POV: Adeline
The river was too quiet.
I had come alone—against every instinct, against Aiden's unspoken wishes, against the fear that had lived in my chest since the scout arrived with his stories of systematic destruction. But the walls of the packhouse had started to feel like a cage, and the weight of everyone's eyes had become unbearable. I needed air. I needed space. I needed ten minutes of solitude to remember how to breathe without an audience.
The water moved sluggishly over stones, its usual murmur muted to something that felt wrong. The air hung heavy and still, as if the forest itself was holding its breath.
My wolf stirred uneasily beneath my ribs.
Something's wrong.
I stopped at the water's edge, yarrow forgotten. The hairs on the back of my neck rose. Every sense sharpened, the world contracting to a single, terrible awareness.
Then I smelled them.
Ash. Iron. The acrid tang of wolves who marked their territory in blood.
Ironclaw.
Not one wolf—multiple. The scent came from every direction, layered and deliberate. A wide semicircle, closing slowly around the riverbank. They had positioned themselves with the precision of hunters who had done this before. Who had practiced exactly this formation on packs that no longer existed.
My legs locked. My breath stuttered and stopped.
Run, my wolf screamed. RUN.
But I couldn't move. Because it wasn't just fear flooding my body—it was memory.
The fire came back.
Not gradually, not in fragments, but all at once—a tidal wave of horror crashing through every barrier I had built. The packhouse of Ash Hollow engulfed in flames. The screaming that rose and fell like a living thing. Wolves I had known my entire life burning while I watched, helpless, frozen, useless.
Caleb.
His body in my arms, blood soaking through my clothes. The light leaving his eyes while fire crept closer. His last breath against my cheek, my name on his lips, and then—nothing. Nothing but heat and smoke and the sound of my own screaming.
And through the flames, watching it all with patient satisfaction—
Ronan's smile.
You're mine now, little wolf. You've always been mine.
I fell to my knees.
The impact jarred through my body, but I barely felt it. The past had swallowed the present whole. I was kneeling on frozen ground, but I was also kneeling in ash. I was beside the river, but I was also beside Caleb's body. I was surrounded by Ironclaw scouts, but I was also surrounded by flames that would never stop burning.
Can't breathe. Can't think. Can't—
Hands gripped my face.
Warm hands. Rough hands. Hands that smelled of cedar and home and something my wolf recognized before my mind could catch up.
"Adeline."
Aiden's voice, cutting through the roar of memory like a blade through smoke.
"You're here. You're with me. Breathe."
I couldn't see him. My vision had narrowed to a tunnel of fire and darkness, Ronan's smile burning at its center. But I felt him—felt his palms against my cheeks, his thumbs stroking across my cheekbones, the steady warmth of his presence anchoring me to something real.
"Breathe," he said again. His voice was low, certain, unshakeable. "With me. Feel my hands. Feel the ground. You're not there. You're here. You're safe."
His thumbs moved in slow, deliberate strokes. Over and over. A rhythm that asked nothing, demanded nothing, simply offered itself as a lifeline in the drowning dark.
I gasped.
Air flooded my lungs—not smoke, not heat, but cold winter air that tasted of pine and river water. The fire receded. The screaming faded. Caleb's face dissolved into the grey of an overcast sky.
Aiden's face filled my vision.
He was kneeling in front of me, his expression fierce with something that looked like fear barely controlled. His dark eyes searched mine, tracking the return of awareness, waiting for some sign that I had come back from wherever memory had taken me.
"That's it," he murmured. His thumbs kept moving, kept stroking, kept tethering me to the present. "You're here. You're with me. I've got you."
"How—" My voice came out shattered. "How did you—"
"I felt it." His jaw tightened. "Through the bond. Your panic hit me like a fist. I ran."
The bond. The connection I had been trying to ignore, trying to control, trying to pretend didn't exist—it had betrayed my terror directly into his chest. He had felt me falling apart from across the compound and come running.
"Ironclaw," I managed. "They were—they surrounded—"
"Gone." His voice hardened. "They fled when they heard me coming. Cowards. They weren't here to attack—just to terrify."
To terrify. To remind me that they could reach me whenever they wanted. To prove that no pack, no Alpha, no walls could keep me safe from what was coming.
"Alpha."
Elara's voice, thin and urgent. I hadn't heard her approach, hadn't noticed anything beyond Aiden's hands on my face and the slow return of my breathing.
She stood a few feet away, her silver-streaked hair catching the dull light. Her pale grey eyes were fixed on something in her hands—something small, pale, wrong.
"I found this in the grass," she said. "Near where they stood watching."
She extended her palm.
A carved bone lay against her weathered skin. Small, no longer than my finger, shaped with deliberate precision into something I recognized instantly.
A death token.
The kind wolves left on graves. The kind that said this person is already dead, we're just waiting for their body to catch up.
"They left this," Elara said quietly. Her eyes found mine. "For her specifically."
The targeting was undeniable now. Not the pack. Not Willow Ridge. Me.
Aiden's hands fell from my face, but only so he could pull me against his chest. I went without resistance, too hollowed out to pretend I didn't need him, too shattered to maintain any distance at all.
"I'm taking her back to the packhouse," he said over my head. "Double the patrols. No one goes to the river alone. No one."
I don't remember the walk back. I don't remember entering the packhouse or climbing the stairs or being guided into his study instead of my room. I only remember his hand holding mine—firm, constant, refusing to let go even when my fingers trembled so badly I couldn't grip back.
I shook for hours.
Not crying—I was past tears. Just shaking, my body processing terror it couldn't contain, my wolf curled into a tight ball of animal fear in my chest. Aiden sat beside me on the small couch near his hearth. He didn't speak. Didn't offer platitudes or promises. He simply held my hand and let me shake.
When my voice finally came back, it was a whisper.
"He's not just hunting the pack." The words scraped against my throat. "He's hunting—"
"You." Aiden's voice was quiet, certain. "I know."
He knew. But he didn't know how personally. Didn't know that Ronan had watched me grow up beside his brother. Didn't know about the obsession that had festered for years, the way Ronan had looked at me across Ash Hollow's fires long before he held the torch that burned us. Didn't know that the death token wasn't a threat—it was a promise. A claim. Ronan's way of saying you belong to me, and no Alpha's protection will change that.
I let his incomplete understanding stand.
Because telling him the full truth would mean explaining why Ronan wanted me alive. Would mean confessing that I had known, from the moment I saw those ritual patterns in the woods, exactly who was circling Willow Ridge and why.
Would mean losing him.
So I pressed closer to his side, and I let him hold my hand, and I buried the truth deeper—even as the death token's message burned in my mind like a brand.
You're already dead. You're just waiting for your body to catch up.
I was terrified that Ronan might be right.