Chapter 39

Kade

He returned to find Nightshade in the grim, efficient aftermath of battle — wounded being tended, watch rotations doubled again despite the previous night's exhaustion, the whole pack carrying itself with the particular tightness of people who'd looked directly at how real the danger actually was and hadn't fully recovered from the sight.

He found Wren in Ezra's small quarters, the old leather-bound book still open on the table between them, and the look on her face when she saw him in the doorway told him, before either of them said a word, exactly how much had changed in the three days he'd been gone.

"You're back early."

"I rode through the night when the messenger reached me about the attack." He crossed the room in three strides, checking her over with the same urgent thoroughness he'd have used at Ashenmoor, relief flooding through him at finding her whole, exhausted but unhurt. "I should have been here."

"You couldn't have known. And you had your own house to put in order." Wren's hand found his, steady despite the visible exhaustion underneath it. "Sit down. There's a lot to tell you, and I don't think either of us should be standing for it."

He listened to all of it — the attack, the captured wolf's confession, Ezra's decades-old translation of a prophecy neither of them had asked to inherit — with the particular stillness of a man absorbing considerably more than he'd expected to find waiting for him when he rode back through Nightshade's gates.

"The Moonless." He turned the name over, something cold settling into his chest at the scale of what they were apparently facing. "An organization old enough to have wiped out an entire pack forty years ago and patient enough to wait this long for the bloodline to resurface. That's not a threat any single pack handles alone, prophecy or not."

"No," Wren agreed. "It's not."

"Then we don't handle it alone." Kade said it with the same plain certainty he'd used at the training yard three weeks past, an easy conviction that came, he was beginning to understand, from finally choosing something instead of merely enduring it. "The task force. The alliance with Ironfang. Whatever support Ashborne and the fifth power are willing to offer once they understand the full scope of what's coming. We build something bigger than the Moonless is expecting, and we meet this reckoning together, the way the prophecy apparently already hoped we would."

"You spoke to your father." Wren studied him, something gentler in her expression now. "How did that go?"

"Better than I expected. He told me something he'd never told me before — that he understood exactly what I was choosing, because he'd made the opposite choice himself, thirty years ago, and spent every year since wondering what he'd traded it for." Kade held her gaze, something steady and certain in it. "Seraphine and I are formalizing a separation. She was remarkably gracious about it, considerably more than I deserved. She wants to meet you eventually, properly, once things settle. I think, in her own way, she's rooting for us."

"That's generous of her."

"She's a generous person. I've come to appreciate that about her more than I ever properly told her, until it was almost too late to matter." He reached for Wren's hand again, some old ache in his chest easing at the simple contact. "I came back to tell you my house was finally in order. I didn't expect to come back into the middle of a war."

"Welcome home, then." Something wry and warm in Wren's exhausted voice, the ghost of a real smile beneath the weight of the last three days. "I hope you're ready for it."

"I've been ready for this specific fight since the moment you walked through those summit doors and I understood exactly what I'd have to become worthy of." Kade pulled her gently into his arms, and she let him, resting against his chest with a weariness she'd have refused to show almost anyone else. "Whatever the Moonless want, whatever this prophecy actually demands of you — you're not facing a single piece of it without me standing beside you. That's not a promise anymore, Wren. It's just the truth of who I intend to be from now on."

Outside, the pack continued its grim, determined work of rebuilding after a battle that had only confirmed how much larger this fight was about to become, and Wren stood in Kade's arms in the quiet aftermath, drawing whatever strength she could from the knowledge that whatever came next, she wouldn't be facing it as the invisible girl at the back of a Blackthorn clearing ever again.

She would be facing it as exactly who she'd fought six long years to become — and, for the first time since a birch arch and a crowd of forty faces had tried to convince her otherwise, she would be facing it loved.