The first scream didn’t come from the wounded.
It came from the trees.
Bram Kade heard it tear down the ridge line, a jagged, glass-sharp howl that didn’t belong to any wolf he knew. It sliced the midnight quiet, sent a shudder through the men and women at his back.
“That’s not one of ours,” Jessa said softly, her fingers tightening around the grip of her rifle.
“No,” Bram growled. His wolf bristled beneath his skin, pacing, claws scraping against the inside of his ribs. *Rogues.*
Night in the Ashridge forests was never gentle. Too many things stalked the shadows, teeth and claws and human cruelty wearing fur. But tonight, the air tasted different—metallic, sour, wrong.
The patrol fanned out along the animal trail, boots silent on the damp earth. Moonlight filtered through branches heavy with frost, turning the world silver-blue. Their breath plumed in front of their faces, mingling with the faint curl of smoke from the village behind them.
Bram’s scar itched.
He resisted the urge to touch his face. On nights like this, too many eyes watched: half his patrol, his alpha’s trust, the ghosts of the men and women he’d already failed.
“Beta?” Ren murmured at his left shoulder. “Orders?”
Bram lifted his nose, scenting the wind. Pine sap, cold stone, distant river. Then—beneath it—something feral and wild, like rot and broken glass wrapped in fur.
“Line spread. No one runs ahead,” he said. “Jessa, rear guard. Ren with me. We keep the valley between us and home.”
“Copy,” Jessa replied. The rest of the patrol murmured assent.
They moved.
The howl came again. Close now. Too close.
His wolf surged, snarling to be let free, to meet the threat with teeth instead of steel. Bram pushed the instinct back, clamped down hard on the need to shed skin and lose himself in the rush.
Not yet. Not with eleven lives at his back counting on his head more than his claws.
“Ren,” he said quietly, “watch the tree line to the east. If they’re driving us, that’s where they’ll push through.”
“How many you think?” Ren asked.
“Too many,” Bram replied.
The first rogue hit them like a black bolt.
It crashed from the underbrush in full wolf form, eyes gleaming white, lips peeled back in a soundless snarl. Its fur was patchy, muzzle scarred, body too thin. It didn’t smell like a pack wolf. It smelled like madness.
Bram’s gun was already up. Two shots rang out in quick succession. The rogue jerked mid-leap and slammed into the ground a breath away from Ren.
“Contact!” Jessa shouted from the rear. “Three, maybe four—”
Another shape burst from the dark to Bram’s right, then another, and another.
The forest exploded.
Gunfire cracked. Wolves roared. Branches snapped, bodies collided, metal and teeth flashed in chaotic, brutal rhythm. Bram shot until the slide locked back and then shifted in a blur of tearing skin and stretching bone.
The relief of fur and muscle pouring over him was instant, savage. His wolf howled, drunk on the scent of blood and fear.
They were outnumbered.
Bram knew it the way he knew the beat of his heart. Rogues poured from the shadows like a tide—sleek black forms and shaggy brown, eyes either glassy with mindless hunger or bright with too much mad intelligence.
*Trap,* his wolf snarled. *We walked right into it.*
He tore one rogue’s throat out, felt the hot gush of blood over his muzzle, the twitch and stop of its pulse. Another hit his flank, teeth punching into flesh. Bram snarled, kicked, rolled, came up snapping.
A scream—human, high and choking—cut through the melee.
“Ren!” someone shouted.
Bram twisted toward the sound. He saw Ren go down under a pile of fur, claws flashing, a spray of blood arcing in the moonlight. He saw Jessa’s wolf form launch herself at the pile, her tan fur darkening as she ripped and tore.
He saw too many of his patrol on the ground.
Panic flared, bright and ugly. *No. Not again.*
He tried to push toward Ren, but three rogues slammed into him at once, driving him down. Teeth sank into the side of his face. Fire ripped through his cheek, too hot to be just pain. Something cracked near his eye. Vision went white, then red.
