THE ROGUE: HUNTED BY THE ALPHA

The Alpha and the Ash 3

Riven accepted this without visible reaction, which was one of the many things Kaelen valued about him. "Timeline?"

"Open." He looked north, toward the dark interior of the Ashveil. "However long it takes."

* * *

He spent the rest of the morning with Orrek.

His injured tracker was a compact, sandy-haired man of thirty-two with the wind-roughened face of someone who spent most of his life outdoors and the direct, slightly combative manner of someone who had spent most of his professional life being very good at his job. The dislocated shoulder had been reset; he held his right arm with careful stillness and his expression with less careful stillness, which meant he was managing more pain than he was acknowledging, which was consistent with everything Kaelen knew about him.

"Walk me through it," Kaelen said. "Start at first contact."

Orrek did. He was a precise observer; Kaelen had always valued him for this. He described the sounds first: nothing, then movement from three directions at nearly identical moments, then the fire. He described his own engagement in the flat, anatomical language of an experienced fighter giving a debrief rather than a dramatic account, which Kaelen appreciated.

"First contact was physical, not visual," Orrek said. "They hit from the northeast; I had time to turn about forty degrees before they were on me. Fast. Faster than I was expecting from a single opponent at that angle. Moved differently than pack-trained; less linear, more circular. Like they were fighting inside a smaller space in their head than the actual space allowed."

"What do you mean?" Kaelen said.

"I mean most pack fighters at that engagement range use their momentum and size advantage. Straight-line aggression. This one worked the angles. Redirected my weight instead of fighting it. I've seen that kind of technique before." He paused. "Voss family style. The old Omega warrior tradition from the southern packs."

Kaelen kept his expression still. "Voss family style."

"My grandfather trained against an Aldric Voss in a formal tournament, forty years ago. Described the exact same thing: redirection, angular approach, the way they use a larger opponent's force against them." Orrek's eyes moved to Kaelen's with the candid directness of a man reporting something he himself found inconvenient. "I know what the file says. I know the Voss line is extinct. I'm telling you what my body recognized. Maybe it's coincidence."

"There are no coincidences in a perimeter engagement," Kaelen said quietly. "What else?"

"I was on the ground in under eight seconds. Last thing I clearly remember before the lights went out was a face. Low light, fast movement, I don't have a detailed impression." He thought for a moment. "Young. Smaller than I expected given the force. And angry." Another pause, and when he spoke again he sounded slightly less like a professional debriefer and slightly more like a man reporting something that had unsettled him. "Not feral angry. Not the yellow-eye blank I've seen in the ferals. This was a person-angry. This was a person who knew exactly what they were angry about."

Kaelen thanked him and left him to the medical tent.

He walked to the northern edge of the camp and stood looking at the tree line and thought about the Voss treason case, which he had read in his official briefings and had found, on both occasions, oddly unconvincing in its tidiness. Cases that tidy were usually either very simple or very constructed. The Voss case had not looked simple.

He thought about a person-angry fighter who used an extinct family's combat tradition and had been surviving alone in the Ashveil for two to three years.

Then he filed the thought away, with the careful precision of a man who had learned not to let his theories outrun his evidence, and began preparing for the hunt.