Page 7 of Alpha’s Divine Claim

Dane shifts his weight. He’s already doing what an Alpha does with a threat, turning it toward a plan the pack can carry out. Find where Faelan’s built something. Go there. Tear it down. They’re reaching for the last fight, the one that ended at the ward-stone network, the one they already know they can win. They want a thing they can put their hands on. There isn’t one. The thing they want to go destroy is inside Nova, Harper and Kari. There’s nowhere to march to, nothing to break.

I make myself consider the harmless version, where these are just old marks stirring on their own now that the network’s down, nothing behind them. It doesn’t hold - this was made to do something, and someone is still working it. The dread I carried out of this room yesterday finishes turning into something harder. I can’t hold it as a careful maybe anymore. The honest answer is worse than they’re bracing for, worse when said out loud. I could keep the worst of it back until I know the whole design but they’d keep bracing for a fight that isn’t coming. It would be easy. It’s what I usually do. Not this time. Nova, Harper, and Kari carry this in their bodies. They have the right to know what’s in them.

“It isn’t leftover damage,” I say to the room, and I don’t soften it. “It’s a design. Deliberate. His.” I wait until I have all of them. “This isn’t a structure out there to find and break. It’s already here. It’s in them.”

Nobody moves for the moment it takes to land. Dane gets there first. He doesn’t flinch, one slow breath in and out before he sets himself, already turning the problem toward what the pack does now. Nova hasn’t moved at all, still and inward the strategist is already three moves down a road none of us can see yet. Kari’s gone quiet, the have jokes run dry, her buzzing hand closed in a loose fist against her thigh. Behind her, Rafe has gone rigid at the door. I don’t have to look at him to know what’s in him. He was in the North Range when she put her palm to that mural. He knew what that ground could do, he let her walk up to it. He’s blamed himself for it ever since.

Ben’s hand closes on the back of a chair. What’s in him reaches me just as clearly. Harper got hers in the season he spent turning away from her, when she touched the Debt Stone with no one at her back, because he’d made sure he wasn’t there. His hand finds her shoulder now, like it can make up the distance after the fact. Harper reaches up and covers his hand with hers, holding it there.

“If it’s deliberate,” Dane says, “what’s it for?”

That’s the question I can’t answer. I give him the truth instead of a guess. “I don’t know yet. He didn’t set these records in our people for nothing. It points somewhere. I haven’t read where.”

Every person here is looking to me now. I can be right about all of it and still not be able to keep them safe. I hold each of their eyes in turn anyway. Before I leave I stop in front of Nova, Kari, then Harper. A hand on each, nothing said. It’s the only promise I can make them right now, and they take it for what it is. Then I step out of Lyanna’s healing space into the August afternoon. The heat off the porch steps is instant after the cool inside, pine, cut grass and horses on the air, the light warm where it lands on my arms. The door swings shut behind me. Out at the treeline, where the light stops under the pines, he’s there. The man I can’t see into. My attention goes to him, the same as it has for months. I let it.

I cross the yard knowing what these marks are but not why. He stays at the edge of the trees. He’s behind me the whole way, I don’t have to turn around to know he’s there.

Chapter 5

Valen

Icome down from the treeline onto the open ground I picked last night. Packed dirt under my boots, warm where the sun clears the ridge, cool still in the last of the shade. I keep an even pace. I walked this line in my head all night until the sun came up. I hold to it now, unhurried, the same as if I did this every morning of my life.

A wolf near the horse line catches my scent before she sees me. Her head comes up, her eyes find me and everything in her goes still. One wolf at a time, the rest follow her look. The morning noise drops out under it, someone’s laugh cut off mid-breath, a hammer stopping on the downswing. I hold the same pace all the way.

They take me in exactly as I expected. Not as stranger they’ve never seen but as the thing they’ve caught at the edge of their sight for months and never caught. Warriors go alert without drawing. They hold their ground and wait to see what I do.

Kari’s the first to find her voice. “Took you long enough,” she says, arms crossed, watching me cross the last of the open ground. “We were running a pool on whether you’d ever grow a pair.”

I stop where I mean to, hands open and visible at my sides, empty on purpose, so no one has to wonder.

“Nova had money on Midsummer,” I say. “Wyatt said never.”

Her arms come down off her chest, the humor goes with them. I’ve named two people and a bet none of them said out loud where I should have been able to hear it. She doesn’t answer but looks away first. Behind her, a younger wolf has gone very still. Mateo. He’s rigid, staring at me like he’s finally matching a face to something that was only ever a presence in the dark. He spent a night convinced I was standing twelve feet from him and couldn’t put a face to the certainty. Now he has one.

Rafe steps out ahead of the others. He’s one of three who’ve actually laid eyes on me before today, at the edge of the last fight, when I let more show than I meant to. He looks me over, once, slowly, deciding something. When he speaks his accent stretches on the hard words, the same lift I grew up hearing in the North Range, back before I ever called myself Grey.

“He’s the one who’s been on our line.” Rafe says it to Dane, not me. “Months. He’s never moved on us. Not in all that time.”

That’s the whole account he owes anyone and he gives it without padding. He turns his attention back to me and holds it there. We take each other’s measure in the space of one breath. Neither of us says anything else. The pull at the back of my skull sharpens before I’ve located her. It always does lately, the same place it’s sat since the first night I caught her signature from the ridge and didn’t understand it. I turn. Nyxiana. I’ve had her name as long as I’ve had anyone’s, and I still don’t let myself use it if I can help it.

She’s standing at the edge of a knot of pack members, weight even on both feet, hands still at her sides. Silver hair catching the early sun, pale enough it looks lit from inside. Her eyes are violet, flecked through with silver, a color I’ve never seen on anything else living. She’s smaller than the wolves standing near her. Nothing about her build says wolf, something leaner and more exact, coiled into that stillness like she could move before she needs to.

Heat goes through me low and immediate. My hands close once at my sides and open again. I take her in longer than I should. I tell myself it’s the same habit that takes in every room I walk into. It isn’t. I just want to look at her. I make myself go back to watching the pack. It doesn’t hold as easily as it usually does. Her attention is already on me. It isn’t the wariness the rest of them are aiming at me. She’s gone still, focused, like she’s working something out I can’t see. It catches on me for the length of a held breath. Then she covers it. Her chin lifts a fraction, shoulders set. Whatever was loose in her stance draws in and locks. I know exactly where her hands are, exactly how much ground is between us, down to the step.

Dane. The Alpha. I’d have known that from how the yard moves around him even without the name. He comes through his own pack without breaking stride. Wolves step out of his way, clearing a straight path through the yard. He stops an even distance from me, close enough that neither of us has to raise a voice.

“Who are you? What are you? Why have you been watching my pack for months, and why are you standing in my yard now?”

Every wolf behind him stands the demand with him. Fifty of them wanting the same answer, all of them waiting on me. I hold his look.

“I’ve been on your line for months. I know your rotations, patrols, horses.” A breath. “I walked in this morning because I picked the morning. Nobody found me.”

“Why now?”

“Because I decided to.”

Dane’s eyes stay fixed on mine. “What are you?”