His wolf screamed.
He thrashed, clawed, bit. The world narrowed to fur and fangs and the copper stink of his own blood. A rogue’s jaws closed on his throat. Another ripped at his belly. The forest spun.
*Get up, Bram. Get up.*
He tried. Gods, he tried.
A howl cut through the carnage—not rogue, not his. Deep and commanding, vibrating through the ground and the marrow of his bones.
*Alpha.*
The sound broke over the clearing like a storm.
Rogues flinched. Some turned to flee. Others went wild, snapping at anything within reach, including each other. Bram used the moment, dragged his torn body toward where Ren had fallen.
He saw the boy’s eyes, wide and glassy. Saw the gash across his throat. Saw the way his chest stuttered, then stopped.
“Ren,” Bram’s wolf keened, a desperate, broken sound that never made it past his shredded throat.
He didn’t remember collapsing. One moment he was half-crawling toward Ren, vision tunneling. The next, the world tilted and folded in on itself, and everything went dark.
***
He woke to pain and silence.
No, not silence. Too much silence. No heartbeats close by, no low voices cursing, no soft weeping.
Just the crackle of a nearby fire and the drip of water somewhere to his left.
Bram stared up at the ceiling of the pack infirmary, the wooden beams blurred and doubled. One eye refused to focus. Something thick and tight banded his chest. Every breath hurt.
He tried to shift. His wolf didn’t move.
Panic shot through him, sharper than the pain. He reached inward, searching for the familiar weight of his other self, the restless shadow that had always been there, pacing at the edges of his thoughts.
Nothing.
“Easy,” a voice said quietly from the doorway. “Don’t do that. You’ll tear your stitches and my temper in the same go.”
Bram turned his head, a fresh bolt of agony lancing through his skull. He bit back a groan.
Mara, the pack’s healer, stepped into view. Her dark hair was scraped back in a messy knot, stray curls escaping to cling to her temples. She wore her usual shapeless gray tunic, sleeves shoved up to reveal wiry, capable forearms smeared with drying blood.
“Welcome back,” she said. “You look like shit.”
“Feel worse,” he rasped. His throat felt raw. Swallowing hurt. Speaking hurt more.
“Good,” she said briskly. “Might stop you doing something stupid for once.”
He tried to smirk. It probably came out as a grimace.
“Rogues?” he asked.
“Dead or scattered,” she said. “Your patrol took down at least seven before the alpha arrived with reinforcements. We’re still counting bodies in the forest.”
“Mine?” The word tore out before he could stop it. He forced his good eye to meet hers. “My patrol?”
Mara’s jaw tightened. For a moment, lines of exhaustion carved deeper into her face.
“Half,” she said finally, voice low. “Six gone. Four more in my back room. You make five.”
Bram’s heart slammed against his ribs. “Names.”
“Later.”
“Now.”
She blew out a breath, then glanced at the curtain that separated his bed from the rest of the infirmary. Voices drifted in—muted, tense.
“They’re telling families,” she said. “I don’t want you hearing it through a wall.”
“Mara,” he ground out.
She looked at him, then away, then back. “Ren. Jessa. Tyne. Hollis. Mikel. Branwen.”
Each name landed like a physical blow. Ren’s wide eyes. Jessa’s easy grin. Tyne’s filthy jokes. Hollis’s soft singing on long patrols. Mikel’s ridiculous hat. Branwen’s stubborn, steady presence.
Gone.
Something inside him tore, clean and silent.
His wolf was still nowhere.
Mara watched his face carefully. “You almost made the seventh,” she said quietly. “One more minute in that clearing and I’d be stitching you up for a pyre instead of a bed.”
“Should have been,” he said, voice flat.
She slapped him.
Not hard, not enough to hurt more than everything already did, but the sharp crack of palm against cheek snapped his head to the side. Heat flared along the uninjured half of his face.
