," she said quietly, "waiting here to meet it isn't protection. It's a target with a door on it. You know that."

She was right, and hating that she was right didn't make it less true. I had spent eight months learning, badly, that the safest-looking choice and the right one were not always the same thing, and I did not intend to make that mistake again tonight of all nights.

"Take twelve warriors," I said to Zane. "I'll take twelve more. We go now, before whoever's in that camp knows the first wave has already failed."

"And if it's more than twenty-four can handle?"

"Then we send word back and Vexara brings the rest."

Vexara's jaw tightened. "I'm not staying behind guarding a door, Kael."

"Someone has to be the one Seraphine trusts enough to listen to if this goes wrong," I said, and watched the argument die in her before she finished building it, because we both knew I was right, and because some new, careful part of her had already started weighing what Seraphine would need more than what she wanted for herself.

Seraphine POV

I heard them before Wren could stop me from hearing them, low urgent voices just outside the shattered doorway, and I understood the shape of what they were deciding before a single full sentence reached me clearly.

I got to my feet before Wren could argue, Lyra held tight and settled at last into something close to sleep, exhaustion finally winning out over the fury she'd been born screaming into.

"Kael." My voice cut through whatever he'd been saying to Zane, and both of them turned. "You're not leaving without telling me what's happening."

He hesitated, and I watched him decide, visibly, to give me the truth instead of the version he thought might spare me something.

"There's a second camp. Zane found it. We don't know if it's reinforcements, or somewhere they meant to take you if the first attack succeeded." His jaw tightened. "We're going to find out before it finds us."

Something cold and clean moved through me, the same clarity I'd felt reading the transfer order the night my father died, the sensation of understanding a threat completely rather than fearing it blindly. I had spent eight months being underestimated by everyone who thought a healer with a newborn had nothing left to fight with, and I found, at that moment, that I resented the idea of being protected from information almost as much as I resented the danger itself. I had earned the right to know exactly what was coming for the people I loved, and I did not intend to let anyone, Alpha or otherwise, decide that for me again.

"Then go," I said. "But you come back. Both of you."

Kael looked at me for a long moment, and something passed across his face that had nothing to do with strategy or Alpha command, something raw and unguarded that I hadn't seen from him since a corridor in the Iron Keep, a lifetime and eight months ago.

"I intend to," he said. "I have far too much left to make up for not to."

Zane POV

We rode out with twenty-four warriors and the last reserves of strength any of us had left after a night that had already asked everything of us once. The half mile passed in tense, near-silent formation, every wolf among us straining for the first sign of torchlight through the trees, no one speaking beyond the low, clipped exchanges necessary to hold formation.

We found the camp exactly where I'd said it would be.

We found it already burning.

Not from any fire we had set. Not from anything Ironblood or Duskfen had touched. The tents stood in their careful, organized rows exactly as I'd described them, and every single one of them was engulfed, flames climbing high and fast in a pattern too even, too deliberate, to have started by accident.

Kael reined in hard beside me, staring at it with the same confusion written across his face that I felt settling cold in my chest.

"Someone got here before us," he said slowly.

Through the smoke, moving between the burning rows with unhurried, deliberate steps, a lone figure emerged into the open ground ahead of our line, silver-haired, unarmed, hands clasped calmly behind his back as though he had been waiting for us the entire time.