CHAPTER 297

CHAPTER 297
Elsie's POV

Daven went down first.

It happened in the space between one stride and the next—a wet, tearing sound that cut through the chaos of our retreat like a blade through silk. The pack bond that binded me to every one of the soldiers screamed. A sensation like hot iron being ripped from my chest, like someone had reached into my ribcage and torn out something vital by the roots. I stumbled mid-stride, my paws skidding through wet leaves, and for one horrible moment I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but feel the wrongness of it spreading through the pack-bond like poison through a vein.

“DAVEN!” Thorne’s howl tore through the link and the air simultaneously, a sound so raw it scraped my nerves like broken glass. It wasn’t just a name. It was a denial, a prayer, a curse all at once.

I looked back. Every instinct I possessed—every scrap of training, every lesson drilled into me by people who’d died to teach it—screamed at me not to. Never look back. Never stop. The pack survives because the pack moves forward. But I looked back anyway, because Daven was pack, and the pack wasn’t supposed to leave its own behind in the dark with teeth closing in.

He’d stopped running.

He stood in the middle of the trail. His grey fur was black with blood along his hindquarters where the wound from the ambush had torn open again, and the blood wasn’t just seeping anymore—it was pumping, thick and dark, pooling in the leaf litter beneath him with each labored beat of his heart. I could see the exposed muscle beneath the torn flesh, the white flash of something that might have been bone, and I didn’t understand how he was still standing, still breathing, still holding himself upright with that terrible, deliberate stillness.

“Don’t stop for me.” His voice came through the link. There was no tremor in it. No plea. Just a calm so absolute it wrapped around my panic like a cold hand and squeezed.

“I’ll buy you thirty seconds.” He turned his head just slightly, and I caught the gleam of one amber eye reflecting firelight that wasn’t there. “Make them count.”

“Daven, no—” I was already turning, already shifting my weight to go back, because this wasn’t happening, this wasn’t how it ended, not like this, not him, not—

He turned to face the howls closing in and didn’t look back.

“NO!” The word ripped out of me raw and broken, a sound I didn’t recognize as my own, a sound that tore my throat bloody. I lunged forward—or tried to—but something slammed into my side with the force of a landslide, and suddenly Kael was there, his shoulder driving into my ribs, his body a wall of muscle and desperation forcing me back, forcing me forward, forcing me away from the wolf I was leaving to die alone in the dark.

“You can’t save him by dying with him!” Kael’s voice was rough, scraping against my mind like gravel, and I realized with a distant, shattered part of myself that he was crying. Kael, who I’d seen take a blade to the gut without flinching, who’d laughed in the face of an enemy charge. His voice was breaking. “Run, Elsie. For him. Make his thirty seconds matter.”

I ran and behind us I heard everything.

The snarling came first. The snap of teeth finding purchase, the wet tear of flesh giving way, the crunch of something that might have been bone. And through it all, through the chaos of the attack, I heard Daven’s voice in the pack link one last time—not words, just a feeling. Warmth. Pride. Relief that he’d held them long enough.

Then silence where his presence should have been.

A part of the pack link collapsed. The space where Daven had lived in my mind, in my heart, in the network of light and warmth that connected our pack—it crumpled inward like a burning building, and the void it left behind was cold and absolute and screaming. I felt Thorne stumble beside me, felt the jagged sob that tore through him. I felt Kael’s grip on my consciousness tighten, steadying me even as his own grief bled through the link like an open wound.

Eighteen plus one.

I didn’t have time to grieve. The forest blurred past in streaks of silver and black, and my lungs burned with every breath, and my legs screamed with every stride, and I couldn’t stop, couldn’t slow down, couldn’t do anything but run and run and run while the howls behind us grew louder again, closer, hungrier.

Two more soldiers—Aldric and a younger one named Petra whose voice still cracked when she laughed—exchanged a look through the pack link that I caught the edge of. It was quick, that look. Barely a flicker. But I felt the decision crystallize between them, felt the quiet acceptance pass from one mind to the other like a sealed letter, and my heart stopped in my chest.