“Don’t you dare,” she said, eyes blazing. “Don’t you *dare* say that. You want to die, do it on your own time, not on my table.”
He stared at her. She shook, just a little, then forced her hands to stillness.
“You’re the beta,” she said. “You think you get to lie down and wallow because you lost people? You think *any* of us don’t have blood on our hands?”
“They were mine,” he said.
“They were the alpha’s,” she shot back. “They were Ashridge. They *knew* what they were walking into every full moon, every patrol. You think you’re so special in your guilt, Kade? You think you’re the only one carrying ghosts?”
Her eyes flashed, and for a heartbeat, he saw past the brusque healer to the woman who’d buried a mate ten years ago and still flinched when the wind howled just right.
He shut his mouth.
“Good,” she muttered. “Now, you listen. The rogues weren’t right. I don’t mean the usual madness. I mean *wrong*. Their blood… it smelled like ash. Their eyes were—” She broke off, shuddered. “There’s something else in those woods.”
“Rogue packs,” he said. “Always been.”
“Not like this.” She folded her arms. “And with half your patrol gone and your pretty face rearranged, the council’s going to make moves.”
“Council can shove their moves,” he muttered.
Mara snorted. “I’ll make sure to embroider that on a cushion for them. But listen—”
The curtain jerked aside. Alpha Corin stepped in, bringing cold air and the weight of his presence with him.
He filled the room without trying. Tall and broad, dark hair shot through with iron, his eyes were a wolf’s even in human form—pale, assessing, dangerous. Tonight, they were tired too. The lines around his mouth were carved deeper than Bram had ever seen.
“Out, Mara,” Corin said quietly.
She hesitated, then squeezed Bram’s forearm, fingers warm and firm. “You pull that bandage off your face, I’ll sedate you,” she warned. “Don’t test me.”
Then she pushed past the alpha and was gone.
Corin stepped closer to the bed. Bram forced himself not to flinch under the man’s gaze.
“Beta,” Corin said softly. “How bad?”
Bram huffed a breath that might have been a laugh. “Think I’d look better if I’d died.”
Corin’s lips twitched. “Mara won’t let you off that easy.”
They stood in silence for a long moment, the air thick with all the things neither of them were saying.
“Report,” Corin said at last.
Bram’s throat worked. He swallowed, tasted blood. “Patrol moved out at twenty-one hundred. Standard route along east ridge, loop back by the river. First contact at twenty-two twenty-seven. Rogue howl. Scent carried wrong—stronger than usual, bitter. We advanced in standard spread. First rogue engaged at…” He trailed off, frowned. Time blurred in his memory. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “It went fast.”
“Too many,” Corin said quietly.
“Too organized,” Bram added. “They pushed us into the hollow. Came from all sides. Like they’d studied the terrain.”
“Which means someone’s leading them,” Corin said. His gaze went distant, cold. “Or something.”
Bram hesitated, then forced himself to ask, “Why didn’t I feel you sooner?”
The alpha’s eyes snapped back to his. Pain flickered there, quickly hidden.
“I was with the council,” Corin said. “Arden brought word the eastern boundary stones had shifted again. We were arguing remedies when the first howl hit.”
Bram nodded. Not Corin’s fault, then. Not entirely.
He still tasted failure like bile.
“The others?” Bram asked.
Corin’s jaw clenched. “You know the names?”
“Mara told me.”
“I’ll lead the pyres at dusk,” Corin said. “I want you there if you can stand. If Mara says you can’t, you’ll be there anyway. Even if I have to drag this damned bed outside.”
Bram stared at the ceiling. “They died on my orders,” he said. “I put them on that patrol.”
Corin’s voice turned sharp. “You put them on *rotation*.”
“Same thing.”
“No.” The alpha stepped closer, his voice dropping low and hard. “You listen to me, Bram Kade. You stand up there with me tonight with your scars and your shattered pride, and you remember that every wolf on that pyre made a choice when they swore to this pack. They chose to put their lives into our hands. That doesn’t make their deaths your sin.”
