Chapter Seventeen

Into the Dark

Emily's POV

We left at exactly ten.

Eight of us; Lucas, Adam, Alena, four Ironblood fighters whose names I had learned over three days of training, and me. We took two vehicles to the tree line and went the rest of the way on foot. The night was cold and clear and the moon was almost full, which Alena told me was both good and bad. Good because we could see, bad because they could too.

I had been given a light jacket, boots with good grip, and a knife I was told was for last resort only. I carried it in my right hand because it felt wrong not to. My wolf pressed steadily against the inside of my chest the entire walk. Not frantic. Focused. Like she was orienting herself, reading the land.

Lucas walked beside me. Close enough that our arms brushed occasionally. He did not speak but his presence was a constant, steady warmth at my left side that made the dark feel less total.

The northern site came into view through the trees after forty minutes of walking. It had once been a proper packhouse, the remnant of the dismantled pack that had been taken apart twenty years ago by the council. What was left was a long, low building of old stone, two outbuildings behind it, and a perimeter of recently added fencing that was clearly not original. They had fortified it, not extensively. There was not enough money in a rogue operation for that, but enough.

Four guards visible. Lucas held up his hand and we stopped. He and Adam communicated in the rapid, near-silent shorthand of men who had done this many times. Directions changed. The team split, Alena and two fighters peeling left, Adam and one fighter going right, Lucas staying at the centre with me and the remaining fighter.

"Stay behind me until I say otherwise," Lucas said against my ear.

I nodded.

The team moved. It was fast. Faster than I expected, and more quiet, the kind of coordinated silence that comes from years of training together. The four guards were neutralised not killed, just handled before any of them managed to raise an alarm. The fence had a section that Adam had found on the reconnaissance images, a weak point at the south corner. We went through it in under a minute.

Inside the main building it was darker. Lucas went first. I stayed close, two steps behind, and tried to trust my instincts the way Alena had told me to not think, just move. The building smelled like damp stone and smoke and something else underneath both of those things that I could not identify but that made my wolf press harder than she had yet.

They found the first set of rogue wolves in a side room, four of them, alert and armed, and the fight was brief and brutal and loud enough that it no longer mattered if anyone else in the building heard us. Lucas moved through it with an efficiency that I could not have prepared myself for. He was not violent in the way I had feared powerful men were violent for display, for cruelty. He was violent the way a force of nature is precise, purposeful, and done.

Running footsteps from deeper in the building, more coming.

Lucas grabbed my arm. "There is a lower level. Adam's contact said the prisoners are underground. Door on the left at the end of this corridor."

I ran.

The door was heavy and locked. Lucas hit it once and the frame cracked. He hit it again and it gave out. Stone stairs going down. Dark at the bottom. I went first without thinking about it, something pulling me down, forward, certain and Lucas was right behind me.

The lower level was one long room. Low ceiling. Cold. Three cells along the right-hand wall, iron doors, each one locked. I went to the first, empty. The second, empty. The third…

I heard breathing before I reached it. Slow and shallow and very tired. The breathing of people who had been tired for a very long time.

My hands were shaking so badly that Lucas had to help me with the lock.

The door swung open.

Two people, a man and a woman. Thin, marked by years of captivity, blinking against even the small amount of light from Lucas's torch. The woman had dark hair streaked through with grey. The man had brown eyes that were still sharp even in that face.

The woman looked at me.

She said my name.

Not Emily. A name… my real name, the one my parents had given me before Aden stripped everything that was mine away.

A name I did not remember.

And yet I knew it the moment it left her mouth. Knew it the way you know a sound you heard in the very first days of your life and have been carrying without realising it ever since.

I crossed the cell in three steps and I held on to her and I did not let go.

Above us, the sounds of the fight grew louder.

And then, underneath all of it, underneath the running and the shouting and the crack of bone on stone, I felt the thing in my chest that had been pressing and building and waiting for sixteen years reach its absolute limit.

And break.

My father's voice, before I heard my mother sing, was what I heard first in the cell.

It was the smell. The specific combination of his presence, something soft and complex that I should not have been able to identify without a wolf's senses and that I identified anyway with a certainty that bypassed analysis entirely and went straight to the oldest part of what I was. Before language. Before memory. Before anything that could be questioned or reasoned with.

I knew him the way I knew the sound of my own heartbeat. Not from recognition. From something that predated recognition. The specific frequency of the person whose blood I carried, whose genetics had shaped me, who had been reduced to a story about loss and guilt for twenty-two years and was in this room, real, breathing, alive.

My mother said my name, the real one, and I crossed the cell without being able to account for the steps between the door and her arms. I was simply there holding on, not performing grief or relief or reunion but doing something simpler and more total, being present to the fact of her. The physical reality of her after twenty-two years of her being an absence I had learned to carry without naming.

She was smaller than I had imagined her. Or I was larger than I had been when I last knew what she felt like. Both of those things were true simultaneously. Her arms were thin but the grip was strong, the grip of a woman who has survived captivity through will and has not let that will diminish regardless of what captivity did to the body around it.

Above us the sounds of the fight were continuing. Lucas and the team were managing it. I knew this through the bond, his presence sharp and functional and fully engaged, Caius providing combat precision at the level that made Ironblood's Alpha the Alpha he was. They had the upper floor. We had this room.

My father had pushed himself upright. He was looking at me with his sharp eyes and whatever the years had done to his body had done nothing to his eyes. They were still the same eyes I had seen in my memory so rarely and so carefully, the ones that had looked at me on the night everything changed, before the fire, before any of it, when I was small enough to be held and the world was small enough to be safe.

I reached for him with one arm while I held my mother with the other and he came forward and the three of us stood in the cell together for one complete moment before the sounds above reminded us that we were not finished.

"We have to move," I said. My voice was steady. I was not going to lose the steadiness now.

My father nodded. My mother pulled back and looked at my face and said one thing in the second before we moved.

She said "We knew you would come."

I did not know until she said it how much I had needed to hear that.