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“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means you don’t have to fight like a wolf who grew up here. You grew up with him. You know things about how he moves and how he thinks that none of us will ever know. That’s not a weakness you have to apologize for. It’s an advantage nobody else in this compound has.”

Sloane’s throat tightened around something she didn’t have a name for, and she pushed it down the way she always did, flat and controlled, until it stopped pressing against her ribs.

“I train every morning,” she said. “Before anyone’s awake. I hit the bag until my hands bleed through the wraps. I run the perimeter twice. And it’s still not enough, because every time I picture him walking through that door again, I go back to being six years old standing in a doorway, and I don’t know how to train that out of my body.”

“You can’t train it out.”

Sloane looked at her.

“You can build something stronger next to it,” Olivia said. “You can’t erase what your body learned when you were small. Nobody can. But you can teach it something new to reach for when the old thing tries to take over.”

“I hate this.” The words came out low, and she didn’t try to soften them. “I hate needing help. I hate that a man who hasn’t had power over me for years can still make my hands shake.”

“You’re not asking for help. I’m offering it.” Olivia set the book down on the bench between them. “There’s a difference, even if it doesn’t feel like one from where you’re sitting.”

Footsteps on the garden path. Caitlynn came around the hedge with a mug in each hand, and she held one out to Sloane without asking whether she wanted it.

“Viktor told me about the scout,” Caitlynn said. “I want to help you train.”

Sloane wrapped both hands around the mug and didn’t drink. “I don’t need a babysitter.”

“I’m not offering to babysit. I’m offering to shift and come at you full force, no holding back, because a heavy bag doesn’t teach you what it feels like when something is actually trying to kill you.” Caitlynn sat on the grass across from the bench, unbothered by the damp. “I’ve fought for my life more than once in this pack. I know the difference between training and preparing.”

“And you,” Sloane said to Olivia. “What, you’re going to read to me while I bleed?”

Olivia’s mouth curved, not quite a smile. “I’m going to build a working ward in the training yard that mimics resistance, changes the terrain under your feet, throws obstacles you can’t predict. Garrett isn’t going to fight you in an open field with nothing between you and him. He’ll use the ground. I can teach the ground to fight back before he gets the chance.”

Sloane looked between them, the woman with fire she’d once called a stranger and the woman with magic she’d once dismissed as useless, both of them sitting in the wet grass on a Tuesday afternoon because a man had stood at a tree line and let himself be seen.

“Why?” she asked with a fractured voice, and had to stop and start again. “Why would either of you do this?”

“Because we’re a pack, Sloane,” Caitlynn explained. “And that makes us a family, whether you want it or not.”

She blinked furiously. “I didn’t ask for this.”

“No,” Olivia said. “You didn’t. That’s rather the point.”

Sloane drank from the mug. Chamomile, no honey, still warm. She didn’t say thank you, because the words sat somewhere behind her teeth and refused to come forward, but she didn’t get up and leave either, and for her that was close enough to the same thing.

“Tomorrow,” she said finally. “Five-thirty. Before the compound wakes.”

Caitlynn was already on her feet, brushing grass from her jeans. “I’ll be there in fur.”

“And I’ll have the ground ready,” Olivia said.

Sloane watched them walk back toward the main house, matching pace without discussing it, and she sat alone on the bench with the empty mug in her lap and the memory of a grey wolf standing at a stone that hadn’t been breached, only visited, only shown.

He wanted her to know he could reach her.

She stood, set the mug on the bench, and walked toward the training yard to hit something before the light left.

Chapter 17 - Chris

Viktor spread the map across the study table at seven in the morning, before the dining hall had filled, before Chris had finished his first cup of coffee.

“Ward gaps,” Viktor said. “I need someone to walk the perimeter and mark every point where the resonance drops. Not from a report. On foot.”