Chapter 38

They spent the rest of the night in Fern's small cabin, going through old pack records by lamplight, searching for any name that might explain what they'd just seen in the trees.

"There," Fern said finally, tapping a yellowed page with one thin finger. "Bram Ashworth. Lost his entire family in a border raid forty years ago — mate, two pups, all of it, in a single night. He disappeared into the woods a week later. We assumed he'd died out there, grieving alone. Nobody ever found a body."

"Forty years is a long time to survive alone in the woods," Kade said.

"It's not surviving," Fern said quietly. "Not really. Whatever's left of Bram hasn't been alive in any way that word usually means for a very long time. He's just been out there, hollowing further and further, waiting for something to finally fill the emptiness or finish him off."

Ivy looked at the old photograph tucked into the record — a young man, smiling, arm around a woman Ivy assumed was his mate, two small children at their feet. Nothing about that photograph matched the cold, drifting shape from the treeline, and that gap, more than anything else, made her chest ache.

"He used to be happy," she said quietly. "He used to be someone's whole world."

"He still could be, maybe," Fern said. "If the old stories are right. A bond strong enough might reach what's left of him, remind him what wholeness actually felt like, long enough to either bring him back or let him finally rest. Either outcome ends the danger. Neither outcome is guaranteed, and both are dangerous to attempt."

"Dangerous how?" Kade asked.

"If the bond isn't strong enough to reach him," Fern said, "he won't just retreat again. He'll try to take what he's sensing instead — consume it, the way he's consumed everyone else he's found alone in the dark these past forty years. You'd be offering him exactly what he's hungriest for, with no guarantee he responds to it the way the stories promise instead of simply devouring it."

Kade's jaw tightened. "You're talking about using Ivy as bait."

"I'm talking about the only method anyone's ever recorded working against a Hollow at all," Fern said honestly. "I won't pretend it's safe. I also won't pretend there's a safer option sitting somewhere unused."

Ivy set the old photograph down carefully, thinking of Rowan back home, of Margaret, of everything she had to lose if this went wrong. Then she thought of Bram Ashworth, forty years alone in the dark, and the two small children in that photograph who'd never gotten to grow up beside him.

"I'll do it," she said. "Not because it's safe. Because he was somebody's whole world once, and I don't think anybody's tried to remind him of that in forty years."

"Ivy—"

"You'll be right there," she said, turning to Kade, steady despite the fear sitting cold in her chest. "The bond works both ways. If I reach for him, you're reaching too, whether you mean to or not. We do this together, the same way we've done everything else this year."

Kade looked at her a long moment, torn between every protective instinct he had and the plain truth that she wasn't wrong about the only real option in front of them.

"Together," he agreed finally, low and rough. "Every step of it."

They set the plan for the following night, salt lines prepared, Damon's security spread wide but hidden, Fern positioned close enough to guide them through whatever came next.

They were still finalizing positions when the alarm horn sounded, sharp and sudden, from somewhere inside the compound itself.

Not the treeline. Not the fence line. Inside the walls.

"That's not possible," Damon said, already running toward the sound, Kade and Ivy right behind him. "Nothing's gotten through our lines in weeks—"

They rounded the corner of the main hall and stopped cold.

The temperature had dropped instantly, breath fogging thick in the air, and in the center of the courtyard, a shape drifted slow and deliberate between two frozen, terrified pack members.

It wasn't hunting either of them.

It was standing perfectly still, facing the gate Ivy and Kade had just come running through, as if it had been waiting, patiently, for exactly this moment to finally arrive.