Smoke curled up from controlled fires, thin gray ribbons stitching the camp to the bruised sky. Wolves moved in tight patterns—hauling the wounded, salving burns where cracked vials had spat wolfsbane, burning everything the enemy had touched. Orders rolled from Dimitri's throat in a steady cadence that kept panic from finding a foothold.
Elysia stood at the edge of the motion, muscles singing from the fight, shoulder bandage warm against her skin. The ache she could ignore. The weight under it—stares that measured and doubted—ground in like grit. She had bled beside them and watched their suspicion sharpen. Strength, she was learning, didn't calm fear. It concentrated it.
Cathal ghosted to her side so quietly she felt him before she saw him. "You're quiet today."
"Thinking," she said. "You all right?"
He nodded, too quickly. His gaze snagged on the triage circle where the healer cut a bolt free from a warrior's thigh and packed the wound with bitter paste. "Will they come back?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said. "But if they do, we'll be ready."
He swallowed. "We," he repeated, like a vow he wanted her to sign. Elysia didn't answer. She didn't have to. His shoulders eased.
Across the yard, a door slammed so hard it rattled its frame. Kieran strode from Dimitri's quarters with storm in his eyes and his jaw locked. He had gone in angry; he came out angrier. Elysia could imagine the words inside—Get rid of her—because she had heard men dress fear in those clothes before.
Later, alone at the forest's edge, she let the camp's noise thin to the hush of pine and wind. The argument in her chest—go, stay—didn't quiet. Leaving would be easier. It would also be the kind of easy that calcifies into regret.
"Are you going to leave?" Cathal's voice tugged her from the thought. He had a talent for appearing when the world teetered.
"I don't know," she said, because lies and children never should share breath. "Maybe it's better if I do."
"No." His face hardened, startling as a blade drawn from velvet. "They don't trust you, but I do."
Elysia exhaled a breath that felt like it had waited years to be let out. "I'll stay. For now," she said. "It might get harder."
"Then we fight harder," he answered, small hands balling in a way that made her chest ache.
She left him with the healer and took the perimeter herself. She told Dimitri she needed air; she didn't say she needed certainty. The forest gave her both.
The tracks she found were fresh—too fresh to be chance. Heavy pawprints cut a deliberate line toward Shadowclaw ground, evenly spaced, weight forward. Not a hunt. A march.
She crouched and splayed her fingers against the damp earth. Beneath the musk of wolf lay the faint, sour sting of wolfsbane dust. A human boot print ghosted the edges of the trail, toe digging in as if the wearer had guided the wolves like cattle.
Not a pack raid. A tether.
Elysia rose and followed the line three dozen paces, then stopped dead. The pawprints doubled back on themselves in a shallow S, looping to create more than there were. A trick. She took a slow breath and studied the dirt. The front pads were too clean for the distance covered; something had brushed them between steps. She scraped at a print with her nail and found the smear of gray paste in the pad's bowl.
They'd doctored the feet to leave a trail that would be easy to read and wrong to trust.
When she reached the camp again, her pulse was a drum in her throat. Dimitri stood at the training ground with his captains, lines etched between his brows that hadn't been there yesterday.
"I found a line of prints heading straight for us," Elysia said without preamble. "Too perfect. They're baiting a recon."
Dimitri's face darkened. Kieran appeared at his shoulder with friction in his smile. "Why would we believe a rogue whose arrival coincides with attacks?"
"Because wolfsbane paste sits in the pads," Elysia said. "Humans laid the line. Hunters. They've leashed wolves and they're walking them like dogs."
The captains traded wary looks. Dimitri lifted a hand, quieting the murmur. "We verify. Double patrols now. Recon at dusk." His eyes stayed on Elysia. "You're on it."
Kieran's head snapped. "You're really bringing her?"
"She reads the ground," Dimitri said. "Tonight we need ground read."
They moved at last light—nine wolves and one rogue threading the trees, sound swallowed by damp earth. Breath smoked in the cold. The forest held its hush like a secret.
Kieran took the right flank, eyes raking the shadowed trunks as if they'd personally offended him. Elysia held the center line. Dimitri ranged just ahead, silent as snowfall, blade slung low at his spine.
The trail was almost eager to be followed. Elysia let it lead—then let her eyes drift wide to what it wanted her to miss. A snapped twig where none should be. A scuff that angled away from the bright prints at a human's stride. A knotted cord, hair-thin, stretched across brush at knee height—oiled and nearly invisible.
"Stop," she breathed.
The team froze. Dimitri didn't ask; he follows the tilt of her chin to the cord. Kieran tensed, then scoffed. "A rabbit snare."
"Wolfsbane trip-line," Elysia said. "That knot holds a vial. The minute we hit it, the air becomes a throat you can't breathe through."
Dimitri sheared the line with a knife and caught the tiny clay bulb as it fell. The paste at its lip smoked where metal brushed it. He wrapped it in leather and pocketed it. His glance at Elysia was brief, approving—and gone.
They advanced more slowly, cutting two more lines, stepping over a shallow deadfall camouflaged with ferns. Elysia's skin prickled with the certainty that someone watched them count and avoid each blade.
