Chapter Five — Rescued

Amelia's POV

I don't remember when the thorns found me.

I only remember running — bare feet on cold earth, branches whipping across my face, the darkness of the Blackridge forest swallowing me whole. Behind me, the sound of heavy paws. Snarling. The wet, ugly hunger of rogues who had been given an order and intended to carry it out.

Bring her back.

Jace's order. Jace's men. Even now, even after everything, he couldn't simply let me go. I wasn't a person to him. I was property that had wandered off — and property needed to be returned.

I had run until my legs stopped working.

Until the thorns caught me like hands and pulled me down into the dark undergrowth, tearing at my skin without mercy or hesitation. I felt the blood before I felt the pain — warm and slow along my arms, my cheek, the backs of my hands where I had tried to break my fall. The twins shifted inside me and I curled around them instinctively, making myself small, making my body a wall between them and the ground.

Hold on, I told them. Just hold on.

My breath was a thread. Thin and fraying.

The rogues circled. I could hear them — low, ugly sounds in the darkness, the snap of teeth, the slow deliberate pacing of predators who knew their prey had nowhere left to go. One of them stepped closer, close enough that I could see the pale flash of its eyes in the dark.

Then—

"Stop."

One word.

One voice.

And the entire night obeyed.

It came from everywhere and nowhere at once — low and absolute, carrying the kind of authority that didn't ask for compliance. It simply took it. The air pressure changed. The darkness shifted. Every rogue in that clearing went rigid at once, hackles raised, something ancient and terrified moving through them like a current.

I turned my head slowly.

He stood at the edge of the clearing like he had stepped directly out of the dark itself.

Tall — impossibly, overwhelmingly tall. Six foot four of controlled, leashed power that made the trees around him look smaller somehow. Dark skin, sharp jaw, long black hair falling across his forehead in disheveled waves. And his eyes — ice grey, pale as a winter moon, cutting through the darkness with a cold clarity that made every living thing in that clearing instinctively still.

Zaydeen Briggs.

Alpha of Black Thorn Pack.

He wasn't snarling. He wasn't shifted. He didn't need to be. He simply stood there and let the weight of what he was press down on every rogue in that clearing like a physical thing — and one by one, they broke.

Snarling. Scrambling. Scattering into the dark like smoke in wind.

The night had turned against them. This was no longer their hunt.

He crossed the clearing in long, unhurried strides and crouched beside me. Up close his eyes were even more unsettling — pale and sharp and absolutely focused, moving over my face, my arms, the blood on my hands with an expression I couldn't name. Not pity. Not calculation.

Something quieter than both.

"I have you," he said. Low. Steady. The same voice that had scattered a pack of rogues now gentled into something almost careful. "Stop fighting. I have you."

I hadn't realized I was still fighting until he said it.

I let go.

I don't know how long I was unconscious.

I come back to myself in pieces — warmth first, then sound, then the deep restless pressure beneath my skin, like my bones are remembering something my mind has forgotten.

I pace the edge of the clearing, breath coming fast, heart pounding hard enough to shake my ribs.

The night air feels thick in my lungs. Every breath burns. Heat coils along my spine in slow, insistent waves — foreign and familiar at the same time, like a language I once knew and lost.

The world stretches. Shadows deepen, colours bleeding into one another as my heartbeat stutters and something inside me shifts.

I don't understand what's happening to my body.

I only know that it started when he touched me.

When those large, careful hands lifted me from the thorns and carried me out of the dark — something woke up in me that had been sleeping for a very long time. Something that recognized him before my mind could catch up. Something that said there in a voice older than reason.

Beneath the pain is something else.

Certainty. Power. A wild, breathless rightness that steadies me even as my body changes, even as tears blur my vision and my hands shake and everything I thought I knew about myself rearranges quietly into a new shape.

I press both hands to my stomach.

The twins are still. Calm. As though they feel it too — this shift in the air, this settling. As though some part of them recognizes what I am only beginning to understand.

He is not Jace, something inside me whispers.

He is not a wound. He is the end of one.

I sink to my knees in the soft grass at the edge of the Black Thorn pack grounds and let the tears fall — not from pain this time, not from grief or fear or the particular exhaustion of surviving things that were meant to break you.

From something I don't have a name for yet.

Something that feels dangerously, terrifyingly like hope.

Inside the pack house, I am told later, Zaydeen Briggs sat in a chair outside the healing room and did not move for four hours.

He didn't pace. Didn't make calls. Didn't conduct the business of running a pack the way Alphas were supposed to when the world didn't stop for their feelings.

He just sat.

And waited.

The way, I would come to learn, he always did.