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Chris ran.

Behind him, the gap he left in the flank opened for half a second before Damian filled it. Chris felt it through the pack bond. His brother-in-law stepping into the space, planting, holding. No hesitation. No backward glance toward safety. Damian held the line because the line needed holding, because the man he’d become since his return was not the man who’d walked away four years ago.

Chris covered the four hundred yards in under a minute, weaving through buildings, leaping a low wall. The second breach gaped ahead, a ragged hole in the ward shimmer. Six wolves inside the perimeter, moving fast toward the residential block.

***

The ward tore at 4:19.

Sloane was already dressed. She’d been awake since three, sitting on the edge of the bed with her boots laced. When the first alarm hit, she’d gone to the window. Eastern perimeter. Every patrol wolf drawn toward the tree line.

The second alarm was hers.

She felt the ward split before she heard it. A vibration through the floor, the hum in the foundations going thin, then gone. She was out the door before the klaxon caught up, kicking off her boots at the threshold because they were wrong for shifting.

The yard stretched ahead in amber light. Six dark shapes crossed the open ground with coordinated speed.

Caitlynn came through the Alpha house door. No shoes. Hair loose. Fire already building in her palms, gold light flickering at her wrists.

“How many?” Caitlynn asked, her breath racing.

“Six. Coming from the west.”

“Garrett?”

“I don’t see him yet.”

Olivia appeared at the junction of the eastern wing corridor, shifted, enormous, her wolf filling the narrow space from wall to wall. She moved to Sloane’s right flank without a word.

The first wolf reached the yard at a dead sprint. Sloane shifted. Her wolf was grey, lean, fuelled by every hour she’d spent in this yard since Olivia offered to teach the ground to fight back. She met the first wolf before it cleared the stone path, drove her shoulder into its chest, and sent it tumbling across the packed earth.

The second angled toward the Alpha house door. Sloane cut it off.

Caitlynn’s fire caught the third mid-leap. A column of gold light, precise, controlled, punched through the dark. The wolf hit the ground smoking.

Olivia took the fourth at the corridor junction. Her body filled the gap between walls, jaws closing on the rogue’s shoulder. The fifth tried to get past on the left. There was no left. Olivia was the corridor. It bounced off her flank, and she put it down without releasing the first.

Sloane drove the second back across the yard, feinted, and came in from the angle Chris had shown her three weeks ago. Low side, under the guard. Her teeth found the thick muscle of its shoulder.

The sixth wolf did not come through the breach.

He walked through it.

Garrett Mercer crossed the broken ward line on two feet, unhurried, watching the yard with an expression Sloane knew from memory. Calm, proprietary, the look he wore when he walked into a room that belonged to him, because every room belonged to him.

He was older. Leaner. Hazel eyes the same color as hers in a face carved by years of living rough. Hands loose at his sides.

“Sweetheart,” he said, his cold eyes on hers.

Sloane released the wolf she was holding. It slunk away, bleeding. She shifted back to human form because she wanted him to see her face when she did this.

“You shouldn’t have come here.”

“I came to take you home.” Soft. Patient. The voice he’d used when she was small, before the burning, before the bruises. “You’ve always known I’d come back for what’s mine.”

He stepped forward. Her body remembered him. Every nerve lit up with the old signal. Be still, be small, wait for it to pass. Her hands wanted to fold. Her shoulders wanted to curl inward.

She stepped toward him instead.