THIRTY

RILEY

Knox shifted back first.

He stood in the Nevada scrub in the autumn morning light and looked at the Elder Council — twelve of them, still in their regalia, Elder Reth at the center — and then he looked at me. I'd shifted back too, the shift in reverse feeling like the most natural thing I'd ever done, like pulling a deep breath after a long time without enough air.

He invoked the challenge.

I didn't fully understand the words — old pack formal language, the kind of thing that gets carved into ceremonial objects — but I understood what it was from the way the elders' faces moved. Something they hadn't expected. Something they'd expected never to hear. Reth's composure shifted by exactly one millimeter, which in a man of his control was the equivalent of someone else dropping everything they were holding.

The challenge couldn't be refused. That was the point.

Knox fights like he does everything else — without heat. It's the thing that makes him frightening, that absolute zero-temperature control, the sense that he's executing a plan rather than responding to provocation. He went through the enforcers methodically, not cruelly, with the specific economy of someone who knows exactly how much force each situation requires and applies exactly that much.

I fought beside him.

I want to note that I had no formal training. I want to note that three weeks ago I didn't know I had a wolf. I want to note that what I had was five years of being a single mother and four days of Knox teaching me the pull-back and a bond running at full signal that meant I knew where he was every second without looking.

Luna, from Grayson's arms, provided running commentary the entire time.

"Daddy knocked the old one down." Pause. "Mama is growling. She sounds like a big dog." Pause. "I think Daddy's winning." Pause, turning to Hunter: "The one with the fancy scarf is scared of Mama. Can you see? He keeps moving back."

Grayson, who I later learned was holding Luna with both arms and essentially experiencing the most professionally disorienting thirty minutes of his career, told me afterward that he'd stopped trying to filter what she was saying somewhere around the second enforcers and had simply let it happen.

Hunter watched in the serious, fully absorbed way he watched everything he was trying to understand. Cataloguing.

The last elder standing was Elder Petra — not Reth, who had gone down in the second exchange, but Petra, the archivist who'd sent Knox the documents about his father. She looked at Knox for a long moment. Then she knelt.

One by one, the others followed.

Knox stood in the field.

He was breathing harder than he'd show — I could feel it through the bond, the cost of it, but I was probably the only one in the field who could. He looked steady. He looked like what he was.

He looked at me. At the twins. At Mara, who had materialized from somewhere and was standing with her arms folded and an expression that said she had driven eleven hours for this and was cautiously satisfied with the outcome. At Grayson, who had Luna on his shoulders at this point because she'd requested the elevation for a better view.

He looked at the kneeling Council.

"New laws," he said. His voice carried in the still air. "Starting with her."

And he was looking at me when he said it.

I was still barefoot from the shift. I had scrub grass between my toes and probably twigs in my hair and the bond was running warm and bright and very much alive between us, and I thought about a girl in a white dress bleeding on a marble floor five years ago who had looked at the moon and said *I'll never let you find me again*, and I thought about how much had changed and how much hadn't and how both those things could be true.

"Okay," I said.

Just that.

He almost smiled.