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I’d carry those four words into whatever waited for us on that ridge.
I lifted the latch, and we walked out into the cold together.
We took the north line an hour after sunrise.
The ridge ran above the draw like a spine, bare granite along the top with pines crowding the slopes below. Ruby had chosen the ground two days ago, bent over the map with her finger on this exact rise. From here, you could see the road where it came out of the trees, the stream cutting across the low meadow, and the long open slope a line of attackers would have to climb.
She’d chosen it because it was the one place on the north side where nobody could be forced off an edge.
The pack had spread along the ridge in the shape she’d drawn in the dirt. Wolves lay flat among the rocks, gray against gray. Others waited in the trees on two legs, bows strung, knives at their belts. Imogene held the eastern end with a dozen of our best. Gage was somewhere below us, running the gap between the two lines, carrying word back and forth faster than anyone else could.
Ruby stood beside me in her red cloak at a high point of the ridge.
Bait. She’d suggested it. They’d pause to make sure she wasn’t one of their own.
I hated her being a target, and I’d do everything in my being to protect her.
They’re coming. Imogene’s voice sounded in my head, taut. Out of the trees now. Conan…
How many?
A pause. Too long.
The twenty-two. And more behind them. Another pause. Gray coats. Crown soldiers. With horses.
I went cold.
Below us, the Order came out of the trees in their red, spreading into a line across the meadow the way Ruby said they would. But behind them came a second line, gray and orderly, the sun glinting off steel. Crown soldiers. Not assassins who struck in the dark. An army, marching in daylight, as if they had every right to be here.
For twelve years, we’d fought the Order, our enemy. But the Order is just the knife, and it was clear who was holding the handle. Here was the rot beneath the red, marching up the Wetherel road in the open. The Crown itself.
“That’s not a clearance operation,” Ruby said quietly beside me. “This is an occupation.”
A rider moved among the gray coats, a tall man on a dark horse, his cloak edged in gold. Ruby’s breath caught.
“Mervyn.” Her voice came out flat, the way it did when she was working. “The Crown liaison. He countersigns every order the Order issues.” She shaded her eyes. “He never leaves the capital. Not for anything.”
I grunted. “Unless there’s land to sign for.”
She turned to me, and I watched her face as she put it together. The land grants. The shell holdings. The decades of packs pushed off their territory and land handed off. They weren’t here to recover one disgraced field operative.
They were here to eliminate us and take the land.
Ruby’s face was pale beneath the freckles, but her jaw was set, her hand resting on the knife at her hip. Her lips parted but she didn’t say a word.
At the back of the line, a covered cart sat at the edge of the trees beside a canvas tent. Its flap was closed. Four figures in red stood around it, motionless.
I looked at her once more, memorizing her. The wind pulling loose strands from her braid. The red cloak against the granite. The small scar at the corner of her lip I’d only noticed last night. Gray eyes met mine. Steady. Determined.
Then I stepped in front of her, and I let the wolf out.
The shift took me in a rush of heat and bone and fur. When it finished, I stood on four feet at the crest of the ridge, between my mate and the army coming to kill her. I turned my head and looked back at her through the wolf’s eyes.
The world had gone sharper and duller at once. Colors faded. But her scent hit me like a wave. Her heart beat louder, hard and fast. She looked straight back at me without an ounce of fear.
She placed her hand between my shoulders and ruffled the fur.
Two in the northwest, blades drawn, Gage reported.
