LOGINTheo had been searching the Outcast Lands for two weeks.
Every camp. Every settlement. Every lone wolf they encountered. "Have you seen Elara Walstrong? Female. Mid-twenties. Dark hair. Exiled three years ago." Most said no. Some said maybe. None had concrete information. Until they reached a camp on the fourteenth day. It was small. Maybe ten wolves. All older. All keeping to themselves. The camp elder,The idea came from Elara, which Jasmina should have expected because most of the ideas that turned out to be right came from Elara, who had the particular quality of thinking about the problem underneath the problem while everyone else was still on the surface one.They were in the office doing the weekly governance review, which they'd been doing every Thursday since the council recognition came through, and Elara was going through the pack relations section of her folder when she said, almost as an aside, that she'd been thinking about what Aldric was actually offering the packs he visited versus what Jasmina was offering them from a distance.Jasmina asked what she meant.Elara said Aldric went to people. In person. He sat with them, talked with them, understood specifically what made their situation feel precarious and then offered an argument that addressed that specific precariousness, even if the argument was partially wrong or serving other purposes underneath. She said the re
The news about Silas came through Stefan's network on a Wednesday morning in the fifth month after the battle, and it came without drama, which somehow made it worse. A simple message from his contact in the eastern independent network: Bloodmoon Pack had formally affiliated with the Eastern Collective as of the previous Friday. The affiliation had been announced internally to Bloodmoon's senior council first, then quietly passed through the independent network, deliberately not announced through council channels, because Silas was smart enough to understand that a formal council notification would invite formal scrutiny and he wasn't ready for that yet.Stefan brought it to Jasmina while she was doing the morning brief with Jetstar, who looked at the note and then looked at Jasmina and then went back to his files without saying anything, because there wasn't much to say that the note didn't already make clear.Silas had sixty warriors and Bloodmoon sat directly south of Strong Black
She called the meeting for the following week, all six alliance Alphas if they could make it in person or by radio if they couldn't, and told Jetstar to frame the invitation honestly rather than dressing it up as routine business. This was about the Eastern Collective. Everyone needed to come prepared to think, not just listen.Vincent and Marcus came in person. Erik joined by radio from Northern Frost, his voice carrying the particular flatness he got when he was already irritated by something before the conversation had even started. The three southern clan Alphas joined together on a single line, which had become their habit since they'd started coordinating more closely with each other, something Jetstar had noticed and quietly encouraged because three small voices speaking with one coordinated position carried more weight than three small voices speaking separately.Jasmina laid it out the way she'd laid out the Gareth situation eight months earlier, except this time there was no
The representative came in the third week of the new exercises, and he came through the front gate the ordinary way, in a single vehicle, with no escort and no weapons visible, which Stefan noted immediately as either genuine confidence or a deliberate performance of it.His name was Tomas. He was younger than Jasmina expected, maybe early forties, with the kind of unhurried manner that suggested either real calm or extensive practice at appearing calm, and he asked at the gate, politely, whether the Alpha Supreme might have twenty minutes for a conversation.Jasmina took the meeting in the main hall rather than her office, with Stefan present and Elara taking notes, because she wanted this on record from the first sentence.Tomas opened by saying he wasn't there to threaten anyone or deliver an ultimatum, and that he understood word of the Eastern Collective had likely already reached her in some form, and he wanted the chance to explain their position directly rather than let it arr
Sable's new exercise didn't look like much from the outside, which Jasmina had come to expect from her by now, because the most important things Sable did with Kira rarely looked dramatic in the moment and only made sense afterward when she explained the reasoning.What it actually involved was people. Different pack members coming into the nursery one at a time, sitting across from Kira for a few minutes, talking to Sable or to Jasmina about something ordinary, and Sable watching Kira's reaction to each one. Not the content of what was said. The person themselves.Jasmina sat in for most of the sessions over the following two weeks because she wanted to understand what Sable was actually building, and because some part of her—she admitted this to herself plainly, sitting on the nursery floor on a Thursday afternoon—didn't entirely trust herself to stay calm if Sable was right about what this exercise might reveal.The first dozen people who came through were straightforward. Jetstar,
Vincent took two weeks to come back with anything, and when he did it came in a long phone call rather than a written report, because what he'd found wasn't the kind of thing he wanted sitting in a file that other people might eventually read.He said his people had gone through every council record they had access to going back forty years, looking for any mention of a wolf matching Aldric's description, and they'd found almost nothing under that name, which on its own confirmed what Stefan had already suspected—the name was either adopted or it was simply not the one he'd used for most of his life. What they had found was a single thread, thin and circumstantial, that connected a man matching his rough age and description to a pack called Hollow Vale that had existed in the deep eastern territories about thirty-five years ago and didn't exist anymore.Jasmina asked what had happened to it.Vincent said the official record was sparse. Hollow Vale had been a mid-sized pack, maybe nine
They knelt in the dirt. Both unable to stand. Both refusing to yield. Meredith pushed through the crowd. Ran to Jasmina. "The baby's in distress," she said. Hands on Jasmina's stomach. "Heartbeat is there but weak. Fading." "Can you help?"
Day four before Marcus's deadline, Jasmina woke to chaos. Someone had vandalized the east wing. The section where Elara and her women stayed. Graffiti on the walls. Crude drawings. Words like "traitors" and "whores" and "go back to exile." Elara stood
Alpha Marcus Greythorn arrived with fifty wolves. All warriors. All armed. All arranged in formation outside the packhouse gates."That's a declaration of war," Jetstar said, watching from the window. "He brought enough fighters to take the packhouse by force."Jasmina's heart p
Jasmina woke at three in the morning, gasping. Pain exploded through her chest. Her ribs. Her face. Not her pain. His pain. Through the mate bond, she felt everything Damoew was experiencing. The beating. The shame. The despair. "No," she whispered.







