The alarm goes off at 3 AM, and I'm useless before my feet hit the floor.
Lysander bursts from his room already half-shifted. Thalia's wolf explodes from our bedroom in a blur of white fur, clearing the stairs in a single bound. Patrol wolves converge from every direction with supernatural speed.
I stand in the hallway in sweatpants and bare feet, human-slow, listening to a battle I can't join.
"Kieran," Caroline appears at the guest room door. "What's happening?"
"Perimeter breach, eastern sector. Stay inside, stay away from windows. If anyone you don't recognize enters this house, scream."
I reach the communications hub and pull up security feeds. The eastern patrol route was changed four hours ago—Thalia implemented the randomization herself, briefed only the two wolves running it. The route should have been invisible to anyone outside those three people.
The cameras show fragments: muzzle flashes in the treeline, wolves converging on a compromised position. The audio carries sounds I'll never unhear.
"Lysander, report."
"Two down," his voice comes back ragged. "Rivera and Park, dead before we reached them. Ambush was textbook—kill zone at the bend where the trail narrows. Hunters gone by the time we arrived."
"The route was changed four hours ago. How did they know?"
"That's the question, brother. Thalia chose it herself, briefed them personally, told nobody else."
"How many hostiles?"
"Six at least, based on shell casings. Professional kit, night vision, silver-tipped rounds. This is a funded unit with real-time intelligence on our movements."
"Bring them home. Don't leave them out there."
"Already on it."
The radio goes silent. I sit surrounded by screens and frequencies and the complete inability to do anything that matters. My hands grip the desk until my knuckles whiten, and I'm reaching for my wolf again—that automatic reflex to shift and fight—finding nothing but hollow silence.
The aftermath is worse than the battle.
Wolves carry two bodies through the gate wrapped in canvas that can't contain the blood soaking through.
The dawn light turns the courtyard into something grotesque—long shadows stretching across pavement that's already stained with losses from last week's attack.
Thalia walks behind them in human form, someone's jacket thrown over her bare shoulders, feet leaving bloody prints on concrete. Her hands are red—blood dried in the creases of her palms, under her fingernails, smeared across her forearms where she must have pressed against wounds she couldn't close in time.
"Thalia," I meet her at the bottom of the steps. "Come inside. Let me—"
"Rivera's wife is pregnant," her voice is flat, the careful monotone of someone refusing to acknowledge what's falling apart. "He was taking paternity leave next month."
"I know. I approved it myself."
"Park's daughter just turned four. She made him a bracelet out of beads, and he wore it on every patrol because she said it was magical protection." She looks down at her hands. "He was still wearing it when I found him."
"That's not your fault, dear. You did everything right—"
"And they still died!" Her voice cracks. "Two more wolves died following orders I gave them, on a route I chose, under protocols I designed specifically to prevent this."
I pull her against my chest. She lets me—doesn't resist or collapse, just stands there rigid and trembling while I hold her. My hands press against her back, trying to pour every ounce of comfort into the contact.
It's not enough. I feel it in the stiffness of her body. Before, my touch carried the mate bond—supernatural healing that reached beneath skin into the place where grief lives. Now it's just arms and warmth…
Just a man holding his wife while she bleeds internally from losses he can't reach.
"The route was sealed," she whispers against my shoulder. "I told no one."
"The traitor is closer than we thought. Senior enough to access information before it's distributed, or positioned to observe your movements directly."
She pulls back. "It means someone I trust is selling us, and I can't figure out who because everyone looks guilty when everyone's afraid."
In the hours after the ambush, Silvermoon corrodes from the inside.
Wolves who've shared meals and guarded each other's children for decades now sit in separate corners of the common room, eyes tracking movement with predatory wariness that used to be reserved for enemies.
Patrol teams request reassignment, refusing to run routes with partners they suddenly don't trust.
A fight erupts in the training yard between two wolves accusing each other of leaking schedules—Lysander has to separate them physically, his Alpha authority the only thing preventing bloodshed between packmates.
"This is what they want," I tell Thalia that evening. We're in our bedroom, the house locked down tight. "The attacks are strategic, but the real weapon is paranoia. They they just need us destroying ourselves from within."
She sits on the bed's edge, shoulders curved. "I changed every protocol…"
"We're missing something. A surveillance method we haven't considered, a vulnerability we can't see."
"Or the traitor is someone so close to me. They just watch where I go and what I do," she meets my eyes. "That's a very short list, Kieran."
"How short?"
"You, Lysander, and triplets. Oh, and Caroline who just arrived and already has access to our home," she counts on bloodstained fingers. "Elara, who treats our injuries and knows every physical weakness. Marcus..."
"You can't seriously suspect—"
"I can't afford not to suspect anyone," her voice drops. "A few weeks ago I would have staked my life on every wolf in this pack. Tonight I'm sitting in my own bedroom wondering which of the people I love is getting my wolves killed."
"Come to bed," it's all I can offer. No wolf, no bond, no Alpha authority to promise tomorrow improves. Just a mattress and a man who used to be enough.
"I should keep working on the access logs. There has to be a pattern—"
"Thalia, please. You haven't slept in four days. The logs will be there in the morning."
"People keep dying while I sleep."
"They will die faster if their Luna collapses from exhaustion," I hold out my hand. "Four hours, that's all I'm asking."
She looks at my outstretched hand for a long moment, then takes it.
She lies beside me in the dark, close but not touching. I reach for the bond out of habit—that automatic reflex I can't break, the neural pathway still firing toward a connection that doesn't exist. Nothing comes back.
"Thalia? Are you sleeping?"
Her breathing has evened out, exhaustion pulling her under despite everything. I watch her in the pale glow from the security floods outside our window, memorizing the face of a woman who's aging in real time under the weight of a war she didn't start and a betrayal she can't solve.
A traitor we can't identify. A pack fracturing under suspicion it can't survive. And an Alpha lying awake reaching for something that's gone, listening to his wife breathe, counting hours until the next attack reveals what this one couldn't.
Somewhere in Silvermoon, someone is watching us break, and they're not finished yet.