He sets his jaw, lips pinched together. I step on his throat with a booted foot.
“Code.”
He tells me. I punch it in. The gate opens.
The teenager moves. She scoops up the toddler. Grabs the five-year-old’s hand. Behind her, two more children emerge from the back of the room. Seven altogether. All young. All thin. All carrying the silence of wolves who’ve learned that quiet keeps you alive.
The youngest of them looks at my hands, still clawed, the fur not fully receded. She doesn’t flinch. She reaches up and wraps her fingers around one of mine, and the grip is so small and so deliberate that something inside me breaks clean in half.
I lead them into the corridor. Past the medical room. Past the equipment I don’t look at. Toward the side entrance I broke open. Behind me, seven children follow because the alternative is staying in a cage.
The radio is dead. Has been since I entered the building. Something in the structure—shielding, dampening, whatever the Syndicate uses to suppress their captives—has killed the signal. The team doesn’t know where I am.
But I know where Willow is. Not through the radio, not through sight. Through the pull. The same pull that’s been connecting us since that very first night; the bond I’ve been calling attraction and obsession and everything except what it might actually be.
Mate.
The word surfaces, and I don’t push it back down. Not tonight. Tonight I’m half-shifted in a Syndicate facility with sevenchildren behind me and the woman I’m bonded to somewhere in the building next door, and there’s no room left for denial.
The thought doesn’t scare me. It settles. Like a fact I’ve been circling that finally stopped moving long enough for me to see it whole.
We reach the side entrance. The compound outside is noise and fire; smoke from the depot, shouts, the distant roar of Jericho making another pass. I check the route. Clear for now. The south exit is two hundred yards of open ground.
I pull the shift back further. Not all the way. I keep the strength, the speed, the wolf’s senses. But my hands need to hold a child, and claws aren’t built for that.
“Stay close to me,” I tell the teenager. “Don’t stop. Whatever you see or hear, keep moving south.”
She nods. Once. No questions. A wolf who knows how to take orders when survival depends on it.
I pick up the toddler. She clings to my torn shirt with both fists and buries her face against my shoulder. She’s shaking. Warm. Lighter than she should be.
We go.
Out the side entrance. Into the firelit compound—smoke and noise and the distant shape of Jericho banking against the stars. The teenager is beside me, the five-year-old’s hand locked in hers, the other children close behind. We move south, past burning vehicles and scattered guards, toward the extraction point.
My radio is dead. My team doesn’t know I’m here.
But the bond is alive. A warm line running through the facility’s suppression, connecting me to the woman inside the main building. Faint. Dampened by whatever shielding fills these walls. But there.
She’s alive. She’s fighting. She’s doing what she came to do.
And I’m carrying the children out of the place I helped fill.
The toddler buries her face against my neck. Her heartbeat is fast and small against my chest.
We keep moving.
Chapter 27
Willow
The door blows inward, and I’m through it before the hinges stop screaming.
The facility’s interior is a maze. Corridors branching left and right, fluorescent strips buzzing overhead, the smell of antiseptic and confined wolves thick enough to choke on. My thread-sense is already working: reaching ahead, feeling for the bonds I’ve been tracking for weeks. They’re here. Close. The Ravenclaw signatures are unmistakable, even muffled by whatever dampening technology fills these walls.
I lead the breach team left. Briar is behind me, silent, knife drawn, covering our six. Two Ravenclaw fighters flank us, fur bristling over their powerful wolf forms, fangs gleaming in the flickering light.
The corridor is empty, but not for long. I can hear shouts echoing from somewhere deep in the building, the compound waking up to the fact that the assault isn’t just at the fences.