We dress like the room is on fire. His shirt is inside out—I can see the seam running along his shoulder—and he doesn't fix it, just shoves his feet into boots while I drag my tunic over my head with fingers that have forgotten how buttons work.
The runner is young, fifteen maybe, bent double with her hands on her knees and shaking like she has been running since sundown. She holds out the letter without looking up and my fingers close around it before my brain finishes registering the handwriting on the fold.
Lira's. No co-sign from Ronan. The handwriting is wrong—not her usual clean slant but something rushed, leaning hard to the right, ink smudged where her hand dragged through wet lines. Worse than the last one.
I read it twice because the first time the words slide through me without catching, like my mind refuses to let them land. Vesper challenged and defeated—formal pack law, a wolf named Gregor with Hilda positioned behind him like a chess piece pretending to be a pawn.
Vesper fought, lost, banished. Ronan beaten, confined to quarters. Neve still in the nursery with Nico—refused to leave, and nobody has forced her out yet, and that yet does more work than any other word in the letter.
Lira does not say where she is writing from. The letter ends with five words that collapse every safe thing in my chest: Nico is still inside.
The peace from an hour ago—the river, his forehead against mine—shatters so completely I cannot feel where it went. Every thought narrows to one point, bright and unbearable: my son behind walls now controlled by the woman who tried to poison him out of existence.
"What is it?" Jericho is reading my face the way a man reads smoke—direction, distance, how fast the fire is moving.
"Hilda took Moonveil." My voice comes out stripped, mechanical, a stranger's voice wearing my mouth. "Gregor challenged Vesper under formal law. Vesper lost—banished. Ronan's confined."
"And Nico?" His hand stills on the tent post, knuckles whitening slow around the wood grain.
"Still inside." My nails bite into my palms hard enough that I will find the crescents come morning. "Behind walls controlled by the woman who wanted him erased before he drew his first breath."
Jericho's jaw shifts—not a flinch, a recalibration. The man who was kissing me against a pine tree an hour ago is gone and the alpha stands in his place, already calculating distances and odds.
"Hilda has three children and no use for a Veilbreaker heir," I say, and the flatness in my own voice is a sound I have never produced before. "He's a threat under her regime, Jericho. Not an asset."
"I know what he is to her." His eyes track mine, steady and terrible in the lamplight. "What are you thinking?"
"I'm riding tonight." The words leave me with the force of a door slamming shut in a stone corridor.
"No, you're not." He plants himself between me and the tent flap—not commanding, not restraining, just a wall of deliberate calm I want to put my fist through. "You ride blind into a hostile compound with no intelligence and no numbers, and that is how Nico loses his mother."
"Don't." My throat closes around the word like a fist squeezing wet cloth. "Don't use him to make me rational right now."
"I'm using him because he is the reason you stop and think." He doesn't move from the doorway. "You dead on Gregor's floor changes nothing for Nico except now he has no one coming for him."
The words land like a blade laid flat against my sternum—not cutting, pressing, showing me where it could go. My jaw locks so hard my molars ache and something behind my ribs fights to scream.
"I hear you," I say, and the admission scrapes out of me raw, my throat working around it like glass. "I hate that I hear you."
"Good. Hate me later." He crosses to the council table and unrolls a map with hands already at war. "How many wolves does Gregor command?"
"Lira didn't say." I press my knuckles to my mouth, tasting salt and skin. "The letter reads like someone writing with one eye on the door."
"Does Neve still have access to the nursery?" His finger traces the eastern route toward Moonveil on the parchment.
"She hasn't been forced out yet." That word again, scraping the same raw nerve every time it hits air. "Nobody's tested the line."
"The peace treaty." He looks up from the map and his eyes are sharp enough to cut parchment. "Does it give you legal standing to enter a pack under new leadership?"
"The terms reference Vesper's authority." I say it slowly, the strategist in me waking beside the mother who wants to howl. "If Vesper is banished, I don't know whether the treaty transfers or dies with his seat."
"Then that's the first thing we find out." He straightens and the single word carries through canvas like a thrown blade. "Ulric!"
Within a minute Ulric appears, half-dressed, already sharp. The camp shifts around us—torches lighting, wolves moving to positions, voices low and urgent like a machine rehearsed for exactly this gear change. I send a runner toward Moonveil's border to gather what they can without crossing.
That night I sit on the edge of Jericho's bed, sleepless, holding Clara's comb in one hand and Sorrel's carved stone in the other, pressing both until the edges leave marks in my palms.
At the border of my senses—faint, steady, impossibly far—Nico's energy hums once like a heartbeat separated from me by two days of riding and a compound full of wolves who answer to Hilda.
Jericho comes in after midnight and does not ask if I am alright. The answer lives in every rigid line of my spine and asking would insult us both.
"Can you still feel him?" His voice is low, stripped to its bones, as he lowers himself beside me on the bed.
"Barely." My thumb moves over the carved stone in a rhythm that has nothing to do with calm. "Like hearing someone breathe through a wall you cannot break."
He does not offer comfort I cannot use. He offers his hand—palm up on the blanket between us—and I take it, his fingers closing around mine with the steady pressure of a man holding a rope over a long drop.
We sit in silence while the camp breathes around us and the dark presses against the canvas. My thumb traces his knuckles and I count his breaths and somewhere in the counting the scream behind my ribs quiets to something I can carry without shattering.
The shout splits the silence from the eastern perimeter. A single voice, sharp enough to cut through every layer of quiet between us and the tree line, and Jericho is on his feet before the sound finishes.
"Someone approaching from the east." The guard's report punches through the tent wall, tight and wary. "Alone. On foot."
From the east—from the direction of Moonveil. It’s not the runner I’ve sent, it can’t be. Jericho's eyes find mine across the dim room and the question in them is the same one clawing up my throat: who walks alone out of a pack that just devoured itself, in the dark, toward a rival camp with nothing but the night at their back?