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The fourth attacker hung back near the tree line, watching. Chris caught its eyes for half a second in the moonlight, pale and calculating, before it turned and vanished into the dark.

He didn’t chase it.

He stood over the two downed wolves, breathing hard, blood hot in his mouth, and looked across the churned dirt of the gate to where Sloane stood over the third, chest heaving, eyes bright with something that hadn’t been there an hour ago.

They’d held the line. Four against two, and they’d held it without breaking a sweat that mattered.

For the first time since the ritual bound them together, Chris let himself believe they might actually be as strong as they needed to be.

He shifted back first. The cold hit his bare skin immediately, and he grabbed the spare clothes kept in the box by the gatehouse before tossing Sloane hers. She caught the bundle without looking at him, pulling her shirt over her head, her breathing still uneven.

Two of the night guards dragged the downed wolves toward the holding pen near the western wall. The third had bolted the moment it could move, favoring a back leg, vanishing into the tree line before anyone could stop it. Chris watched it go and filed the direction away for the morning briefing.

“You’re bleeding,” he muttered.

Sloane touched the side of her ribs and looked at her fingers, red under the moonlight. “Barely.”

“Barely still counts.”

“I’ve had worse.”

“That’s not the reassurance you think it is.”

She almost laughed. It came out short, more breath than sound, but it was real, and it loosened the tension he’d been carrying since the alarm went off. He put a hand on her shoulder, light, testing whether she’d pull away. She didn’t.

“He sent four,” she said quietly. “To test a gate he already knows is guarded.”

“You think it’s a message?”

“I think everything he does is a message.” She looked toward the trees, toward the dark space where the fourth wolf had disappeared. “He wanted to see how we’d respond. Together.”

Chris followed her gaze into the trees, where nothing moved now but wind through the branches, and understood she was right. Somewhere out there her father had gotten exactly what he came for.

Chapter 22 - Sloane

The cut at her ribs bled into the borrowed shirt. She pressed the fabric against it while she walked, keeping pressure with her forearm, her other hand swinging loose at her side. The adrenaline was still in her legs. Her stride was too fast for the path, her boots hitting the gravel hard enough that the night patrol wolf at the western junction stepped aside without being asked.

Chris walked beside her. He hadn’t spoken since the tree line. His hand had stayed on her shoulder for a count of three before he’d let go, and she could still feel the print of it through the cotton, warm against skin gone cold from the shift.

The compound was awaking around them. Lights flickered on in the barracks. A voice carried from the eastern corridor, someone relaying the alarm stand-down. The gatehouse radio crackled behind them, the night lead calling in the all-clear.

“Infirmary,” Chris said sternly.

“It’s a graze.”

“It’s bleeding through your shirt.”

“I’ll deal with it.”

He looked at her. She looked back. His face was streaked with dirt from the gate, blood still dark at the corner of his mouth from the first wolf he’d taken down. He held her eyes for a beat, then nodded once.

“I’ll file the incident report,” he said. “Viktor will want it before dawn.”

“Tell him the fourth one pulled back before engaging. It watched us fight, then ran.”

“I saw.”

“Make sure that’s in the report. The watching matters more than the fighting.”