SERA POV
"You want to use my children as bait?" Lyra's voice was deadly quiet.
"Not the real children," I said firmly. "Decoys. Two of our best warriors under a glamour spell. Elena thinks she's so smart—let's show her what real strategy looks like."
Kade was staring at me like he'd never seen me before. "You've changed."
"Five years of keeping my children alive in the Wastelands changed me." I turned to Elder Thea. "Can you do the glamour?"
"Yes, but I'll need two volunteers willing to risk their lives. If Elena discovers the trick before we spring the trap, she'll kill them."
"I'll do it," Finn said immediately.
"And me," Lyra added, her eyes fierce. "I'd die for those kids anyway. Might as well make it count."
"No one's dying," I snapped. "That's the whole point. We make Elena think she's won, draw her and Marcus into one location, then hit them with everything we have."
Kade's tactical mind was already working. "We'd need perfect timing. If either force realizes it's a trap too early—"
"They won't. Because we're going to give them exactly what they expect—desperate parents willing to sacrifice everything to save their warriors."
"And what happens to the real twins while we're doing this?" Kade demanded.
"They stay in the bunker with a full security detail. Twenty of my best rogues plus twenty of your strongest warriors. Enough firepower to hold off an army."
Elder Thea nodded slowly. "It could work. But Sera, you're asking these people to trust each other. Rogues and pack wolves have been enemies for generations."
"Then it's time that changed," I said coldly. "Because our enemies just united against us. If we don't unite back, we all die."
Another explosion rocked the packhouse. Closer this time.
"We're out of time," Kade said. "Everyone who's in, meet in the war room in five minutes. Everyone else, evacuate to the bunkers now."
The next few minutes were chaos. Warriors running in every direction. Parents grabbing children. The sick being carried to safety underground.
I knelt in front of Aria and Asher, my heart breaking.
"You have to go to the bunker, babies. With Lyra's second-in-command, Marcus." I gestured to the massive rogue warrior who'd helped me survive my first year in the Wastelands. "He'll keep you safe."
"No!" Aria grabbed my jacket. "I want to stay with you!"
"You can't. It's too dangerous."
"Then don't go!" Asher's eyes were huge with tears. "Please, Mama. I feel how scared you are. Don't go where the bad people are."
My empathic son. Feeling everything I tried to hide.
"I'm scared," I admitted. "But you know what? Being brave doesn't mean you're not scared. It means you're scared and you do the hard thing anyway."
Kade knelt beside me. "Your mama and I are going to stop the bad people so they can never hurt you again. But we need you to be brave and trust us. Can you do that?"
Both twins looked at him, then at me, then at each other in that weird twin way they had—like they were having a whole conversation without words.
Finally, Aria nodded. "Okay. But you have to promise to come back."
"I promise," I said.
"Both of you promise," Asher insisted, looking at Kade.
"I promise," Kade swore. "Nothing will stop me from coming back to you."
We hugged them both tight, then watched Marcus lead them away to the bunker. Every step they took felt like someone ripping my heart out.
"If this goes wrong—" I started.
"It won't," Kade interrupted. "We're not losing them. Not after I just found them."
In the war room, fifty of my rogues stood on one side, fifty of Kade's pack warriors on the other. The tension was thick enough to cut.
"Listen up!" Kade's Alpha voice commanded instant silence. "I know pack and rogues have been enemies. I know some of you have killed each other's friends. But right now, we have a common enemy who wants to destroy both our people and murder two innocent children. So here's how this is going to work—you're going to fight together, or you're going to get out of my way."
One of his warriors, a scarred male named Drake, stepped forward. "With respect, Alpha, how do we know the rogues won't betray us mid-battle?"
Lyra snarled. "How do we know your pack won't do the same? You exiled Sera for treason she didn't commit. Why should we trust you?"
"Because I'm vouching for them," I said, my voice cutting through the rising argument. "Every rogue here has bled for me. Fought for me. They're more loyal than any pack wolf I ever met."
"And I'm vouching for my warriors," Kade added. "They follow orders. And I'm ordering them to treat the rogues as allies."
Drake and Lyra stared each other down for a long moment. Then Drake held out his hand.
"For the children," he said gruffly.
Lyra gripped his hand. "For the children."
Just like that, the tension broke. Wolves on both sides started nodding, accepting each other.
Elder Thea stepped forward with Finn and Lyra—the two who'd volunteered to be glamoured as the twins. She began chanting, her hands glowing with ancient magic.
The air shimmered around Finn and Lyra. When it cleared, they looked exactly like Aria and Asher—same size, same faces, same silver eyes.
"Creepy," Finn muttered in a voice that now sounded like a four-year-old's.
