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Rising. Rising. I dropped my head back and crashed with a shaky cry, shuddering with the climax, as wave after wave swept through me. He surged his body up as he held me and erupted with a fierce growl. He buried his face against my shoulder, his breath hot against the very place where his teeth had dragged the night before.

My body tensed with expectation, a deep part of me craving his bite.

He didn’t reveal his fangs, but kissed me there, gently.

Afterward, we lay tangled together while the light grew brighter through the slats. Neither of us moved.

Eventually, my stomach growled, loud in the quiet loft.

Conan laughed, the breath from it ruffling my hair. “Breakfast, then.”

“Yes.”

We made it together. He fried eggs and cut thick slices of bread while I brewed the tea, black this time, strong enough to face the day. We moved around each other in the small kitchen as if we’d done it for years, his hand brushing my back as he passed, my hip bumping his when he reached across me for the salt.

For one bright, stolen hour, the Crimson Order didn’t exist. It was just the two of us living peacefully together in this cottage.

Then we finished eating, and he looked at the window, and I watched the softness leave his face.

It was time.

We continued strategizing in the longhouse. I went over everything I knew with Conan and Imogene. The approaches. The ridgelines. The dead ground where a line of six could hide. The river crossing where they’d expect us to run. He listened the way he always did, asking sharp questions, never once waving my answers away. Imogene stood across the map, arms folded, and when I’d pointed out where they’d advance from, she corrected a landmark.

“You’re right,” I agreed. “You know this terrain better than me.”

She looked faintly surprised.

She exchanged a glance with Conan, then turned back to me. “You’re prepared to do this then? Fight against the Order?”

I exhaled through my nostrils. It hadn’t been the plan when I’d been sent here, but plans had changed as I learned more about what I’d been part of. I raised my chin a notch. “Absolutely.”

She eyed me for a few seconds before nodding.

A wolf runner came in mid-afternoon and shifted into a young man with a narrow face, breathing hard.

“Gage,” Imogene said.

My whole body went still. Sara Corrin’s son.

He didn’t look at me. “It’s not six. There are twenty-two of them. They’re camped below the draw. They’re not moving yet.”

Twenty-two. Not a clearance team. An operation.

Conan’s eyes met mine across the table. I didn’t need a pack bond to know what he was thinking. Twenty-two operatives didn’t come into wolf territory for one disgraced field operative. They came for all of us.

Gage left for the north line again before I could make myself say a word to him.

The last runner came in at dusk, with the light going green behind her. It was Fern, and she’d run for miles.

“They’ve moved up the road. They’re six miles off now and they’ve stopped again. Twenty-two, same count, and there’s a tent up.”

“A tent?” Imogene said, brows arched.

“A proper one.” The girl caught her breath. “There’s a woman in it. She came up the Wetherel road in a covered cart this morning with four of them, and she hasn’t put a foot on the ground.”

The room had gone very quiet.

I heard myself ask it from somewhere outside my own body.