Chapter 11

Things almost looked easy after that. The triplets no longer slept in the same room—Elena now rotated through their beds, an assertion of rank every bit as much as her new place at the head of the long table, or the way she addressed the Council. When Donovan called her “Evie” it was never a diminutive again, but rather a war cry. Damon played the lieutenant, drilling the younger wolves every morning before breakfast, and Devin finally started speaking in full sentences, having found or fabricated the caution and substance to fill them.

From the start, she kept every promise: no one went hungry, no one had to hide. She blooded her own hands on the weekly hunts, and when a rival pack sent an assassin, she let the triplets watch as she skinned him alive. That night, the air in the house thrummed. The boundary between Luna and her alphas wasn’t so much dissolved as melted, left sticky on the floor and tangled in the sheets.

But none of it stopped the dreams. In them, the deer always ran ahead of her, uncatchable and silent. The old runes on the trees bled red, then peeled from the bark like strips of skin. Once, she dreamed of her father’s hands, breaking her neck and cradling her face all at once.

She told no one.

***

It was on the tail end of the first real snow that the outsiders came calling again, this time not with open palms but with serrated claws. Elena was alone in the house, tending to errands and tending to wounds. The triplets were out rounding up lost spring calves, and she was already half-shifted, her skin prickling under the red flannel shirt. She smelled them before she saw them—strangers, two packs’ worth, trailing up her porch with the arrogance of men who’ve never gone hungry a day in their lives.

She opened the door not a second before they could knock, and in that moment, every wolf in the yard looked at her, saw the Luna, and froze.

“This is my land,” she said. “Speak your piece or get off it.”

There were six of them, all men, their faces impassive but their shoulders dipped and rolling like they smelled a storm.

The one in front, a thick-necked brute with hair the color of ash, said, “We need a treaty. We want to run the ridgeline south of the river this spring.”

She laughed. It was a sound she’d learned to use, sharp as broken teeth. “You think I’m going to cede territory before we’ve even met at the table?”

The man held her gaze. “Maybe you think you’re strong, girl,” he said, “but the packs out there remember what happened to your mother. They remember how she—”

Elena was across the porch before he finished, her hand at his throat, nails already pushing through the thin layer of his skin. Her other hand twisted his wrist until he dropped the blade he thought she hadn’t seen. She let herself pant, let the fog of her breath and rage fill the inches between them.

“I’m stronger than my mother ever was,” she said. “Tell your packs that.”

He didn’t answer. She let him go and, as he stumbled back, the others followed. They didn’t look at her again.

She watched them all the way up the hill, then went back inside, locking the door gently.

When the triplets came home, she told them everything, every detail except the way her hands had shaken afterward. Damon wanted to start a war; Donovan wanted to starve them out. Devin suggested a party, make the outsiders drink and screw until they wore themselves down to nubs. For once, she agreed with Devin.

The next full moon, they hosted the largest run in modern memory.

She marked her skin with war paint, black along her jaw and throat, and let her alphas decorate her in whatever ways pleased them. Damon made a crown from shed antler, which balanced dangerously until she split it with a saw and wore the halves as antlers of her own. Devin found a belt of bird bones and tied it around her waist. Donovan just watched, eyes never leaving her neck, hunger simmering so close to the surface she felt it like a fever.

The outsiders came, and found a new pack—laughing, wild, unafraid. The ground shuddered with music and stomping and, when the first brawl of the night broke out, Elena let it run its course. She drank from every bottle, danced with every girl, head high and loose on her shoulders. She paraded like the deer, visible and elusive all at once.

When the challenge finally came, it was the ashy brute again, this time with half his face painted like a skull. He made the mistake of stepping to her on the dance floor, reaching for her hair.

Elena grabbed his knuckles, spun them both in a mock waltz, and said, “You get one shot, old man.”

He aimed a punch at her sternum; she caught it, wrenched his shoulder out of socket, and bit the lobe of his ear clean through. The music never stopped.

He fell, and the others carried him away. No one challenged her again that night.

At dawn, she woke in a tangle of triplet limbs, fur matted with sweat and blood, her antler crown tipped rakish above her brow. She lay quiet, memorizing the shock of herself in the cracked mirror on the bedroom wall. She looked like an animal, but nothing in her face called it shame.

Beside her, Devin burrowed against her shoulder, sleep still clinging to him; Damon sprawled across her thighs, drooling into the sheets; Donovan curled at her back, hand tight around her ribs, as if anchoring her to the world itself.

She let herself believe this was the beginning, that the old female in her dreams was not her mother but a future self, strong enough to split the world with her hunger and hold it together with her need.

Elena rose, careful not to wake them, and pad barefoot to the porch. The sky was cut open with orange and chickweed blue. The woods pulsed with the sounds of survivors, every one of them owing the dawn to her, and to this strange, sprawling, ugly family she’d stitched together from the bones of a dead order.

She finished the last of the moonshine, wiped her mouth, and howled. Just once, low and clean.

The answer came, not just from the triplets, but from all the woods beyond, raw and bright and hers.