After My Mate Let My Pack Burn

The rain hit me sideways by the time I cleared the pine ridge.

I don't remember running through the pack gates. I don't remember the guards stepping aside or the gravel slicing my palms when I stumbled at the front steps. What I remember is the pounding of my own fist against the heavy oak door of the Ironveil pack house, and the sound of my father's name coming out of my mouth again and again like a prayer for something that had already ended.

"Rhett—" My voice cracked open. "Rhett, open the door!"

My knees buckled. Water poured down my hair into my eyes, into my collar, soaking through the thin wool of the tunic I hadn't thought to change. My hand kept hitting the wood. It didn't sound like knocking anymore. It sounded like something breaking against something that wouldn't break back.

The door opened.

Warm gold light spilled out onto the wet stone. Rhett filled the doorway in a clean white shirt, his sleeves rolled to the elbow, a glass of amber liquor in his right hand. Behind him, half-hidden by his shoulder, Regina stood in a black silk robe. Her hair was loose. Her scent—damask roses and black amber—rolled out through the open door and mixed with the rain.

She said nothing. She looked at me like a woman watching a slow scene through a window.

"Silverpine is under attack," I said. The words came out too fast, all consonants and no breath. "Mercenaries. A raid. My father—" My throat closed. I forced it open. "My father's link. It died. It died in my head, Rhett. He was talking and then he wasn't. Send warriors. Please. Send the eastern gammas. There's still time if you—"

Rhett looked at me.

He looked at me the way a man looks at a chair that has been dragged into the middle of his living room. His eyes moved across my soaked hair, my shaking hands, the mud on my knees. His mouth did something that was almost a sigh.

"Natalie."

His Alpha tone dropped over me like a cast-iron lid. Full weight. Every ounce of it.

**"Stop this performance and submit."**

For a heartbeat, the world went silent.

The pressure of that command should have flattened me. Eight years ago it would have. Even three months ago it would have. Tonight, it hit my skin and slid off, and what rose up beneath it was something that did not belong to me yet—hot, wide, humming like a struck bell inside my ribs.

Rhett didn't notice. He had already turned his head.

"Marcus. Remove her from the grounds."

Beta Marcus stepped from the interior shadow at once, as if he had been waiting. He didn't look at me. Two gammas came behind him—men I had trained on the winter drills three seasons ago, men whose mates I had helped through birthings. They took my arms.

"Marcus," I said. His name came out thin. "Marcus, my father is dead. My mother is—Marcus, please—"

He kept his eyes on the doorframe.

The gammas pulled me down the steps. My boots skidded through the mud. I twisted my head back over my shoulder as they dragged me across the gravel, and I saw Rhett already turning inward, Regina's fingers already lifting toward the small of his back.

The door closed.

The sound of the lock traveled across the wet yard cleaner than any noise had a right to.

***

They pulled me across the yard and past the outer paddock toward the tree line. My father's name kept coming out of me. I couldn't stop it. It wasn't a scream. It was quieter than that. A repetition. A tick of the throat.

Somewhere near the first row of pines, something inside me stopped.

I don't know how else to describe it. A door I had never touched swung open in a room I had never entered. Heat poured up from the base of my spine into the back of my skull, so sudden and so vast that I heard myself gasp.

The gammas felt it before I did.

The one on my right made a small choking sound. The one on my left let go of my elbow like he had touched a stove. I turned my head, dazed, and saw both of them stumbling back into the wet undergrowth, their shoulders lowering, their chins tipping toward their chests. One of them dropped to one knee in the mud, his eyes wide and bewildered, staring up at me as if he did not recognize what he was looking at.

I didn't understand. I didn't have room to understand.

The rope in my chest pulled north. My parents' scents—pinewood, my mother's rosemary, the faint iron of my father's aftershave—yanked at my sternum like a hook set deep.

I ran.

I ran through the tree line without a coat, without the wooden box on my vanity, without anything at all. Branches tore at my sleeves. The rain sluiced down my face into my mouth. My boots hit the leaf mold and threw up black earth behind me. I did not slow at the creek. I did not slow at the ridge. Silverpine was fourteen miles through the forest if a wolf ran straight. I ran straight.

***

Behind me, in a warm room with a fire in the grate, Rhett accepted the folded scout's report from a runner at the side door. He read it twice.

Then he set the paper down on the sideboard and looked at Marcus.

"Rogue confirmed. Coordinated. Not opportunists." He swirled his glass. "Prepare a patrol. Six men. Light gear."

Marcus's chin dipped. "For deployment, Alpha?"

"For assessment." Rhett watched the amber slide against the crystal. "Once it's over. Damage evaluation. Territorial opportunity. Silverpine's grazing land has always been undervalued." He took a slow swallow. "Do not contact them. Do not warn them. And do not," he added, without looking up, "contact her."

Marcus bowed his head and stepped back out into the corridor.

Behind Rhett, Regina let her robe slide from one shoulder. He turned toward the fire and refilled his glass.