The Rogue Queen's Rise

I walk until the trees stop telling me where I am and start telling me where I'm not, and somewhere in that stretch of not, I stop crying and start counting miles instead. Miles are useful.Miles are something I can do something about.By the time I hit the county road my feet have gone from cold to numb to something past both, and I sit on the guardrail long enough to put my shoes back on — I did grab them, eventually, some scrap of sense winning out over the part of me that wanted to walk out of that cabin barefoot and never look like I'd needed anything from it — and I take out the phone I haven't used to call anyone in longer than I want to admit.There's exactly one number in it that isn't Marcus's pack.Renata picks up on the second ring, which tells me she's been half-waiting for this call for three years the same way I've been half-dreading having to make it."You're alive," she says, instead of hello."Define alive.""There it is." I hear something metal clatter in the backgr

The first one shows up eleven days after I do, which is how I learn that Renata's garage isn't quiet so much as it's waiting.I'm elbow-deep in a crate of spare parts I don't understand yet, sorting by size because Renata said sorting by size was a start, when the bay door rattles on its track and a girl steps in off the gravel like she's not sure the building will let her.She's young. Younger than young — seventeen if I'm being generous, all wrists and collarbone, wearing a jacket two sizes too big for her the way I used to wear my own posture two sizes too small. She doesn't look at me first. She looks at the exits.I recognize that particular scan, the door, the other door, the gap under the workbench big enough to fold into if it comes to that, because I used to run the same count in my head every time I walked into Marcus's kitchen."Renata around?" the girl asks, voice pitched low, like she's trying to take up less space with the sound of it too."In the office. I can get her."

The truck doesn't come back the next day.It doesn't come back the day after that either, and by the third morning I've almost convinced myself Renata was right the first time — somebody's mailbox, somebody's wrong turn, nothing that has anything to do with us.Almost.Wells doesn't relax the same way. I notice it in small things — the way she's started sitting closer to the bay door instead of the back office, the way her bucket has migrated again, another six feet, until she's close enough to see the gravel drive without being seen from it. She hasn't said a word about the truck since it passed. She hasn't needed to. I've learned enough of her sideways language by now to read it in where she puts her body.Piper notices too, in her own way. She's started sleeping with her boots on — the ones Renata gave her that first night — and when I catch her at it she just shrugs, like it's obvious, like of course you keep your boots on when something in the air has changed and nobody's told yo

Daniel's truck comes up the drive four days after he left, and I'm on the porch before the engine's fully cut, which tells me something about how little of the last four days I've actually spent doing anything but waiting.Four days is a long time to run a pack from a porch. I've signed off on disputes I'd normally have walked out to settle myself.I've let Sarah handle two supply runs I'd usually oversee.I've stood at that same kitchen counter more mornings than I want to count, looking at a stack of two mugs I haven't been able to bring myself to reduce to one, like keeping the second one out is its own kind of waiting.He doesn't get out right away. He sits there a second, hands still on the wheel, the way a man sits when he's deciding how to say something instead of whether to say it, and by the time he does climb out I've already braced for whatever's coming to be worse than I want it to be."She's alive," he says, before I can ask. "Safe. Two states over, at a garage a friend of

The second stranger to come looking for us in a month isn't lost, and isn't scared, and doesn't ask Renata's permission before he starts walking the perimeter of her property like he's already decided it might belong to someone else soon.It's been three weeks since Cole walked out of the tree line on unsteady legs, three weeks in which two more rogues have found their way to the bay door — a middle-aged woman who barely speaks and a pair of brothers who never leave each other's side — until the garage that used to feel spacious now feels like it's holding its breath every night to fit everyone under one roof.Renata's stopped joking about running out of cots. I've stopped pretending I know exactly what this is turning into.I clock him from the bay door before anyone says a word — a big man, broad through the shoulders in the specific way Alphas and their enforcers get broad, moving with none of the careful, measured distance Daniel kept. He's not hiding that he's looking. He wants u