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Imogene gave Conan a questioning look before she left. He nodded and said nothing else.

He insisted I take the loft that night, and he slept down on the bedroll below.

In the quiet of the cottage, I thought about him sleeping here last night. I could smell him on the bedding. He’d slept with barely anything on, which I’d noticed acutely that morning when he’d climbed down the ladder with his muscles moving sinuously.

And then all the time we’d spent here today. Working together. Eating together.

When I’d fallen forward and he’d caught me, he’d cradled me to his chest—his warm, muscular, bare chest. He’d held me in his strong arms.

And then…that gentle kiss on the top of my head.

I thought about his lips. What it would feel like to kiss them…

No. That was wrong. He was a shifter, a wolf. Enemy to the Order.

But now?

I pressed my fingers to my lips as I drifted to sleep.

The next morning he brought me from the cottage to where the pack lived. With the Crimson Order sending a clearance team into wolf territory, not only was my life in danger, but the lives of all the shifters here.

It could be a bloodbath.

We had to prepare.

We walked north, then east, along a route off the corridor. Conan didn’t take a path I would have recognized as one. He chose a stream bed, then a deer trail, then a turn in the hills. I counted my paces. Old habit.

The ground dropped into a hollow ringed by ridges, steep on three sides, with the river cutting through the fourth. A village appeared, obscured by the trees above.

Cabins and longhouses sat low along the riverbank, some half into the hillside. Smoke rose from a dozen chimneys and thinned before it could climb high enough to be seen. Racks of fish and venison hung drying under the eaves.

I scanned for exits. The river, the trail we’d come in on, and a cut in the northern ridge, where a sentry stood with a bow. Whoever had selected this location had chosen well.

Although Conan had assured me that he’d notified the pack that we were coming and that we’d be safe, shifters stopped when they saw me, and my muscles tensed. A man splitting wood lowered his axe. Two women at the river straightened with wet laundry in their arms. A little girl ran and hid behind a woman’s skirts, and I understood why when I looked down at myself.

The red cloak. The Crimson Order had walked straight into their safe space.

No one said a word. They looked at Conan, and whatever he communicated kept them from coming closer. It didn’t soften the hate in their stares.

I kept my hands where they could see them, showing I wasn’t a threat.

Past the last longhouse, on a rise above the river, stood rows of cairns. Small stacked stones, marking the dead.

Imogene stepped out of the largest longhouse, and her gaze pinned on me in her assessing way. “Come here.”

We followed her inside where a long table ran beneath hanging lamps. Along the back wall, shelves climbed to the rafters, crammed with boxes, bound ledgers, and bundles of paper tied with string. The box in the cellar had been a sample. This was the archive.

“Everything we’ve taken off the Order,” he said.

“And what we’ve written down ourselves,” Imogene added.

Then we got to work to prepare for the Crimson Order. She spread a map of the territory across the table, and I marked every approach a clearance team might take, every place I would have set a line, every ridge I’d have used to push. Wolves came and went all day, some on two legs and some on four, carrying reports from the watch posts. They moved the children and elders to the caves above the northern cut. They doubled the sentries. They listened when I spoke, even when they wouldn’t look at me.

At one point, Imogene paused. “Tell me the names of the six.” Somehow she managed to do so without sneering or glaring at me with accusation.

So I told her. All of them, in order, with dates.

Imogene noted their names in a ledger. She put her pen down. “Say that one again.”