“Feels like it,” Bram muttered.
“Good,” Corin said.
Bram blinked. “What?”
“It should feel like it,” Corin said grimly. “Or you’re in the wrong job. But you don’t get to let that feeling drown you. You use it. You remember every name, every face. And next time you smell that rot on the wind, you trust your instinct and you bring twice as many wolves.”
Bram stared at him. Nausea rolled in his gut. Next time. The thought of going back out there, of leading anyone anywhere again—
His wolf shifted, faintly, like a shadow stirring in another room.
He latched onto it.
“Can’t shift,” he said abruptly.
Corin’s gaze sharpened. “What?”
“Tried when I woke up. Nothing. Like he’s—” Bram’s throat tightened. He forced the word out. “Gone.”
Silence settled over the bed. Heavy. Suffocating.
Corin stepped closer, the air around him rippling with restrained power. “Close your eyes,” he said.
Bram hesitated, then obeyed.
“Reach,” Corin said quietly. “Not with fear. With command. You’re beta. You don’t beg your wolf. You *call* him.”
Bram sucked in a breath and pushed inward.
He’d always thought of his wolf as a second heart—constant, steady, always there even when quiet. Now, when he reached, he found… nothing. An echoing emptiness where that steady presence should be. Panic flared. Sweat broke out along his brow.
“Calm,” Corin murmured. “Fear drives him deeper. He’s hurt, same as your body. Bruised. Hiding.”
“I don’t…” Bram forced his breathing to slow. He reached again, more gently this time, probing the hollow inside.
A flicker. So faint he would have missed it if he hadn’t been alpha-trained.
Not gone. Not whole either.
“There,” Corin said. “You feel it.”
Bram nodded, jaw locking.
“He’ll come back,” Corin said. “Or he won’t. You don’t get to stop leading while you wait to find out.”
Bitterness surged. “Easy for you to say.”
Corin’s hand landed hard on his shoulder. “You think I haven’t felt it?” he snarled softly. “You think I haven’t woken up and found my wolf so far down I thought I’d lost him? You live long enough, you bleed enough, you lose people—your wolf retreats. He’s not gone. He’s *protecting* you the only way he knows how.”
Bram swallowed. The faint flicker inside him twitched again, like a sigh.
“Rest for today,” Corin said, straightening. “We bury our dead at dusk. Tomorrow, we plan. The council will press for harsher borders. They’ll talk about raids. They’ll bring up Thornfell.”
Anger cut through Bram’s fog. “Thornfell can rot.”
“So says every Ashridge wolf when they’re feeling righteous,” Corin said dryly. “But the truth is, we don’t have the numbers to fight rogues and rival packs both. We need information. Allies, if we can stomach it.”
Bram scowled. “You’re not thinking—”
“I’m thinking,” Corin said, “that Thornfell has a new high healer, and they’re eager to prove their goodwill. And we, as luck would have it, have just injured our own.”
“Mara will flay you,” Bram muttered.
“Mara’s too smart not to see the sense,” Corin said. “A healer from Thornfell sees what their old alpha couldn’t. Maybe they’ve noticed this rot in the woods too. Maybe they know its source.”
Bram’s fingers curled into the blanket. “You want to invite a Thornfell wolf *here*? After what their raiders did to the northern farms?”
“Their new alpha executed every raider he could find when he took power,” Corin said. “He sent us their heads in a basket, if you recall.”
Bram grimaced. Hard gesture to argue with.
“We sign a treaty,” Corin said. “They send us their healer. We send them Mara for a season in exchange. Neutral grounds on border disputes. Shared patrols in trouble zones. We cannot stand alone anymore, Bram. Not with this creeping through the woods.”
Bram’s chest ached with more than wounds. He thought of his father, who’d spat whenever Thornfell’s name came up. He thought of the stories of burned barns, stolen livestock, pups gone missing in the night.