“No,” I said immediately, the word jagged and desperate. “Whatever you’re thinking, no.”

“My lady.” Aldric’s voice was calm in a way that terrified me more than panic would have, “Petra’s leg won’t hold another mile.”

I hadn’t noticed. I’d been so consumed by Daven’s death, by the hole in my chest where he used to be, that I hadn’t seen Petra favoring her left hind leg, hadn’t noticed the dark trail she was leaving in the leaves, the way her gait had shifted from a run to something more like a stagger. She was young—nineteen, maybe twenty, still carrying the faint lankiness of a wolf who hadn’t quite grown into her frame—and her face was pale with pain, but her eyes were steady. She’s terrified, I realized. She’s terrified and she’s made peace with it, and I can’t—I can’t—

“I’m staying with her,” Aldric continued, and there was something almost apologetic in his tone, like he was sorry to inconvenience me with his imminent death. “We’ll slow them down.”

“That’s an order I’m refusing.” I couldn’t keep the snarl out of my voice, couldn’t keep the desperation from bleeding through the bond like light through cracked shutters. “Keep running, both of you, that’s a direct command from your High Fang, and I swear to every god that’s ever drawn breath, if you stop I will drag you forward myself—”

“With respect,” Petra said, and her voice was trembling, but her chin was up and her eyes were bright and she was looking at me like I was the sunrise she’d never see again. “You can punish us for disobedience after we survive this.” A ghost of a smile flickered across her face, there and gone. “Right now, go.”

They peeled off before I could stop them.

I lunged after them—or tried to. My body moved before my mind caught up, muscles bunching, paws digging into soft earth, and I would have followed them right back into the jaws of the pursuit if Kael hadn’t slammed into me again, harder this time, his shoulder catching me square in the ribs hard enough to drive the air from my lungs.

“PETRA—ALDRIC—”

They were already shadows among the trees. I saw Aldric position himself in front of her, broad-shouldered and immovable, a wall of flesh and fur and decades of loyalty. I saw Petra press her flank against his, her injured leg trembling but refusing to buckle. I saw them turn to face the howls together.

And then Kael’s shoulder hit mine again, driving me forward through trees that blurred into streaks of black and silver, and I couldn’t see them anymore, couldn’t see anything but the path ahead and the darkness closing in, and behind us the howls hit the place where Aldric and Petra had stopped and the night exploded into sound.

I heard Aldric’s battle cry—a roar that shook something loose in my chest, that made Kael flinch beside me, that would echo in my nightmares for the rest of my life. I heard Petra’s snarl, higher and sharper but no less fierce, the sound of a wolf who had decided that if she was going to die, she was going to make the enemy bleed for every inch. I heard the clash of bodies, the rip of teeth, the wet crunch of something breaking—

And then Petra screamed.

A sound that cut through the pack link like a cauterizing iron, high and terrible and abruptly, horrifyingly cut short. The link buckled again—two more lights snuffed out in rapid succession, one right after the other, Aldric’s warmth and Petra’s bright spark both vanishing into the same hungry darkness that had swallowed Daven.

Twenty plus one.

The pursuit behind us thinned for a moment—just a moment—bought by two people who’d decided my survival mattered more than their own. I felt it through the link’s remaining threads: the hesitation in the enemy ranks, the confusion as they tried to regroup around the wolves who’d thrown themselves into their path like living barricades. Aldric had taken three of them down before they overwhelmed him. I knew because I felt the echoes of it through the pack-link, fragments of sensation from wolves too far gone to shield their final moments. The weight of bodies crushing him. The taste of enemy blood in his mouth. Petra’s flank still pressed against his, warm until it wasn’t.

I hated it. I hated every second of it with a ferocity that burned hotter than any wound, that seared through my veins like venom. I hated that I was alive and they weren’t. I hated that I couldn’t go back, couldn’t fight, couldn’t do anything but keep putting one paw in front of the other while my pack died behind me piece by piece. I hated that they’d chosen this—chosen me—and that the only way to honor that choice was to keep running like a coward through the dark.

