Chapter 6: Tracks That Don’t Belong

Maren had the yard cleared and the pack assembled within twenty minutes of the runner’s report, which told me more about how seriously Thorneheart took an unregistered patrol than anything anyone had explicitly said to me yet.

“Talk to me,” she said to the scout … a lean, younger wolf still catching his breath, hands braced on his knees.

“Three sets of tracks, maybe four. Crossed the ridge trail an hour before dawn, moving parallel to the border instead of toward it. Didn’t announce, didn’t request passage. Whoever it was wanted to not be seen doing it.”

“Ashen King’s men don’t announce,” Dorian said, arms crossed, his gray-muzzled face set in a grim line. “That’s not how they scout. They map a territory quiet, then come back with numbers.”

“We don’t know it’s them,” Maren said, though her tone didn’t have much conviction in it.

“We don’t know it isn’t.”

I stood at the edge of the gathered pack, Kian’s hand already finding the small of my back the way it had every morning since the barn … a habit two days old that already felt like it had always belonged there. Petra sidled up beside me instead of leaving me to feel out of place alone.

“This happen a lot?” I asked her, quiet.

“Not this close.” She was watching Maren’s face, not mine. “Ashen King’s been swallowing broken packs along the northern edge for two years. Thorneheart’s small … we’re not worth much to him on our own. But we sit between him and Ironwood’s back border, and Ironwood’s worth a great deal.”

A runner from the front gate cut through the gathering before I could ask anything else, out of breath in a different way than the scout had been … not urgency, embarrassment. “Letter for the Calder girl,” he said, holding out a folded page with a wax seal I recognized instantly, even at a distance. My sister never used anything but that particular shade of blue.

Kian’s hand tightened slightly against my back, a small, involuntary show of the same protectiveness I was still learning to let myself lean into instead of flinch away from.

I broke the seal. Selene’s handwriting, elegant as always, every loop of it performing sincerity it didn’t contain.

Ivy … I’ve heard rumors you’ve landed somewhere safe, which is a relief, truly. Mother and Father are beside themselves with worry, though I imagine you don’t believe that. I only ask, sister to sister, that you tell me exactly where you’ve settled, so I can reassure them myself. … S.

I read it twice, and both times the same cold clarity settled over me: not one word in it asked how I was. Every sentence wanted a location.

“Something wrong?” Kian asked, though I suspected he’d already read my face well enough to know the shape of the answer.

“My sister wants to know where I am. For Father’s peace of mind, apparently.” I folded the letter back along its crease. “She’s never once in nineteen years asked how I was doing. She’s asking now, four days after a border breach nobody outside three packs should know the details of yet, and somehow she already knows I’m ‘safe somewhere.’”

Kian went very still. “You think she’s the leak.”

“I think I’d rather be wrong about my own sister than right about her.” I folded the letter smaller, until the crease cut the words in half. “But I don’t actually think I’m wrong.”

He pressed a slow kiss to my temple, unhurried, unbothered by the pack still gathered a few yards off … a small, deliberate claim that had nothing to do with performance and everything to do with the simple fact that he wanted to. “Whatever she’s playing at,” he murmured against my hair, “she’s not getting near you to do it.”

Maren, who’d clearly been watching the whole exchange without pretending otherwise, crossed the yard toward us with an expression that made my stomach tighten before she’d said a word.

“I take it congratulations are in order,” she said dryly, glancing between us. “Dorian mentioned something happened in the training yard yesterday. Didn’t realize it had escalated to this speed.”

“It’s not exactly something either of us planned,” Kian said, a little sheepish in a way I hadn’t seen from him before.

“Rarely is.” Something almost fond crossed Maren’s face before it settled back into business. “I’m happy for you both. I also need to ask you something, and I need you to understand I’m not asking it to use you,” she said to me. “Your father’s eastern patrol logs. How current is what you remember?”

“Current as of two weeks ago. He reviewed them every Sunday at the kitchen table. He didn’t think I was listening. I usually was.”

“That’s either the most helpful thing anyone’s told me all week,” she said, “or information Ironwood would very much prefer stayed inside their own walls.”

“Both, probably.”

“Both works.” She glanced at the letter still folded in my hand, then at Kian’s hand still resting against my back, and something in her expression softened slightly despite the gravity of the morning. “Come find me after breakfast. And Ivy … don’t answer that letter yet.”

I hadn’t planned to.

Kian walked me to the porch afterward, an arm settling easily around my shoulders now instead of the careful, deliberate half-inch of distance he used to keep. Four days ago that gesture would have made me brace out of old habit. Now it just felt like the natural shape of standing next to him.

“You heard all of it,” I said, leaning into him.

“Enough of it.” He pressed another kiss, this one to the crown of my head, absent and easy, the kind of small affection that had become as natural to him in two days as breathing. “I don’t like that a letter like that found you this fast. Means somebody in your old house is paying very close attention to where you land.”

“Or somebody already knew, because somebody’s been talking to the people responsible for the breach.”

“That too.” His jaw tightened against my hair. “I keep thinking about the way you described her at that ceremony. Timing her cruelty like she’d rehearsed it. That’s not a description of someone acting on impulse.”

“No,” I agreed quietly. “It isn’t.”

We sat together on the porch steps, his arm still around me, my head against his shoulder in a way that would have felt impossibly forward four days ago and now felt like the only place I wanted to be.

“You’re angrier than you were two nights ago,” he said finally.

“I’ve had two more days to think about it. And a mate who makes me feel steady enough to actually let myself be angry instead of just afraid.”

Something in his expression went soft at that, the particular unguarded warmth I was still getting used to being allowed to see. “Good. For what it’s worth … the anger suits you. I liked you scared and steady at the border marker. I like you like this even more.”

We were still sitting there, his fingers tracing slow, absent patterns against my shoulder, when Maren’s second scout came back at a dead run, considerably faster than the first, and didn’t stop at the yard … went straight for the hall, straight for Maren, and this time I didn’t need to hear the words to know from the set of her shoulders, watching through the window, that whatever he’d found on that ridge had answered every question we’d been asking all day.

Kian was on his feet before I’d fully processed what I was seeing, pulling me up with him, not letting go of my hand. “Stay close.”

I didn’t argue. I followed him toward the hall, close enough to catch three words through the open door … Ironwood, fence, breached … and felt whatever warmth had settled between us a moment ago go cold and sharp with dread instead.

Selene’s letter was still folded in my pocket, and for the first time, I understood exactly why she’d wanted to know where I was.