Chapter Twenty One

The Eastern Wall

Emily's POV

I ran straight to Lucas in the corridor.

He caught me by both arms before I could speak. He had already felt it, I could see it in his face, that sharp awareness that meant Caius had picked something up through the mate bond before I even reached him. His silver eyes were wide and focused.

"How many?" he said.

"More than ten. Eastern tree line, moving in a wide circle around the packhouse." I placed my hand to the wall and closed my eyes for just a second, reaching outward the way I had done in the rogue building. "Fourteen. Maybe fifteen. They are already past the outer markers."

Lucas turned and moved fast. He was already on his earpiece before we reached the main corridor, relaying positions to Alena in clipped, precise language. Adam appeared from the study doorway, took one look at us, and went straight for the weapons cabinet without being told.

George was still at the study table. He had not moved. He looked up when I stopped in the doorway.

"Troy," I said.

"Yes," George said quietly. "He would have had people pre-positioned before tonight. He planned this when he ruled in your favour at the hearing, he knew the ruling would push events forward and he wanted to be ready." He stopped for a moment. "I am sorry, I should have anticipated this."

"You can be sorry later," I said. "Right now I need you away from windows and doors. Yoana's wing. Go."

He blinked at me, surprisingly, I think, at being given direct instruction by the girl he had helped suppress for sixteen years. Then he stood and went.

I moved through the packhouse fast. My wolf did not panic. She was cold and clear and reading the approach through me like a compass finding every magnetic point at once. I could feel the fourteen attackers as distinct presences, their individual bonds to Troy's orders, their formations, the two who had already peeled away from the main group and were moving toward the medical wing.

Toward my parents.

I changed direction without thinking and ran.

The medical wing door was still open. Yoana looked up when I burst through it. My mother was sitting up on the bed, already alert, her wolf, whatever years of captivity had done to it, had clearly felt the shift in the territory too. My father had one arm braced against the headboard, trying to push himself upright.

"Two coming this way," I said. "Yoana, lock the external door. Mum, Dad, move to the inner room. Now."

Nobody argued. Yoana moved to the external door. My mother got my father to his feet faster than I expected and they moved to the inner room, a storage space with no windows that I had noticed on my first day in the wing.

I pushed the door closed behind them and turned.

The first attacker came through the window. He was large and fast and had clearly done this before. I had three seconds before he found his footing and I used all three of them moving the way Alena had drilled into me, compact and low, hitting the angle that used my smaller size as a lever rather than a disadvantage.

He went down harder than I expected. My wolf lent something to the impact, not a shift, not light, just a raw, bone-deep force that came from somewhere deeper than muscle.

The second attacker was already through the door before the first one hit the floor.

This one was different. Older, more careful, and he had not come to fight but had come to take. He looked past me, straight at the inner room door and moved for it with a single minded purpose that told me he knew exactly who was behind it and exactly what his orders were.

I stepped into his path.

"You will not get past me," I said.

He looked at me the way a large man looks at a small woman who is standing between him and what he wants with almost no concern at all.

He rushed, then I moved. The light, the warm, gold-white light that came without asking, flooded the room so completely and so suddenly that he stumbled while stepping forward, blinded, crashing into the wall instead of me.

I hit him once, hard, at the base of the jaw. He fell down.

I stood in the sudden quiet with both hands burning warm, my breathing ragged and my wolf sitting steady at the centre of me.

The earpiece Lucas had clipped to me before I ran cracked. His voice controlled, but with an edge underneath it. "Emily, Report."

"The medical wing is clear," I said. "Two down. My parents are safe."

A short silence. Then, "Good, stay there. We are containing the main group at the east wall."

I looked at the two men on the floor. Looked at my hands, still faintly warm. Then I looked at the inner room door.

I pushed it open. My parents were against the far wall, my father's arm around my mother's shoulders. They both looked at me, at the light still fading from my skin, and at the two unconscious men visible through the doorway behind me.

My mother's face did something I was not prepared for. Not fear or relief but something more brutal than both.

Pride.

"There she is," my mother said softly. As though she had been waiting a very long time to say it.

And from somewhere deep in the packhouse, I heard the unmistakable sound of Lucas's voice raised in pain.

I was moving before the echo died.

I stood over the two men on the floor and looked at my hands for a moment longer than I needed to. The light had faded completely, now pulled back into whatever place it came from, leaving my palms ordinary again or what passed for ordinary. Nothing about my hands had been ordinary since Ironblood's territory had begun to loosen what George had locked away inside me all those years ago.

My wolf came forward, checking. Not the two men, they were not a threat anymore, she was checking me. The specific interior assessment of a wolf who has just done something significant and wants to know how the person they share a body with is holding up after it.

I was holding up. That surprised me, slightly. I had expected more shake, more crash, more of the breathless quality that came after a close thing. What I felt instead was a steadiness that was new. Not the steadiness of someone who has managed to hold themselves together. It was the steadiness of someone who has just discovered that they are capable of more than they knew and that the discovery has settled something rather than unsettled it.

My mother was calling my name through the locked inner door continuously. She had the characteristic of a woman who had survived sixteen years of captivity by building an interior architecture that did not collapse easily, and she was using it now to keep herself present rather than frightening me with her fear.

"I am alright," I said. "Both of you are alright. I am coming."

I opened the inner door. My mother looked at me, at my face, at my hands, at the two men on the floor visible through the doorway behind me and did the rapid assessment of mothers who have been through difficult things without thinking about it. She concluded something. Her expression changed. Not relief, but recognition.

"There she is," she said again. Softer this time. The second time being different from the first in the way that saying a true thing twice can sometimes make it more true.