And I kept running because stopping would make their sacrifice meaningless, and I could not let that happen. If I had to carry their ghosts on my back for the rest of my life, I would do it running toward something they’d died to protect.

The ground changed beneath my paws—softer earth giving way to stone, the loam and leaf litter replaced by loose scree that skittered and slid with every stride. The trees thinned around us, their shadows retreating like spectators withdrawing from a losing fight, and the forest opened into a rocky valley that rose on either side like the ribs of some enormous buried beast. Jagged outcroppings jutted from the walls, silhouettes like broken teeth against the moon-pale sky, and a narrow path wound between boulders the size of houses, the kind of massive stone that had sat unmoved since the world was young.

“This way!” Thorne called, already angling toward a gap in the rock. His voice was hoarse, scraped raw by grief and exhaustion, but his mind in the bond was sharp, calculating. I could feel him thinking, strategizing even through the fog of loss. “Tighter terrain—they can’t swarm us here, not all at once. Single file. It’ll bottleneck them, force them to come at us one or two at a time if they catch up.”

If. The word hung in the bond unspoken. When was more honest.

We poured into the valley, paws skidding on loose stone that clattered down the slope behind us like the rattle of bones. The walls rose higher as we pushed deeper, sheer rock faces streaked with dark moss and glistening with condensation that caught the moonlight like tears. The path narrowed until we were running single file, Kael at my heels, Thorne ahead, the remaining six wolves strung out behind us in a desperate chain of panting breath and pounding hearts. The space felt like a throat—like the gullet of some massive creature swallowing us whole.

I could still feel the absence where Daven had been. I stumbled. Kael caught me each time—a nudge, a flicker of warmth through the link, a wordless reassurance that he was still there, still running, still alive.

Behind us, the howls hit the rock face and echoed.

The sound was monstrous. It bounced off the valley walls, multiplying, layering on top of itself until it sounded like a hundred voices instead of however many were actually left. High-pitched yips ricocheted off the stone and came back as shrieks. Deep-throated bays warped into something that vibrated in my chest like a second heartbeat. It was impossible to tell how close they were, how many there were, whether the sound was coming from ahead or behind or all around us at once. The valley had turned the pursuit into a nightmare symphony, and we were running blind through the orchestra pit.

“They’re inside the valley mouth!” someone shouted through the link—Jessa, her mental voice high and tight with strain. “I can smell them, they’re maybe three minutes behind, maybe less—”

“Keep moving!” Thorne’s command cut through the rising panic like a blade. “There’s a narrows ahead, hundred yards, past the next bend. If we can get through before they reach us, we can hold it.”

Hold it. I knew what that meant. We’d hold it until we couldn’t hold it anymore. We’d hold it until more of us died so the rest could run. The math of survival was brutal and cold, and I hated it, hated it, but Thorne was right and we all knew it.

We ran.

The path twisted, kinked like a broken spine, and the walls drew in so close my flanks scraped stone on both sides. Loose rock bit into my paws, sharp edges slicing through pads already raw from miles of desperate flight. I could taste blood in my mouth and didn’t know if it was mine or phantom echoes from the bond. Kael’s breathing was ragged behind me, and ahead, Thorne’s grey-white coat was a ghost in the darkness, leading us deeper into the valley’s hungry throat.

I kept running, Kael at my shoulder, nine of us left from thirty, and somewhere behind us in the dark, three names I’d carry for the rest of my life.

Daven, who’d given me thirty seconds and his last breath.

Aldric, who’d raised me and died for me in the same moonlit hour.

Petra, who’d faced her end with trembling courage and a smile that broke my heart.

I would not forget. I would not forgive. And if I survived this night—if any of us did—I would make sure every drop of blood they’d spilled was paid back tenfold in the teeth of every wolf who’d hunted us.

Make them count, Daven had said.

I intended to.