"How long will it last?" I asked.
"Two hours, maybe three. After that, the magic fades."
"Then we move fast." Kade spread a map on the table. "Here's the plan. Sera and I will take the decoys to the neutral ground Elena specified. We act desperate and defeated. The moment Elena and Marcus commit their forces to the exchange, our combined pack-rogue army hits them from three sides."
"What if they don't take the bait?" one of my rogues asked.
"They will," I said with certainty. "Because Elena doesn't just want to win. She wants us to suffer. She'll want to gloat, to see the look on our faces when she takes what she thinks are our children. Her arrogance will be her downfall."
We spent the next thirty minutes planning every detail. Who would attack from which direction. Signal codes. Backup plans.
Finally, it was time.
Kade and I walked out of the packhouse with glamoured-Finn and glamoured-Lyra holding our hands. To anyone watching, we looked like broken parents bringing our children to slaughter.
The mate bond hummed between us—both of us terrified but hiding it.
"If this goes wrong," Kade said quietly, "if Elena gets past us somehow—"
"She won't."
"But if she does, promise me you'll run. Take the real twins and disappear. I'll hold her off as long as I can."
I looked at him—really looked. At the man who'd destroyed me and spent five years trying to fix it. The father who'd known his children for hours but would die for them without hesitation.
"No more running," I said. "We fight together, or we die together."
Kade's hand found mine, our fingers interlacing. "Together."
We reached the neutral ground—an open field between territories. Elena was already there with Marcus Redclaw beside her. Behind them, the twelve captured warriors knelt in chains.
And behind them, an army of at least three hundred wolves.
We were so outnumbered.
Elena's smile was vicious. "I didn't think you'd actually come. Guess parental love is stronger than I thought."
"Let the warriors go," Kade demanded. "You get what you want. Release them."
"Show me the children first."
I pushed glamoured-Finn and glamoured-Lyra forward. They played their parts perfectly—Finn crying like Asher would, Lyra glaring like Aria.
Elena studied them, and my heart stopped. Could she tell? Did she know?
Then she smiled. "Perfect. Marcus, release the warriors."
Marcus cut the chains. The twelve warriors stumbled to their feet, bloody but alive.
"Run," Kade ordered them. "Get back to the territory."
They ran.
Elena held out her hands. "Now. The twins."
This was it. The moment of truth.
I pushed the decoys toward her, my face a mask of devastation. "Don't hurt them. Please. Whatever else you do, don't hurt them."
Elena's laugh was cruel. "Oh, Sera. I'm going to do so much worse than hurt them."
She grabbed glamoured-Asher's arm—and froze.
Her eyes went wide.
"This isn't—" She ripped away glamoured-Aria's sleeve, revealing adult muscle beneath the child's appearance. "It's a trick! ATTACK!"
"NOW!" Kade roared.
Our combined army erupted from the tree line on three sides. Rogues and pack wolves fighting together, a tidal wave of teeth and claws and fury.
Elena shifted and lunged for me, but Kade intercepted her, both Alphas crashing together in a explosion of power.
Marcus charged me, and I shifted into my midnight wolf form. We collided mid-air, and I felt his shock—I was stronger than he expected.
Five years in the Wastelands hadn't just changed me mentally. It had unlocked something in my bloodline. Power that made me more than an omega, more than a normal wolf.
I was a queen, and I fought like one.
The battle was chaos. Blood and screams and the sound of bones breaking. Our forces were smaller but better coordinated—pack wolves' discipline combined with rogues' vicious creativity.
I lost track of time. Everything became instinct and survival.
Then I saw her.
Elena had broken away from Kade and was running—not toward the battle but away from it.
Toward our territory.
Toward the bunker where the real twins were hidden.
"No!" I screamed, but she was too fast.
I ran after her, my paws eating up the ground, but she had a head start.
She knew. Somehow, she'd figured out where the real children were.
I pushed myself harder, faster, my lungs burning.
I burst into the packhouse to find bodies everywhere—the warriors we'd left to guard the bunker entrance. All dead.
The bunker door was torn open.
I shifted to human form and ran down the stairs, my heart in my throat.
The lower level was silent.
Too silent.
I rounded the corner and saw Marcus—the rogue warrior I'd trusted with my children—on the ground, unconscious but breathing.
The twins were gone.
And on the wall, written in blood, was a message:
Too slow, Sera. They're mine now. Full moon is tomorrow. Come watch your children die—or don't. Either way, they won't survive the night. - E
I fell to my knees, a scream tearing from my throat that wasn't human.
Elena had my babies.
And in twenty-four hours, she was going to steal their souls and kill them.