Claimed by the Wolf King

The Riders at the Border

Kade reached the northern tree line at a dead sprint, shifting halfway through the run so that he broke from the last stand of pines on four legs instead of two, faster than any human eye could track and low enough to the ground that the underbrush barely stirred behind him.

The horn sounded a third time, closer now, and beneath it he could hear what the distance had swallowed before: hoofbeats, a dozen at least, moving fast along the old game trail that ran parallel to the border wall. Not Everfell cavalry. Cavalry moved in formation, disciplined and loud, unconcerned with stealth because they had never needed it. These riders kept to the trail's shadowed edge, spread wide enough to avoid an ambush, quiet enough that they clearly expected trouble rather than a diplomatic welcome.

He found his scouts already positioned along the ridge above the trail, Finn and Wren crouched low in the bracken, and dropped into human form beside them long enough to speak.

"Report."

"Twelve riders, Alpha. No banners." Finn didn't take his eyes off the trail below. "They crossed the old boundary marker ten minutes ago. Whoever they are, they know exactly where our border sits, which means somebody gave them a map most humans don't have."

"Weapons?"

"Swords, a few crossbows. Riding light. This isn't an army, Alpha. It's a strike team."

Kade's jaw tightened. A strike team meant someone had sent men specifically to find something, or someone, and the timing made his blood run cold in a way no physical threat had managed in years. Four days since Sera fell into his forest. Four days since the first rumors should have started reaching the capital through his own careful channels. Someone had moved faster than his contacts, or someone had never needed rumors at all because they'd known where to look from the beginning.

"Do we engage?" Wren asked.

"Not yet. I want to know who sent them before we decide how many of them walk away." Kade shifted back down onto four legs, and gestured with a tilt of his head for the two scouts to follow.

They shadowed the riders for nearly a mile, staying high on the ridge where the wind carried their scent away from the trail rather than toward it, and Kade used the time to study the men below with the patience of someone who had learned, the hard way, that acting on incomplete information cost lives. The riders wore no colors, but their gear was too fine for common mercenaries, boots that hadn't seen a season of hard use, blades with matching hilts that suggested a single armory rather than a mismatched company assembled for coin.

Someone with money had sent these men. Someone with money and a reason to keep their involvement quiet enough to strip every identifying mark from twelve riders before sending them across a border that, as far as Everfell's official records were concerned, didn't officially exist to cross.

The lead rider called a halt at the crumbling remains of an old watchtower, one of the abandoned outposts from the war three centuries past that dotted the border like broken teeth, and the group dismounted with the efficient quiet of men used to operating without being seen. Kade watched from the ridge as the lead rider, a broad-shouldered man with a scar bisecting one eyebrow, unrolled a map and gestured toward the deeper forest, toward, Kade realized with a cold drop in his stomach, almost exactly the direction of his own den.

"They're not searching randomly," Finn murmured beside him. "They're following something specific."

"A trail," Kade said quietly. "The carriage wreck. If they found that first, they'd know exactly where to start looking."

He watched the lead rider trace a finger along the map, watched two of the men peel off from the group and begin working the tree line for tracks with the systematic patience of hunters who did this professionally, and understood, with the particular clarity that came before violence, that these men were not here to rescue a lost princess through official channels. They were here to find her quietly, and Kade had no way of knowing yet whether that quiet was meant to protect her, or to make certain no one ever learned what happened to her at all.

He made his decision the way he made most decisions as Alpha, quickly, and without the luxury of consulting anyone whose life wasn't already on the line beside his own.

"Wren, return to the den. Warn the guard on Sera's quarters to double watch and tell no one why. Finn, you're with me." He shifted fully back to human form, crouched low behind a fallen log, and began working out of his boots with brisk, practiced motions. "We're going to have a conversation with our uninvited guests before they find anything worth reporting back to whoever sent them."

"Twelve against two, Alpha."

"Twelve against two who know this forest better than they know their own family names," Kade said. "I like our odds."

They came down off the ridge from two directions, silent until the moment silence stopped serving them, and the fight that followed was mercifully brief. Kade took the lead rider down first, a full transformation mid-leap that put four hundred pounds of muscle and teeth into the man's chest before he'd finished drawing his blade, and the resulting chaos, horses screaming, men shouting warnings that came too late, gave Finn the opening to disable two more before the rest even registered what had attacked them.

It ended with six riders unconscious or too injured to fight, four fled back toward the border at a dead gallop, and the scarred lead rider pinned beneath Kade's forepaws, alive, breathing hard, staring up at six hundred pounds of Alpha wolf with the particular terror of a man who had heard stories his whole life and never quite believed them until this exact moment.

Kade shifted back to human form slowly, deliberately, letting the man watch the transformation happen so there could be no mistaking what he'd just survived.

"Who sent you," Kade said. It wasn't a question so much as a promise that the alternative to answering would be considerably worse than the bruises the man already carried.

"I don't know his name." The rider's voice shook, and Kade believed the fear even before he believed the words. "We were hired through an intermediary. Gold up front, more on delivery, no questions asked about who was paying."

"Delivery of what?"

"A girl. Description matched a court portrait we were shown, gray eyes, dark hair, royal bearing. We were told to bring her back alive if we found her, and to make certain nobody else found out we'd been looking." The man swallowed hard. "We were told, if it came to it, that a body would also satisfy the contract. Just not one anyone could trace back to us."

Kade went very still, and beside him he felt Finn go equally rigid, both of them absorbing the same cold understanding at once. Someone wanted Sera found, or wanted her permanently silenced, and wanted it done in a way that left no trail back to whoever had commissioned it. Not her father's men. Not an honest rescue.

Someone at Everfell's own court wanted the princess erased before she could return home and complicate whatever plans her disappearance had already set into motion.