Drest Moves First

The message came at midnight on the second day.

Not from Reyn. From Dorin, whose handwriting Zara knew as well as her own, in the short clipped code they had developed over six years of working together in situations where full sentences were a luxury.

RC compromised. DA knows. Run.

RC — Reyn's Council. DA — Drest's agents.

Zara was on her feet before she'd finished reading.

She had prepared for this. Some cold, unsentimental part of her had known from the moment she'd walked out of Reyn's hall with his two-day promise that two days was two days too long, that Drest had survived nine years in the inner circle of a canny Alpha by being faster than the people trying to expose him, and that the moment Reyn began verifying the records — the moment he made even one quiet inquiry — someone in that process would carry the word back.

She had prepared. It didn't make it easier.

She strapped her blades on in the dark, muscle memory doing the work while her mind ran ahead. The records — she had the originals, Lena had the copies, Dorin had a third set delivered two days ago to a location only he knew. Drest could burn everything in her tent and still not reach all of it.

But Lena was in the southern camp under four guards and no one outside Dorin's immediate circle knew why.

She was out of the tent at a run.

The southern camp was eight minutes at a sprint. She made it in six, and she knew before she arrived — the quality of the silence wrong, too still, the guards' fire burned low in the way fires did when no one had tended them in too long.

The guards were unconscious. Not dead — she checked pulses with the brief, practiced efficiency of someone who needed to know but couldn't afford to stop. Drugged. Fast-acting, clean, professional.

The tent was empty.

Lena was gone.

Zara stood in the empty tent for exactly three seconds, absorbing it, letting the implications land and settle and be filed. Then she turned and ran back.

Dorin met her halfway, breathing hard, a cut above his ear still seeping.

"Twenty minutes ago," he said, before she could ask. "Six wolves, no pack markings, came through the east perimeter. Clean breach — they knew where the gaps were."

"They knew our patrol pattern."

"Yes." His eyes were steady. Dorin was twenty-four years old and had the face of someone ten years older, and right now it held the particular expression of a soldier delivering a report he wished he didn't have. "There's more. Message arrived for you from the Ironfang line an hour ago. I was bringing it when—" he held it out.

One line. No signature. The handwriting she had memorised without meaning to.

They've taken someone of mine. They want the records. Meet me. Now. You know where.

Zara read it twice. Felt the cold clarity of a situation with no good options settling over her like armour.

Drest hadn't just taken Lena.

He'd taken someone from Kade's side too — the note made that plain. Whoever it was, it was someone Kade was willing to move for, tonight, without waiting.

She thought about what that meant. About the fact that Drest had moved against both of them simultaneously, which meant he knew about the farmhouse. Which meant he had eyes on one of their lines, or both, and had been watching long enough to see the pattern of their meetings.

Which meant tonight was very possibly a trap.

She looked at the note again.

You know where.

She thought of Kade standing in the abandoned farmhouse in a dark coat, no armour, turning toward the door with the alertness of a man with good instincts. She thought of after, said quietly in the cold, held carefully, like something that might not survive.

She thought of Lena's son in Redmere, and an eight-year network, and a war built from the inside by a man who understood leverage better than anyone.

She strapped her third blade to her forearm. Looked at Dorin.

"You know where the third set of records is," she said.

"Yes."

"If I'm not back by dawn, you take them to Reyn yourself. You don't wait. You don't send someone else. You go, you stand in front of him, and you don't leave until he's read every page."

Dorin's jaw tightened. "Zara—"

"That's an order."

He held her gaze for a moment. "Yes, Captain."

She turned and walked into the dark.