MasukFaye pov I stopped running. Not because the danger had lessened, and not because I suddenly believed the situation had become manageable, but because something inside me finally reached a point where instinct no longer made sense. Every direction we moved in led to collapse, every defensive formation broke faster than it could be rebuilt, and every attempt to protect someone ended with more confusion than safety. So I stopped. And in that moment of stillness, I understood something I had been avoiding since this began. As long as I kept being treated as something fragile, something that needed to be shielded, everything around me would continue falling apart. I tightened my arms around the baby, feeling the faint but unstable rhythm of her presence against me. The echo inside her was still there, still alive, but it no longer felt like something I could simply release without consequence. It reacted too strongly now, too unpredictably, as if every use of it was changing t
Jacob POV I knew the moment it changed. Up until then, the chaos had at least followed a pattern I could fight against. It was violent, unpredictable, and tearing through the camp faster than we could contain it, but it still carried traces of what it had been before. Wolves hesitated. They resisted. They fought each other as much as they fought us. There was confusion in it, fragmentation that I could work with, something I could try to control. Then it stopped behaving like chaos. The shift was subtle at first, almost easy to miss if I had not been watching for it. Movements that had been erratic began to smooth out. Attacks that had been scattered began to align. The corrupted wolves stopped clashing with one another, not gradually, but all at once, as if something had reached into the middle of the storm and forced it into order. I saw two of them break apart from a fight they had been locked in seconds earlier. Instead of continuing, they turned in the same direction
Korran pov Retreat had never suited me. It implied loss, weakness, the surrender of control to forces I had not yet mastered. Yet as I stood within the northern forest, far from the shattered clearing and the chaos I had left behind, I realized that what I had done was not retreat. It was repositioning. The air here was different. It carried a stillness that the battlefield had long since lost, a kind of quiet that did not come from peace but from restraint. The forest watched and waited, and beneath its surface, I could feel the faint echoes of power that had not yet been fully claimed. I was not alone. What remained of my elite guard stood at a measured distance behind me, fewer than before, but unbroken in the way that mattered. They did not question. They did not hesitate. Their loyalty had not been shaken by what had happened at the oak, because they understood what others did not. This was not the end of anything. This was the beginning of refinement. I lowered my
Faye pov I did not remember deciding to move, only that at some point the chaos became too close, too overwhelming, and hands were guiding me away from the center of it whether I agreed or not. Someone had decided for me, and under any other circumstance I might have resisted it, but in that moment I allowed it because I could feel how fragile the situation had become. There was no clear line anymore between safety and danger; only distance remained. And even that felt unreliable. I stepped back into the shadowed edge of the camp, my arms wrapped tightly around the baby as I struggled to steady my breathing. The sounds of the fight still reached me clearly, sharp and relentless, filled with the unmistakable noise of bodies colliding and voices breaking under strain. This was not a battle against an enemy we could see. This was something far worse. I forced myself to look. I did not want to, but I needed to understand what we were facing, even if it meant watching somethin
Jacob POV I saw him coming before anyone else fully understood what was happening. There was nothing wild about the way he moved, nothing reckless or uncontrolled in his advance. Even in the middle of the chaos tearing through the camp, his path remained steady, direct, and focused in a way that immediately set him apart from the others. Every instinct I had sharpened at once, not because he was the closest threat, but because he was the clearest one. He was not attacking blindly. He was hunting. I moved before he reached her. The impact hit harder than it should have, my shoulder slamming into his chest with enough force to drive him off course and into the ground. Under normal circumstances, that kind of hit would have disoriented him long enough for me to restrain or disable him completely. It did not. He recovered too quickly. His body twisted beneath me with precision, not panic, and his hand shot upward in an attempt to break my hold before I had fully secured it
Faye pov The screams did not stop after they began, and as I stepped out into the open with the child held tightly against my chest, I realized with a sinking certainty that they were not coming from a single point of conflict. They were spreading across the entire camp, rising from different directions at once, overlapping until it became impossible to tell where one ended and another began. For a brief moment, I tried to convince myself that this was panic, that fear had simply taken hold after everything that had happened. But the moment I saw the first clash clearly, I knew that was not the truth. This was not fear. This was an attack. And it was not coming from outside our walls. It was already inside them. Two wolves were locked in a brutal struggle near the central fire, their movements fast and unrelenting. One of them fought with clear intention, his strikes controlled even in urgency, while the other moved with something that felt broken, as though his body could no
Jacob’s POV I woke up to silence. At first, I thought it was just the usual early morning stillness, but then I realized the space beside me was empty. Faye wasn’t there. My eyes shot open, and my heart slammed against my ribs. I called her name softly at first. “Faye?” Nothing. No reply. I rea
Faye’s POV The days after Thorn’s threat did not feel real. They passed, but I never felt them move. I woke each morning with the same tightness in my chest, the same fear sitting deep inside me. The camp looked normal. Wolves walked between tents. Smoke rose into the air. Children laughed and ran
Faye pov The cheers still rang in my ears, vibrating through my bones, with the pack’s voices shaking the very ground beneath my paws. I stood over Thorn in half-wolf form, and silver fur matted with blood. My side throbbed with a fiery ache, a constant reminder of the blade Kael had driven into m
Faye povJacob helped me into the tent. My legs felt weak, like they could give out at any moment. Blood still leaked from the cut on my side. The bandage Lara had placed there earlier was already soaked. Every step sent pain through me. Sharp and burning. I ignored it. I needed to see my baby. I n







