War Room Warnings

War Room Warnings
Thane

I knew Ayla would be relieved to leave the hotel. Her wolf grew more restless each day. Honestly, I was surprised Aramana hadn’t wrecked the room or made Ayla bite me every time I entered.
She doesn’t want to risk having her pups in unfamiliar territory, no matter what level of protection I offer as the Alpha of Alphas, which means she is probably closer to delivery than anticipated.
And I’m freaking the fu—
“Thane! Get your aura under control before we all suffocate in here.”
Cyrus’ voice pulls me out of my spiral. The team gathered around the war room table, stared at me with a mixture of trepidation and reverence for my authority. I can scent a slight undercurrent of fear as one or more of them realize how greatly I keep my new reality in check.
Alpha of Alphas.
“I just left my pregnant mate in the same home she was abducted from. Saying I’m on edge wouldn’t touch the surface of how I feel right now.” Whether she is at our home, the new estate, or my parents’ home within the pack, regardless of her location, the same threat remains.
“I sent fifty guards out there, Thane.”
I cut my eyes toward Damon. Knowing he would do the best he had is what keeps me from reminding him that all of our mates came too close to tragedy out there, despite being secluded from the world around it.
“You may not want her to be in a position to defend herself, but you shouldn’t forget that she can.”
I hear Damon’s words, but the thought of her having to defend herself makes me feral.
“Honestly, with her mind control—”
“They aren’t mind control powers,” I interrupt Cyrus.
I actually have no idea the full scope of her gifting. None of us does. She could quite possibly be the strongest wolf to ever walk this planet.
“Fine. The way she used her gift to explode the heads of her enemies is enough; you shouldn’t worry about her safety. Actually, you should be concerned for your own. Especially when she is in labor.”
Cyrus laughs, and I would be lying if I said that statement didn’t unlock a new fear within me.
I have no idea what her gift will do under extreme pain.
“Seriously, Thane. What’s going on?”
Tyler jumps on the video feed in front of us. He remains up north, doing what he does as he and his team comb through thousands of records and files from the raid to rescue Ayla and those Raven and Cyrus found in Eric’s home.
“What’s going on, and the reason I called you here, is because Tyler has a development.”
Tyler’s face fills the wall screen, a little too close to the camera, dark hair shoved back like he’s been dragging his hands through it instead of sleeping. The glow from half a dozen monitors flashes over his glasses, reflecting charts and streams of data his brain apparently understands for fun.
“I’ve got something you’re not gonna like.”
Across the table, Cyrus kicks his boots up on an empty chair. “That’s literally your job description.”
Damon doesn’t sit. He’s standing with his hands braced on the table, shoulders tight, gaze already locked on the screen like he’s bracing for impact.
I fold my arms and nod once. “Show me.”
Tyler leans back enough to wave someone off-screen. “Jamie, run the feed.”
The image on the screen shifts from his tired face to grainy footage—night vision, high angle. The overlay in the corner tags it with time and location: three hours before dawn, outer edge of Stevens’ eastern perimeter. Snow. Treeline. Fencing.
“Pulled this from a hacked security system at a trucking depot that Stevens’ people like to use,” Tyler says. “We pinged movement outside the usual routes, high body heat in sub-zero temps. Thought it was rogues at first. It’s not.”
He hits a key. The video zooms in.
A figure stumbles into view from the tree line, moving along the fence. Tall, but hunched. Tufts of hair and scarred skin were uncovered, despite the cold. The camera’s resolution fights the dark, but it’s enough to show too-long limbs and an odd, hitching gait.
“Pause,” I say.
The frame freezes.
“Blow it up,” Damon murmurs.
Tyler’s fingers clatter over the keys. The figure fills the screen, cropped from mid-thigh up. For a second, the distortion makes him look like a figment of the imagination.
Then Jamie runs a filter, and the resolution sharpens.
I hear Cyrus suck in a breath. “Oh, that’s fucking nasty.”
Under the harsh light of the enhancement, the man’s face comes into focus. Or what’s left of it.
“Well,” Tyler says, grim now, the humor gone, “that used to be a pretty boy.”
Half of Eric’s face looks almost normal—you can still see the ghost of the healer who used to walk through my halls like he owned the place. Strong jaw, sandy blonde hair, sharp cheekbone.
The other half looks like he lost a fight with a blast furnace and then healed wrong. Skin twisted and shiny, discolored in unnatural patterns. One eye too wide, the other narrowed to a permanent squint. The left side of his mouth pulls up in a rictus even at rest, exposed teeth gleaming where the lip didn’t regenerate fully. His neck is roped with raised, branching scars that glimmer faintly under the filter.
“How sure are you?” I ask.
Tyler exhales, then taps keys again. A new window appears alongside the video—Eric’s old ID photo from Midnight. He overlays them. The lines of the face, where the bone structure still exists, line up almost perfectly.
“Facial structure match, pre-injury, is sitting at ninety-two percent,” Tyler says. “Margin of error is the scar tissue and, you know, nature not intending faces to look like they’re melting off. Ear shape matches. Hairline matches. Height, weight, stride length—close enough when you factor in limping.”
Cyrus squints, leaning forward. “He looks like a troll mated with a burn ward.”
Damon shoots him a look. “Cyrus.”
“I’m just saying,” Cyrus adds, unbothered. “That’s not a shifter, that’s a cautionary tale.”
Tyler points at the screen. “It gets better.”
“Define ‘better,’” I say.
He ignores me and zooms in on Eric’s exposed forearms. Scars map the skin in twisted lines, but that’s not what grabs my attention.
It’s the faint glow.
