199

199
Selena pov

The sky was barely light when my eyes snapped open.

Lucien was already up, moving across the clearing on three good legs, the fourth still dragging slightly. A group of wolves I didn't recognize had gathered at the tree line  reinforcements from Moonblood, arriving sometime in the dark hours while we slept. None of them came close.

Cassius pressed warm and solid against my left side. Rowan's massive frame anchored my right. Even in sleep, Rowan looked like something that could level a forest  but his presence didn't frighten me. It steadied me, the same way Cassius did.

Last night we fought for each other. I had shattered the witchfire trapping them. They had torn through everything standing between me and survival.

Across the clearing, the early light crept over the bodies of the witches.

Then the ground shifted beneath me  or at least it felt that way.

My stomach dropped hard. The pale dawn sky overhead began to move, the sun arcing fast across it like someone had stolen time and started running with it. The day collapsed into twilight in seconds.

And the bodies multiplied.

Dozens. Then hundreds. Wolves and humans tangled together across the ground as far as I could see.

My heart seized.

I spun around. My mates were gone. I was standing on two legs, human, completely alone in the middle of a massacre.

I walked through it slowly, tears coming without permission, searching every face on the ground. Some I recognized were Bloodfang wolves, Frost Fang wolves, faces without names attached to them.

Then the scene folded again.

I was back in the den at Frost Fang. The bedroom. The last place I had stood before my aunt had manipulated me into leaving my mates behind.

"We stay here for your warmth." Lucien's voice was firm, certain. "We can protect you better on home territory."

But the moment the words landed, something deep in me recoiled.

Wrong. That choice leads directly to what I just saw.

I knew it the way you know your own heartbeat  without question, without doubt.

"We use my heat as bait." The words came out of me steady and sure. "Draw Bloodfang in. Let them think they have the advantage. Then Frost Fang closes in from all sides and forces a surrender. Less blood spilled  theirs and ours."

The rightness of it settled through me like a key turning in a lock.

Before I could see how the vision played out, the world lurched again.

This time I was ready for it.

I was standing at the edge of a cliff, wind pulling at my hair. Behind me, all four of my mates stood in wolf form, backs to me, watching the path below with their hackles raised and their bodies coiled tight.

I turned the other direction.

The valley beneath was swallowed in darkness  deep, lightless, vast. But at the very bottom of it, something flickered.

Two small lights.

I watched them grow. Steadily brighter, steadily closer, climbing toward the mountain like they had always known where to find me. As they rose they left trails of light behind them, peeling back the dark.

Two men. Far apart from each other, neither was aware the other existed. But both of them knew me. I felt it before either of them even lifted their faces.

One carried a torch. My wolf stirred the moment she sensed him  not just another shifter, but something rarer. An Odinswolf. One of her own kind.

The other carried no torch at all. The light in his hand was witchfire, burning from the inside out. And somewhere beneath the seal those witches had cracked open, the part of me that was something more than wolf turned toward him the way a compass needle turns north.

Both of them felt like people I had known in another life.

They were coming. Not enemies  allies. The kind that appears when everything else has fallen away. They would help strengthen what we were. Help me unlock what had been buried inside me for so long.

And they were already on their way.

The vision broke apart like smoke.

"That man won't stop. I think he's figured out the game is over."

Luca's voice pulled me back.

I was still on the ground, snout resting between my paws, Cassius warm on one side and Rowan solid on the other. The clearing. The dawn. The present.

I was on my feet before I finished the thought, needing to see all of them with my own eyes. Cassius and Rowan rose with me immediately. I scanned the tree line until I found Lucien's dark gray wolf  white forelegs, white muzzle  standing at the far edge of the clearing with two large alphas flanking him.

The moment he felt my worry through the bond his ears pricked forward and he turned toward me, sending warmth and reassurance back through the connection as he crossed the clearing.

Shante's wolf stood among the Moonblood wolves. They all held their distance.

Watching Lucien's limp brought everything crashing back into focus. And with it came the realization of who Luca had been talking about. His father was the one who had handed my location to my aunt. The last person still breathing who had helped put my mates in danger.

I waited for the anger.

It didn't come. I was too empty for it.

"Have you spoken to your siblings?" I asked, remembering Luca had sisters.

A long pause. "Every thought I've had since this started has been about you. But you're right." His voice quieted. "I'm just not sure Hazel or Harlow will believe me. We've been distant for years."

"They deserve to hear it from you," I said. "Before they hear it any other way."

"I know."

If the Howling Evergreen moved against his father, his sisters would want to understand why. They deserved that much.

"I still can't work out what he gained from warning my aunt."

"We'll figure it out," Luca promised. "Together. All of us."

With his voice steady in my mind and my three other mates surrounding me, my wolf exhaled something she had been holding for a long time. She knew another storm was coming. She also knew we would be standing when it passed.

My visions had shown me two things clearly: the path that led to ruin, and the choice that could prevent it. I trusted them. I couldn't explain where they came from, whether the wolf in me or the magic now stirring beneath my skin, but every cell in my body recognized them as truth.

Cassius circled around in front of me and my eyes dropped to his unmarked neck. The sight made something in me pull tight with wanting. When we reached Moonblood  just the two of us, somewhere quiet  I intended to change that. He had always promised me something equal, something real. After everything, I was ready.

I wanted to claim all of them. My wolf would have done it here and now in the middle of the clearing without hesitation. But the human part of me understood that a bond like that required more than I wanted. Lucien and Rowan both carried things that needed sorting first. I wouldn't rush past that.

But it needed to happen before my heat. The mate bonds would sharpen everything about my sense of them, their sense of me, the ability to feel danger the moment it arrived. With Darius certainly planning to strike when my scent was at its peak, we needed every edge available.

Bloodfang would never see a five-way mate bond coming.

And the darkness my visions hinted at  the one beyond even this war  we would face that too. One step. One fight. One dawn at a time.

"Yes," I told Cassius, lifting my head. "Take me back to Moonblood."

Ellie had been right all along.

We wouldn't stay long.

Something larger was already calling us forward.