Something happens inside me that I’ve never felt before. My wolf—the wolf I’ve been crushing for days, burying, denying—explodes from the dark place I put her with a force that nearly takes me off my feet. She doesn’t ask permission. She doesn’t negotiate. She tears through every wall I’ve built, and the sound that comes out of my throat is not human. It’s the howl of a wolf who’s lost her—
I can’t finish the thought. Can’t name what he is to me. Can’t do anything except stand in a corridor full of fleeing wolves with my magic unravelling and my wolf screaming into a void where the bond used to be.
The ward drops. For a full second, the corridor of protection dissolves, and the wolves inside it are exposed. A shot rings out somewhere behind us. Someone screams.
Briar grabs my arm. Hard. Her fingers digging in, her face close to mine, her grey eyes flat and cold and refusing to let me fall apart.
“Willow. These people need you. Right now. Whatever’s happening… hold it together.”
She’s right. The ward is down, and someone is shooting, and the wolves I came here to save are exposed because I can’t hold my magic together because he’s—
You don’t know that. You don’t know he’s dead. The signal could be shielding. Could be the blast disrupting the dampening field. Could be anything.
I rebuild the ward. Force my magic back into shape through the ruins of my control, piece by piece. It’s rough. Uneven. Nothing like the clean constructions I threw at the start of the assault. But it holds. It covers the corridor. They keep moving.
I hold it. I hold everything. The ward, the wolves, the evacuation, and the silence where I used to feel him. I can’t check. I can’t go to the east wing. I’m the only thing standing between thirty lives and the guards trying to end them.
So I stand here. I hold the ward. I do my job.
And underneath the job, in the place where the bond used to be, a thought surfaces that I can’t push back down:I never decided.All those weeks of fighting the pull, burying the wolf, telling myself the anger was enough… I never actually chose. I just refused to. And now the choice might be gone, taken by a blast in a building I can’t reach, and the thing I feel isn’t rage or grief. It’s the sick, plummeting certainty that I wasted something I can’t get back.
The thought lasts three seconds. I bury it the way I’ve buried everything else. There are wolves in this corridor who need me vertical.
The evacuation continues. Through the corridor, past intersections Briar has cleared, toward the south exit. Dane is at the chokepoint where the corridor meets the main hall, a wall of golden wolf holding the line alone while families stream past. Sienna appears and disappears, carrying a wolf who can’t walk, moving so fast the guards can’t track her.
Brenna finds me. Her white flame lights the corridor as she clears the final stretch to the exit.
“Stand firm,” she yells. We work side by side, her fire and my wards, aunt and niece, two Corvus women clearing the path. Hermagic is precise, where mine is ragged; hers controlled, where mine is held together with fury and willpower. But together, we’re enough. The corridor holds. The wolves move through.
Then… outside. The south exit. Cool air and smoke and the sound of Jericho making another pass, fire sweeping the north compound. I push the last wolves through the door and feel the night on my face. The dampening field drops away, and my thread-sense opens wide—
And he’s there.
Not a signal. A shape. A man. Coming across the open ground from the east wing with a toddler on his hip, a teenager beside him, and five children behind them. He’s limping. There’s blood on his shirt. His left arm hangs at an angle that says something is wrong with the shoulder. But he’s moving. And the children are moving. The toddler has her face buried against his chest, and she’s clinging to him.
“Oh, thank God!” My legs nearly go. The relief is so total it nearly takes me to my knees, and only the fact that I’m still holding a ward keeps me standing. My wolf is howling. Not in grief now, in recognition, in the frantic joy of an animal that found what it lost.
I don’t go to him. Not yet. There are survivors to load, vehicles to fill, an evacuation to complete. But I look at him across the burning compound—carrying those children out of the place he helped support—and something unlocks in my chest that I’ve been keeping sealed since the night I left his bed.
Briar appears beside me. She’s covered in dust. There’s a cut on her forehead, and she’s carrying something in her jacket. She doesn’t show me what she’s carrying. I don’t ask. But I see the shape of it in her jacket—small, soft, the kind of thing a child sleeps with. And I see her face, which is the same inscrutable mask it always is.
“Where were you?” I ask, though I don’t suppose it really matters now.
“Storage room in the east corridor,” she says, not looking at me. Looking at the compound burning behind us. “Boxes of personal belongings. Taken from the wolves when they arrived. Clothes, bags, shoes.” Her voice is flat. Even for Briar, it’s flat. “Children’s things.”
Her features are set in grim lines. She looks at the burning compound one more time, and when she speaks again, her voice is different. Quiet. Aimed.
“He’ll answer for every name in those boxes.”
She doesn’t say who. She doesn’t need to. We both know which Forrester stayed behind.
The sentence silences something in me. Not because of the words—after what we’ve seen tonight, vengeance is the mildest thing any of us is feeling. It’s the way she says them. The fury too concentrated, too personal. Briar doesn’t do personal.
I don’t examine it. There’s no room for it tonight.
We load the vehicles, the convoy filling with wolves; walking, carried, some silent, some crying, the smallest ones clinging to whoever is closest. Conner hands the toddler to Sienna, and the child screams when she’s taken from him, reaching back with both arms, until Sienna wraps her in a blanket and she subsides into exhausted whimpering.
He stands in the loading area with blood on his shirt and his arm held against his body and watches the child go. His expression is something I can’t read and don’t want to.