Jamie toggles another filter. The scars brighten, spiderwebbing up under the skin in branching paths that pulse oh-so-faintly, like something is moving underneath. Currents.
“Thermal imaging,” Tyler says tightly.
“He looks like he’s glowing. We have no idea how his stolen gift was affected.”
My eyes race over the image, mentally cataloguing every scrap of detail I can find.
“I don’t care how it was affected. He’s not invincible,” Cyrus growls.
“He shouldn’t have survived what Ayla hit him with. The blast alone? That should’ve turned him into ash. But the combination of an external shield detonation, stolen white-wolf healing, and his own stupidity apparently rewrote parts of him. My working theory? He’s stuck halfway between dying and regenerating. His cells keep trying to fix themselves… and failing.”
“We don’t know if he can shift anymore.”
“That alone is dangerous. He could be feral.”
“Being feral would equate to him on a normal day. He’s a sick son of a bitch.”
Thick silence settles.
“Every time he uses that stolen healing, it probably twists him more. But here’s the fun part.”
Tyler runs the footage a few frames ahead. Eric reaches for the fence line and slips on a patch of ice, catching himself with his damaged hand.
The thermal overlay flares.
“Pause,” I say again.
Eric’s fingers dig into the wire, and the metal glows white-hot for a fraction of a second before the image flickers back down into normal tones. Tyler rewinds it and replays it in slow motion.
“You seeing this?” Tyler asks. “He’s bleeding heat. Not just heat. Energy. Like the healing burst is rolling off him, whether he wants it to or not. That’s not controlled. That’s leakage.”
Cyrus whistles low. “So he’s a ticking time bomb and a bad cosmetic ad.”
“Stevens is keeping him on the outer perimeter,” Tyler adds. “Never near the center compound, never near the main house. We’ve tracked three sightings over the last week. All along the border. All alone. No escort. No one even gets within twenty feet of him.”
My wolf bristles.
“Stevens won’t waste a tool if he can help it,” I say slowly. “If Eric is still breathing, he still has a purpose.”
“My guess? He’s using him as a guardian. Think bogeyman at the treeline. No one wants to test the boundary where the half-melted healer patrols. Fear is cheaper than manpower.”
Damon’s suggestion is one I have considered, but not the one I am concerned about.
I stare at Eric’s warped face on the screen. The twisted mouth, the too-wide eye, the inhuman gleam in his scars.
“Or he isn’t planning on staying there. Could be making his way here.”
Cyrus cleans under one of his nails with Raven’s knife. He clearly has a death wish if he stole it from her. Probably trying to rile her up out of boredom.
“He chose the dark side and got the discount, knockoff villain makeover.”
Tyler clears his throat. “There’s more. I had my team run behavioral analysis on his gait and posture.”
Another window pops up with stick figures, lines tracking movement, angles plotted against baseline human ranges.
“He doesn’t move like a healthy wolf. He compensates for pain in his left leg and shoulder, but there’s no inflammation reading. His muscles spasm in patterns I’d call… glitchy.”
“Glitchy,” Cyrus echoes. “Very scientific, thanks.”
“Fine. Neuromuscular misfiring. Happy?”
“What are the odds he can still fight?” Damon asks.
“I think the bigger question is, what are the odds he can do more than heal now?” Cyrus counters.
I don’t take my eyes off the screen. The wolf is responsible for so much evil, right under my nose, the entire time. There hasn’t been a day that goes by since we found out that I haven’t fought guilt.
“Assuming he could die from a bullet,” Tyler mutters.
I look up sharply.
“If his cells are caught in a constant heal-damage loop, traditional trauma might not do what you want it to. He may not heal cleanly, but he also might not stay down.”
“So we’re looking at a half-broken, half-immortal traitor with stolen white-wolf power, patrolling the border of a hostile pack,” Cyrus says. “Awesome. I was worried things might get easy.”
“That’s why you have so many guards on our Luna,” Damon nods. “Why Ronan is riding you so hard.”
“When we go to Stevens, I’m going to annihilate every speck of evil there. The pack either submits to me or becomes non-existent. Raven should be in on it. She deserves to stare into the terrified faces of those who betrayed her. If I take her, then it is one less layer of protection Ayla has here.”
“We’re keeping her mother alive on purpose,” Cyrus says, voice sharpening. “Let her think she’s safe. Let her believe she crawled out of the wreckage and somehow won. Then, when she’s nice and comfortable, we’ll drag her right back under and make her choke on the hope she built.”
“And her intestines?” Damon asks.
“Exactly,” Cyrus says.
“Eric is four hours away. We may never get this opportunity again, and we’ve been waiting on Stevens to make a move. We wait no longer.”
A knock on the door pulls my eyes from the mangled mess that is Eric on the monitor.
“Alpha.”
Theo enters the war room.
“The she-wolves are almost to the pack and will be escorted to their hotel. There were no complications during travel.”
“She-wolves?” Cyrus questions.
“Amani invited her friends to assist with the pup shower this weekend,” Damon explains.
“There are thirty hookers on their way here,” Theo grins.
“They’re professional entertainers,” Damon snaps.
“My sister was one of them, dick. Watch your mouth,” Cyrus threatens.
“So what’s the plan?” Cyrus smirks. “We leave soon and fight a mutant troll?”
“Take out Stevens.”
“And any resistance.”
“Bring Eric and Stevens back for torture if possible.”
“All while there is an actual visiting pack of escorts that could be negatively influencing our mates.”
“Fates, Damon, I hope so,” Cyrus grins. “Actually, maybe my mate could influence them instead.”
“Gee, Cyrus. A pack of strippers trained by a bloodthirsty she-wolf Alpha. What could go wrong?”