“You’re going to do it regardless of what I say,” Bram said.
“Yes,” Corin said simply. “But I’d rather you argue with me now than undermine me later.”
Bram huffed something like a laugh, then winced as it pulled stitches. “Fine. Make your bargain with the devil. Just—” He opened his eye, met Corin’s cool gaze. “Don’t trust them.”
“I don’t trust *anyone* who isn’t Ashridge,” Corin said. “But sometimes, you work with bastards because the monster on the other side of the river doesn’t care whose blood it drinks.”
He turned to go, then paused at the curtain.
“Bram,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t look at the scars as punishment,” Corin said, voice softer. “Look at them as a warning. To you. To anyone who faces you. You survived something that should have killed you. That changes a man. Use it.”
Bram let out a long breath as the alpha left. The curtain fell, cutting off the sight of him.
He lay there in the half-dark, listening to the murmurs outside. The scents of antiseptic and herbs and blood wrapped around him. Underneath, the faint, lingering sting of rogue ash.
Half his patrol gone. His own wolf limping somewhere in the dark of his soul. A Thornfell healer coming into Ashridge territory.
He closed his eye.
Somewhere deep, behind all the pain and guilt and emptiness, his wolf turned its head toward something distant. A scent he didn’t yet know. A pull he didn’t understand.
He ignored it.
For now.
***
By dusk, he was on his feet.
Barely.
Mara cursed him the entire time she bandaged his side and wrapped a wide strip of linen around his ribs. “Stupid, stubborn man. You tore half my careful work. You want to bleed out over the pyres?”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he grunted as she helped him into a clean shirt. “Waste of good blood.”
“You’re a waste of good something,” she muttered, but her hands were gentle when she swabbed at the split skin along his cheek.
He caught a glimpse of himself in the small, cloudy mirror by the basin. For a second, he didn’t recognize the man staring back.
The left side of his face was a ruin of angry, puckered flesh, still reddened and swollen. The scar cut from his temple, across his cheekbone, down past the corner of his mouth. It dragged his lip into a permanent half-sneer. His left eye was bloodshot, the lid visibly thicker. When he tried to blink, it caught on stiffened skin.
“Fuck,” he said softly.
Mara’s gaze flicked to the mirror and away. “Looks worse now. It’ll settle. You want salves, I got salves. But frankly, I’d leave it.”
“Why?” he asked roughly.
She shrugged. “Because there’s nothing honest about a beta without scars.”
He snorted. “You trying to flatter me now?”
“Please. You’re not that pretty.” She tugged the linen around his ribs tighter. He hissed. “There. Now if you breathe shallow and don’t move too fast and don’t do anything stupid, you might not split open in the middle of the ceremony.”
“I’ll try to disappoint you,” he muttered.
She smacked his shoulder. “You always do.”
Outside, the sky burned orange and purple as the sun sank behind Ashridge’s namesake—the jagged line of dark, ash-covered mountains to the west. Lanterns bobbed along the path to the clearing where the pack held their pyres.
Bram walked that path in a haze, each step a sharp reminder of how close he’d come to walking it cold on a plank.
The entire pack turned out.
He saw faces lined with grief, with anger, with that hollow, stunned look people got when the world had shifted under their feet and they hadn’t caught up yet. Children clung to parents. Mates clung to each other. Elder wolves sat stiff-backed on benches, eyes bright with memory.
The six bodies lay atop stacked wood, wrapped in plain white cloth. No adornments. No trinkets. Ashridge believed you went back to the earth with nothing but the shape the gods gave you.
Bram’s gaze snagged on each shroud. He knew which was Ren’s by the way his mother stood closest, shoulders shaking. He forced himself to meet her eyes when she looked his way.
She didn’t blame him.
That almost made it worse.
Corin spoke. Old words, older than any pack feud, than Ashridge itself. He talked of cycles, of hunts that never ended, of wolves running under new moons in new forests. His voice roughened when he spoke their names. Bram’s throat did the same.
