The ambush was over before the vanguard command camp even realized it had begun.
There were no horns, no battle cries, no chaotic clash of steel against steel. The forty Lycan executioners moved through the moonlit pines like a tide of black ink, slipping beneath canvas flaps and behind wooden supply crates. Within minutes, the drunken laughter around the campfires was snuffed out, replaced only by the muffled thuds of bodies hitting the frozen earth and the cold metallic clinking of silver chains.
Inside the central command tent, a single oil lamp flickered over a table cluttered with half-emptied wine skins, meat bones, and unrolled military maps.
Major Garron—the vanguard commander appointed by Alpha Julian and cousin to Lord Kaelen—sat frozen in his iron-reinforced chair.
A heavy,
