Chapter 9

The training ground was forty minutes outside the city.

Ryder drove himself — no security detail, no convoy. Just the two of them in a black truck moving through forest roads that grew narrower and older the further they went from Seattle. Ava watched the trees close in and said nothing. He hadn't explained where they were going until they were already moving, and she'd decided that fighting about it required more energy than she had.

The elders were already waiting.

Two of them. Elder Sorin — ancient, iron-haired, with the compact stillness of a man who had outlived most of the things he'd once feared — and Elder Dara, smaller, white-braided, whose eyes moved to Ava's midsection and then to her face with the same sharp, evaluating sweep.

The field was a cleared stretch of land ringed by old-growth firs. Concrete training barriers, each one a foot thick and six feet tall, ran in rows across the center.

"Show us what you did in the dining room," Elder Sorin said. No preamble.

Ava looked at Ryder.

He crossed his arms and said nothing, which she was learning was his version of *I trust you.*

She turned back to the field.

She reached inward.

Last night it had come without invitation. This morning in the shower it had pulsed once and retreated. She didn't know how to summon it — she only knew the shape of it now, golden and hot, sitting low in her chest between her lungs.

She pushed.

Nothing.

She pushed harder.

A crackle. Her right hand glowed — faint, unstable, flickering gold like a flame in wind.

"More," Elder Dara said.

"I'm trying."

"You're thinking. Stop thinking."

Ava exhaled. She stopped reaching inward and instead thought about the dining room. About the moment the window exploded. About the assassin moving toward her belly and something ancient and absolute slamming up through her bones.

The gold roared through her like water through a broken dam.

She threw one hand outward without aiming.

The pulse hit the first row of concrete barriers and they didn't crack.

They *disintegrated.*

Dust and chunks of concrete sprayed outward in a clean arc. All six barriers. Gone. The air smelled like burnt stone.

Silence.

Elder Sorin made a sound she'd never heard from a wolf his age: pure shock, swallowed quickly.

Dara was already writing in a small leather book.

Ryder hadn't moved. But his jaw was set tight and he was looking at the empty space where six concrete barriers had been with the expression of a man revising everything he thought he knew.

"Enough," Dara said. "Come here, child."

Ava walked over. The gold had settled back immediately — easier this time, like a muscle finding its groove.

Dara took her hand and turned it palm up. She traced the lines of Ava's wrist without touching, eyes moving, lips pressed together.

"What do you see?" Ryder asked from across the field.

"Old blood," Sorin said quietly. "Very old."

"Her maternal line," Dara added, not looking up. "The Sterling name is from her father's pack, but this—" she tapped the air above Ava's palm without contact — "this belongs to something much older. Before the pack system. Before the territory wars."

"What is it?" Ava asked.

"A golden lineage. One that hasn't manifested in three generations." Dara finally looked up. "The last known carrier was called the First Alpha's Daughter. She didn't rule through strength." She paused. "She ruled through something the old texts called *the binding light.* It did not destroy enemies. It unmade them."

Ava stared at her own hand.

"The pups," she said.

"Will carry it too," Sorin confirmed. "All three. In different forms."

The drive back to the city was quiet for the first fifteen minutes.

Then Ava's phone buzzed.

She looked at the screen. Blocked number. Her stomach tightened.

She opened it.

No text. Just an image — blurred, taken from a distance, but unmistakable. A concrete bunker. Fluorescent lights. Three armed men standing around a table covered in surveillance photographs.

Her photographs. Her face. The penthouse address. And in the corner of one photo, barely visible, three small blurry shapes on an ultrasound printout.

She knew that bunker.

She'd never seen it before, but she *knew* it — the same way she'd begun to know things in the last two weeks that she had no rational reason to know. A vision had slipped through while she was half asleep this morning, and she'd pushed it away. Now she let it fully form.

Logan Reed. Pacing between those tables. His mouth moving, giving orders she couldn't hear. The men nodding. A date circled on a calendar above the door.

*The day the triplets were due.*

She locked her phone.

"Ryder," she said.

He looked over.

Her voice was steady. Her hands were not.

"Logan is planning to take them," she said. "The moment they're born. He has a bunker. He has people. He has our location." She held up the phone. "And he has this."

Ryder's jaw went hard.

The truck accelerated.

And somewhere in the quiet beneath the engine noise, deep in Ava's chest, the golden light pulsed once — slow and furious and wide awake.