Chapter 304

Elsie's POV

We kept running until my legs simply stopped working.

I went down hard, paws skidding through loose dirt and gravel, the rest of me following a half-second later as my legs just gave out entirely. Kael caught most of my weight before I hit the ground completely, his shoulder taking the brunt of the fall, but even his strength had limits after everything we'd both pushed through.

We collapsed together in a small hollow tucked between two boulders, hidden from the open sky above, both of us heaving for breath in ragged, uneven gasps.

"Elsie." Kael's voice through the pack link was rough with his own exhaustion, scraped thin. "We need to keep moving soon. Not yet. I know. But soon."

I couldn't answer right away. My chest was doing something complicated—half panting from the run, half something else entirely that I didn't have words for yet.

Thorne.

The thought broke something loose in me, like a dam finally giving way after holding back too much pressure for too long.

I shifted back to human first, because crying as a wolf felt wrong somehow, felt like it belonged to a different kind of grief than the one currently tearing through my chest. Kael shifted a moment after, immediately wrapping his arms around me as the sob finally tore free from somewhere deep in my throat.

"He's gone," I choked out, the words barely intelligible through the crying. "He's out there right now, drawing those things away from us, and I just let him walk out of that cave—"

"You didn't let him do anything." Kael's voice was fierce against my hair, his arms tightening around me. "He made that choice himself, Elsie. You fought him on it. You ordered him to stand down, you used your authority, you did everything you possibly could to stop it. That is not the same thing as letting it happen."

"It feels the same." My voice cracked on every word.

"I know." He pressed his forehead against mine, his breath still ragged from the run. "I know it feels exactly the same right now. But it isn't. There's a difference between choosing to abandon someone and being unable to stop someone else's choice."

I pulled back slightly, just enough to press my hand flat against my own chest, against the place where the pack link lived and breathed inside me, searching desperately for something I was genuinely terrified I wouldn't find anymore.

And there it was.

Faint. Distant. Stretched thin across the miles between us. But there.

"He's still—" My breath caught hard in my throat. "Kael, the link. It's not gone. None of them are gone, I can still feel all nine of them through it—"

"That's good." His hands came up immediately to frame my face, thumbs brushing tears from my cheeks, forcing me to actually look at him instead of staring at nothing. "That's really good, Elsie. Do you understand what that means? It means they're still alive right now. Still fighting. Still out there in this exact moment."

"For how long though?" The question came out small, frightened in a way I rarely let myself sound. "How long can nine wolves hold off however many of those things are still out there?"

"I don't know." He didn't pretend otherwise, didn't offer some hollow reassurance just to make me feel better in the moment. "I genuinely don't know, and I'm not going to lie to you and say I do. But right now, in this exact second, they are alive. And every single moment we spend running instead of collapsing into despair is a moment that actually matters to them too."

I closed my eyes and focused entirely on that thread of connection, faint as it currently was. Thorne's presence first—stubborn, steady, unmistakably him even stretched thin across distance. Then Jessa's, sharper somehow, more frantic. Then Corwin's, oddly calm.

Hold on, I thought toward all of them at once, pushing the thought through the link even though I had no idea if they could actually feel it back through that much distance. Please hold on. We are going to come back for you. All of you. I promise you that.

"We will get them back," Kael said quietly, like he'd somehow heard the thought even without the link carrying words the way it carried emotion. "Once we reach Fangspire, once we have actual reinforcements behind us, we go back for every single one of them. That is not negotiable, Elsie. Not up for debate."

"You can't promise that." My voice was barely above a whisper now. "You don't know what we'll find when we go back. You don't know if there'll be anything left to find."

"I can promise it." His eyes held mine steadily despite everything we'd just survived, despite the blood still drying in his fur, in mine. "I can absolutely promise that, because I am not leaving anyone behind permanently. Not Thorne, not Jessa, not Corwin, not a single one of them, not while there's still a link connecting us to them. We go back. Whatever it takes."

Something in his absolute certainty cut through the worst of the panic still clawing at my throat, easing it just slightly.

"Okay," I whispered.

"Okay?" He searched my face carefully.

"Okay." I forced myself upright, wiping my face roughly with the back of my hand, the human gesture feeling strange and unfamiliar after so many hours spent as a wolf. "We keep running. We get help. We come back for them. I am not giving up on a single one of them, Kael."

"Good." He helped me stand, his hands steady on my arms even though I could feel the tremor still running through his own muscles. "Because neither am I. Not for a second."

I shifted back into wolf form, feeling the change settle over me like a familiar weight, like armor I desperately needed right now.

"How far now?" I asked through the link, voice steadier than I felt.

Closer than before, Kael answered, already moving beside me. We're making real progress. The terrain's opening up ahead—should be faster going.

Then let's keep making it. Every mile counts.

We ran.