Page 53 of Curvy Sold Mate

The question hung between them, and Viktor watched his brother receive it—the challenge and the invitation braided together, the first time in four years Viktor had asked Damian to stand with the pack instead of at its periphery.

“I’m here,” Damian said simply.

“Then go.”

Chris and Damian moved together toward the southern corridor, and Viktor watched them go—his brother falling into step beside a man he barely knew, the two of them assembling into a unit in the time it took to round a corner, because that was what a pack did when the territory was threatened: it stopped being individuals and became a body, each part moving toward its function.

Caitlynn appeared at the top of the stairs, her hair loose, her feet bare on the stone, and the golden light was already building in her palms. She looked at Kahn, and what passed between them was fast and private and carried the weight of everything they’d survived together—the battle three years ago, the pregnancy, the fire she’d thrown to protect their daughter, the partnership they’d built from hostility into something that anchored the entire pack’s magical infrastructure.

“The wards,” Kahn said.

“I know. I can feel them fracturing.” Caitlynn lifted her chin determinedly. “I’ll hold them from the great room. Send Olivia to me—I need the interior secured while I work.”

“She’s already on her way,” Viktor said, because the bond had told him so—Olivia’s presence moving through the compound with purpose, her wolf burning bright, her trajectory aimed at the Alpha house with the deliberate precision of a woman who had heard the alarm and had known, without being told, where she was needed.

Kahn was already halfway to the eastern exit. Viktor fell into step beside him—the position he’d held for twenty years, the Alpha’s right side, the space that was his by rank and by instinct and by the years of trust that lived between them.

“Olivia,” Kahn said.

“With Caitlynn. She’ll coordinate the non-combatants and hold the interior if anything gets through.” Viktor nodded stiffly.

Kahn glanced at him. What passed between them was wordless and fast—the recognition that Viktor had sent the woman he loved to the interior, and that the decision had been strategic, and that the strategic and the personal could coexist in the same man, and the coexistence was what made the man functional rather than fractured.

“She’ll hold it,” Kahn said. The sentence was a statement about Olivia and a gift to Viktor simultaneously, the Alpha acknowledging his Beta’s fear without naming it and dismissing it in the same breath, because Kahn knew his sister, and his sister held things.

They reached the eastern exit. The alarm howls were layering now, multiplying from different positions, painting the attack’s shape in sound. Viktor could read them the way he read patrol reports—the first wave hitting the primary breach, thirty wolves at least, moving in formation, disciplined in a way that Marcus’s rabble hadn’t been three years ago. The ransom money had bought him training.

Viktor shifted.

The change took him with the speed of a man who’d been shifting for thirty years—the pain compressed into a fraction of a second, the crack and reshape of bone, the flood of sensation as the human world collapsed into something vaster. Scent exploded: blood already, adrenaline, the rank foreign musk of wolves who didn’t belong to this territory. His wolf settled into his body with the quiet, lethal focus of an animal that had been bred for this, built for this, maintained through twenty years of sparring yards and patrol runs and the relentless discipline of a man who had always known that standing between his pack and what wanted to destroy it was the thing he did best.

Kahn shifted beside him—the Alpha’s wolf, larger, darker, the massive black form that made other wolves clear a path by instinct. They stood at the eastern threshold together, Alpha and Beta, the formation they’d held since the weight of the pack had descended on them both before either was ready for it.

The breach was visible from the ridge—a ragged tear in the ward line, the golden shimmer flickering, and through the gap, dark shapes pouring in with the organized precision of a force that had rehearsed this exact assault. The ransom’s return on investment, and the thought was cold and clear and free of everything except the mathematics of defense.

Except it wasn’t free of everything, because he carried Olivia’s presence in the bond like a second heartbeat—bright, fierce, alive inside the compound, her wolf humming with readiness.

He ran.

Kahn ran beside him, and behind them the pack’s defenders poured from the compound in a wave of fur and teeth and howls that carried across the valley, and Viktor hit the first wave of rogues at full speed, and the night split open, and the battle for the Beaumont territory began.

Chapter 31 - Olivia

The fighting reached the Alpha house in sound before it reached it in bodies—the percussive crack of wolves colliding at speed, the wet snap of jaws meeting fur and bone, the howls that layered over each other until the night was woven thick with them.

Olivia stood at the corridor junction between the great room and the eastern wing with her feet braced and her wolf pressed so hard against the inside of her ribs that her teeth ached. Behind her, twelve people breathed in the Alpha house’s reinforced interior—Elena, three juvenile wolves too young for the front line, two nursing mothers clutching infants who had gone quiet with the animal instinct of young things sensing a predator, and the pack’s elderly, seated along the wall with the stiff-backed composure of people who had survived worse nights than this and intended to survive this one too.

Caitlynn was on the floor of the great room with her palms flat against the stone, her eyes closed, golden light pulsing from her hands into the ward network that ran beneath the compound like a second circulatory system. Sweat darkened the hair at her temples, and her mouth moved without sound, counting something—anchor points, maybe, or frequencies, or the names of the things she was holding together by will alone.

“The eastern anchor is destabilizing,” Caitlynn said through her teeth. “Maren did something to the foundations before we detained her. The matrix is fragmenting from the inside.”

“Can you hold it?”

“I’m holding it.” The golden light flared brighter, hot enough that Olivia felt the heat of it against her shins from twelve feet away. “Keep everything that isn’t us out of this room.”

The bond carried Viktor in fragments—his combat awareness arriving through the connection in sharp, staccato pulses like a radio cutting in and out of range. She felt the impacts against his body as pressure against her own ribs, felt the adrenaline threading through his blood as a metallic taste at the back of her tongue. He was at the eastern breach with Kahn. He was fighting, and he was alive, and the knowledge of his aliveness sat inside her chest alongside her own heartbeat, indistinguishable from it.

She could have reached for him through the bond. Could have pushed her awareness along the connection and found the shape of him in the chaos of the battle, mapped his injuries, measured the distance between the eastern line and the Alpha house in footsteps she would never take, because she was here, at the junction, where the job was.