Chapter 33

Wren

They found a single piece of useful intelligence among the fallen wolves' effects — a folded, water-stained map marking locations across three territories, three sites circled in dark ink, one of them uncomfortably close to Nightshade's own southern border.

"They've been planning this for a while," Ezra said, studying the map by firelight once they'd made it back to the rendezvous clearing. "This isn't reconnaissance. This is a target list."

Wren said nothing, her shoulder throbbing beneath its hastily wrapped bandage, watching the map like it might rearrange itself into something less frightening if she stared long enough.

Kade sat close beside her, near enough that she'd stopped, sometime in the last few hours, bothering to maintain the careful distance she'd been so certain she needed. "We ride for Nightshade at first light," he said. "All of us. I'm not leaving you exposed on the road with whoever sent those three still out there."

"You have your own pack to think about."

"Torren can lead our contingent home from here if needed. I'm not leaving you." He said it simply, without drama, a plain statement of fact rather than a declaration, and something about the very plainness of it landed harder than a grand gesture would have. "I spent five years not being there when it mattered. I'm not making that mistake twice in one lifetime."

Wren didn't have an argument left in her, too tired and too shaken to maintain the fight she might have put up a week ago. "Okay," she said quietly. "Come to Nightshade."

They rode out at dawn, the whole expedition moving as one wary, watchful column, and it was somewhere in the long, quiet hours of that first day's ride that Wren found herself, without entirely deciding to, telling Kade about Milo — about the boy who'd once stirred a pot too small for his hands, about watching him grow into someone she was fiercely proud of, about the particular ache of loving someone like a mother without ever having quite earned the title.

"You'll like him," she said. "He's going to ask you a hundred questions about Blackthorn's training methods and try very hard not to seem like he's showing off how much he already knows."

"I'm looking forward to it." Kade's voice held something warm and unguarded that she was still getting used to hearing directed at her. "I'm looking forward to all of it, honestly. Everything you built. I want to see it, Wren. Not because I think I have any claim to it — I know I don't. Just because I want to understand who you became, in the years I wasn't there to see it happen."

"That's either very generous or very presumptuous."

"Probably both." A small, real smile, tired but genuine. "I've been told I contain multitudes."

Wren managed a laugh at that, first real one in two days, and felt something in her chest ease just slightly, just enough to notice — not healing, not yet, but no longer actively fighting against the possibility of it either.