At the edge of a low swale, the trail fanned into a churn that said many bodies had milled and none had settled. Elysia crouched, closed her eyes, and let scent map what prints had tried to confuse: wolf musk; human sweat; iron; the bitter-cold thread of wolfsbane. And something else—a clean, sharp smell like hammered weather. The collector.
She stood. "They're not massing," she said. "They're manufacturing noise. The real push won't come here."
"Then where?" Kieran snapped.
"The other side of our line," she said. "While we peel away to chase ghosts."
Dimitri's gaze cut north toward the ridgeline that guarded the camp's weaker approach. "We're being pulled."
Kieran's mouth tightened. "So we run back because a rogue says boo?"
Dimitri ignored him. "Signal first post," he told the nearest runner. "Then we move—"
The horn rose before the runner could breathe, a single thin note from the north that folded the blood right out of Elysia's face. The same secretive call from nights before. Inside the walls.
They ran.
The forest turned to a smear. Branches clawed. Ground heaved. The horn cut off mid-note. Elysia cleared the last stand of pines and saw torchlight strobing off the palisade. Figures clustered at the northwest fence—too many, too smooth. The gate wasn't broken. It was open by a hand that knew the latch.
"Inside," Dimitri said, low and lethal.
They streamed through the east gate as guards heaved it shut behind them. Panic ran under the camp like a second river. Elysia tore toward the laurel by the northwest corner—toward the gap she had found and closed at dawn.
It was open again. The wire had been eased and set back so carefully it almost looked untouched. Almost.
"Where is Cathal?" Elysia demanded, breath sawing.
A sentry blanched. "With his guard—"
"Which guard?" Dimitri's voice was a whip crack.
The sentry faltered. "Beta's order. He—he reassigned—"
Kieran arrived at a run from the opposite path, hair damp with sweat, fury painted on like war paint. "They've breached the corner—east patrol out of position. We move now—"
"Where is my son?" Dimitri asked without looking at him. The quiet of it made silence ripple outward.
Kieran didn't answer. His eyes slid, quick and wrong. The world tipped.
Elysia didn't wait for permission. She vaulted the laurel, tracking on the run: a child's lighter tread, a man's longer stride, and a third, almost weightless, that left a signature only she would notice—the whisper of ash paste the color of old bones.
"North ditch!" she shouted, and sprinted into the trees.
The ditch cut the ground like a black mouth. Torches bobbed at its far edge—three… no, five. Men, not wolves. Hoods up. One turned at the rustle of her boots and his smile in the torch-glow was the same wrong curve she'd seen in the ravine.
"Hello again," the collector called softly. "I told you the boy would come when a mother's voice asked nicely."
"Let him go," Elysia said, and her voice didn't shake.
The collector's gaze slid past her shoulder. "You're late to your own hunt, Beta."
Elysia didn't turn. She didn't need to. She felt Kieran's approach in the way the air soured behind her, the way Dimitri's breath left his throat like a cut made without a blade.
"Traitor," Dimitri said, and the word dropped like iron.
Kieran's reply was quiet. "Survivor."
The collector lifted one hand. Two of his men hauled a small figure up the ditch wall. Cathal stumbled between them, dazed but on his feet, moonstone pendant catching wild light. A thin band of iron circled his wrist; ash stained its inner rim. He wasn't screaming. He was too brave for that. His eyes found Elysia and something in them steadied so fast it hurt to see.
"Two bargains," the collector said pleasantly. "The Ashen Wolf for the boy, or the boy for the Ashen Wolf. Either fills my purse. Choose loud, so the pack remembers who decided."
Dimitri stepped to Elysia's left, blade low, shoulders squared. "You don't get to speak our choices."
"Oh, but I do," the collector said. He flicked his fingers.
Soft thwips split the air. Three quarrels hissed. Elysia knocked the first aside with her forearm—pain flared white—Dimitri swayed and the second kissed his shoulder; the third struck dirt at her foot and burst, smoking. Wolfsbane tore the air open.
"Down!" Elysia snapped, shoving Dimitri aside as the green fog crawled low and hungry. She pulled the bandana from her throat and pressed it to her mouth, eyes streaming.
The collector's men dragged Cathal backward toward a net strung between two saplings—a weave thick with paste that smoked where it touched torch-heat. Elysia's vision blurred. A choice sharpened.
"Take one more step," she told the collector, voice raw, "and I will—"
"Shift," he finished, smiling. "Yes. Do."
The collar burns at her throat pulsed as if remembering the weight they missed. Her bones spoke the other language again, the one she had kept sealed. Dimitri's hand crashed onto her forearm, grip iron. "Elysia—"
He didn't say don't. He didn't have to. The law. Her vow. The boy.
Kieran raised two fingers. Crossbows lifted like the lifting of a tide.
Elysia moved.
Heat roared up from the dark place. Skin cracked into something older. The first quarrel shattered on bone that wasn't bone anymore. She hit the ditch lip, claws biting mud, the wolfsbane fog clawing her lungs, vision tunneling on a small shape struggling in a net that smoked where it kissed his skin—
The moonstone snapped free of its chain and spun in the air like a tiny, falling star.
"Elysia!" Cathal cried, voice breaking—