MasukMona POVThe quiet was the problem.In the chase there had been no room for anything except the next ridge, the next threat, the next breath. In the cabin, with the fire steady and Alessandro’s ribs slowly knitting and the bond sitting whole and undisputed between us, the quieter things finally caught up.I woke before him on the fifth morning and lay still in the narrow bunk, staring at the rough underside of the roof. The completed bond hummed low and content. Outside, rain moved through the high canopy in soft sheets. Safe, relatively. Alive. Together.And under all of that, guilt opened like a bruise I had been too busy to feel.Mom’s face in the antechamber.The way she had said I loved you like the words themselves were a wound.The hall full of wolves watching the images on the screen.Lucas’s careful neutrality as the structure he served tore itself open.The pack that had raised me, taught me to shift, given me a place—now carrying our names as rogue and traitor.I slipped ou
Mona POVThe cabin was smaller than the ranger shelter and farther than anything on the pack’s ordinary maps.Alessandro found it on the third day after the moon—deep range, past the last of the maintained trails, where the redwoods gave way to denser, older growth and the air smelled of wet stone and untouched earth. It had been built by someone who wanted to disappear: one room, a cold hearth, a narrow bunk, a door that still closed. The roof held. The walls did not leak. For the first time since the yard, that was enough.We cleaned it in silence.He handled the structural checks and the perimeter, moving carefully around the ribs that were finally beginning to knit. I dealt with the interior—shaking out the bunk, clearing the hearth, setting what little we had carried into some kind of order. My power sat quiet under my skin, no longer restless with immediate threat. The completed bond filled the space between us without effort. We did not have to reach for each other through wall
Mona POVWe didn’t stop running until the blood-scent of the ruined camp was far behind us and the Ironfang howls had thinned into uncertain distance.Alessandro found a high shelf of granite open to the sky and sheltered on three sides by old-growth fir. From there we could see anyone approaching long before they reached us. He finally let himself drop to one knee, one arm locked around his ribs, breath rough. The cut on his shoulder had stopped pouring but still painted dark streaks down his arm. My hands were still stained with what I had done to Dargrel.For a long time we only sat there, shoulder to shoulder, the bond carrying the aftershock of violence and the stunned quiet that follows a chase that has finally broken.Then Alessandro looked up at the sky.The moon was high and nearly full, white and merciless and clean. It poured over the shelf without obstruction. No pack. No council. No mother down the hall. No rogue waiting in the trees with a camera or a threat.Just us.“N
**Mona POVDargrel laughed through the blood in his mouth.“Look at you both,” he rasped as Alessandro held him against the broken post. “Former Alpha and the little traitor. No pack. No ground. Killing me won’t give you either of those back.”“It doesn’t have to,” Alessandro said. His voice was flat, almost calm, which was worse than the roar. The bond still burned with residual massacre-heat, but a colder decision was forming underneath it. “It only has to stop you from putting your hands on her again.”He shifted his grip for a killing angle.“Wait.”The word left my mouth before I fully planned it. Alessandro’s head turned, eyes still gold, questioning. Through the bond I pushed what I needed him to understand: *This one is mine.*He studied me for a long second. Then, slowly, he loosened his hold and stepped back just enough to give me the space—staying close enough to end Dargrel himself if anything went wrong.I stood on unsteady legs. The drug haze had thinned. The power unde
Mona POVI felt him before the rogues did.The bond, strained and muffled by whatever Dargrel had put in my blood, suddenly flared with a heat so violent it cut through the drug fog like a blade. Alessandro was close—closer than they expected—and he was no longer trying to be careful.The first warning the camp received was the sound of a body hitting the ground outside the tarp shelter hard enough to crack branches.Then the screaming started.Dargrel’s head snapped toward the entrance. “Positions—now—”Too late.Alessandro came through the outer watch like a wolf who had stopped caring about anything except the straight line to me. I couldn’t see all of it from where I was bound, but I felt every impact through the bond: the pure, lethal focus, the way his injured body was being forced past its limits by rage alone. Someone shifted and lunged. The contact ended almost instantly. Another rogue tried to flank and was dragged out of my line of sight with a sound that stopped halfway th
Mona POVThe trap was simple.That was what made it work.We had been moving west along a dry creek bed for most of the morning, using the stone to break our trail. Alessandro’s ribs were improving in the slow, ugly way of injuries that had no real rest to heal under, and my power sat quiet but ready under my skin. The Ironfang search lines had spread wider after the rogue declaration, which should have given us more gaps. Instead it gave Dargrel room to work.He used a wounded-pack-wolf scent as bait.It was faint, distressed, and just credible enough that Alessandro slowed at the edge of a narrow ravine to read the air. In that half-second of divided attention, the net closed.They came from above and behind—four rogues in coordinated motion, fresher than we were, unburdened by cracked ribs and days of running. Alessandro spun and put the first one down hard, but the second hit his injured side with deliberate accuracy. The bond flared white with his pain. I shifted on instinct, pow





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