After My Mate Killed Our Pup

The report reached Kolton through a Delta named Reese, a boy who still flinched when Whitley looked at him too long. I heard about it secondhand, the way I heard most things now—filtered, late, already decided.

Rogue activity spiking at the Appalachian crossing. Whitley's wolf-sense, miraculously recovering, catching my scent near the border twice in the last week.

I hadn't been near that border in a month.

*She's building a story,* Sera said. *A defection story. She wants him to send you out there believing you're already halfway gone.*

I didn't argue with Kolton when the summons came. I didn't ask why intelligence from a mute rogue's 'recovering' senses outweighed six years of my own border instincts. I just packed my kit, checked my blade, and told myself the timing worked in my favor. Dylan was already moving toward the ridge. If Kolton wanted me on that trail, he was doing my work for me.

We rode out at dawn, forty deltas and gammas in formation, mist still low on the grass. I read the line the way I always had—horses too tight on the left, gaps opening on the right, a scout's whistle coming half a beat late from the tree stand.

*Wrong,* Sera said, and I felt it too, cold and clean down my spine. *This isn't patrol. This is a funnel.*

There was no way to abort. I couldn't scream ambush without proof, not standing this close to a formation that already thought I was the threat. So I did the only thing left—I shifted my grip on the reins, dropped back half a length, and put myself where I could see three directions at once.

They hit from all three.

Rogues came out of the tree line like the forest had exhaled them—too coordinated, too patient, waiting until we were fully inside the pass before the first one dropped from the ridge onto Silas's second unit. I heard Kolton's voice snap out commands, sharp and instinctive, and for three full seconds it worked. We held the line.

Then Whitley screamed.

It came out perfectly pitched—not too loud, not too controlled—the exact frequency that reaches straight into an Alpha's spine and short-circuits every other thought. I watched Kolton's head turn toward it before his body caught up, watched six years of discipline fold into pure reflex.

He wheeled his horse and drove through the fight toward her.

The eastern flank went with him. Just like that. Open ground where a wall of warriors had been standing a breath before.

I was the only one left covering it.

A rogue came in low, claws already out, and I didn't have time to be angry about the flank—I killed him first and felt angry after, ribs screaming where his claws caught me on the backswing, four lines opening hot and deep through muscle. I didn't look down. Looking down costs time I didn't have.

Sera poured everything she had left into my legs. *Move. Move, Jolie, they're sealing it—*

A second wave dropped in behind me, closing the corridor I'd just cleared. I turned and there was no way back through—just rogues, three of them, teeth bared, circling in on the smell of blood they could probably taste from thirty feet.

I fought them moving backward, toward the only high ground with a clean line of sight—the gorge ridge, where the trees thinned and the roar of water got louder with every step. I killed the first one clean. The second one cost me skin off my forearm and half my remaining strength. The third I barely remember—just teeth, and Sera screaming numbers at me that didn't make sense until I understood she was counting down how much blood I had left to lose before my legs stopped listening to either of us.

I broke into the clearing at the gorge's edge with my side soaked through, black spots crawling the edges of my vision, forty feet of white water roaring below me like something starving.

Behind me: rogues, closing, unhurried now, because they could smell exactly how little fight was left in me.

Across the clearing, through drifting smoke and the last stragglers of the fight, I saw him.

Kolton. Whitley pressed to his chest, unmarked, untouched, her face tucked into his throat like she belonged there.

He was looking at me.

I watched his eyes go from her hair to my ribs to the blood soaking down into my belt, and something crossed his face that might have been the start of understanding.

It was too late for it to matter. I was already out of ground to give.