When it was his turn, he stepped forward on shaking legs. The entire pack watched him. Judged him. Or maybe that was just his own guilt, sitting heavy on his shoulders.
“Ren Halversen,” he said. His voice carried, somehow. “Jessa Pike. Tyne Harrow. Hollis Venn. Mikel Dryden. Branwen Larke.” He swallowed. “They were my patrol. They were my responsibility. I led them into the dark, and I brought only four back.”
Silence. The sound of the wind moving through the trees. The soft crackle of torches.
“I can’t promise I won’t make mistakes again,” he said. “I can’t promise I can keep all of you safe. No one can. But I can promise this—I will remember. Every time you step beyond the border stones, I’ll see *them*. And I’ll do everything in my power to make sure you come back.”
His wolf stirred, a low, hoarse sound inside.
“I’m sorry,” Bram whispered, so soft only those closest might hear. “I’m so fucking sorry.”
He took the torch Corin handed him. Together, they lit the pyres.
Flames roared up, hungry and bright. The pack howled—not the sharp, vicious cry of battle, but a low, keening song that rose and fell like waves. It vibrated through his bones, through the scar on his face, through the hollow where his wolf hid.
Bram opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
His throat closed around the sound. The memory of the rogue’s howl and Ren’s last choking breath tangled in his chest and refused to let go.
He stood in the firelight, surrounded by the voices of his pack, and felt *alone*.
Somewhere in the distance, beyond Ashridge’s borders, another pack howled. Different rhythm, different pitch. Thornfell.
The sound scraped along his nerves like a blade.
He turned his face toward the flames and let the heat burn the tears from his eye before they could fall.
***
After, there were drinks and food and the subdued murmur of people clinging to life in the shadow of death. Bram endured the touches, the murmured condolences, the tight grips on his shoulder. He said the right words back.
Then he fled.
The woods were different at night when you went into them alone. The same trees. The same rocks. The same rustle of underbrush. But without a patrol at his back, every sound seemed louder. Every shadow deeper.
He walked until the fires behind him were nothing but a faint orange glow on the horizon. Until the scent of smoke thinned and the crisp bite of cold, clean air filled his lungs.
He stood at the boundary stones—huge granite markers carved with old runes, half-buried in moss. One of them had cracked right down the center, a jagged line that hadn’t been there a month ago.
He rested his hand on it.
“You’re falling apart too,” he murmured.
The stone hummed faintly under his palm. Old magic. The same that tied Ashridge’s land to its wolves. It should have felt steady. Solid.
It felt… strained. Like something inside it had been twisted too hard for too long.
“Fucking perfect,” he muttered.
An owl hooted overhead. Far away, a wolf howled—a long, lonely sound.
His skin prickled.
He should have answered. Should have tipped his head back and let his own voice rise in answer, to tell whatever was out there *this is ours. Keep moving.*
His throat stayed closed.
He shut his eye, pressing his palm more firmly against the stone, and reached for his wolf again.
*Come on,* he thought. *I need you. We’re useless like this.*
A faint brush. A flicker. The sense of something wounded, curled tight.
He didn’t push. Pushing had always worked, before. Now, it only sent that flicker further away.
“Okay,” he said aloud. “You rest. I’ll hold the line.”
He lowered his hand.
The wind shifted, bringing a new scent—strange, unfamiliar, threaded with herbs and something… hollow. Like a wolf with its teeth pulled.
He frowned.
It came from the east. From Thornfell’s direction.
***
He didn’t know then that at that exact moment, miles away in Thornfell territory, a small, quiet woman was packing her life into a single worn leather bag, trying not to shake as she folded away the last reminder of a wolf she could no longer feel.
He didn’t know that his wolf, tattered and raw, lifted its head anyway.
And scented *her*.
He only knew that the wind tasted like change.
And he’d never trusted change.
Not even when it came dressed like salvation.
---