LOGIN~Amelia~
I was in the garden when Caleb found me.
~Amelia~“Amelia,” Caleb’s voice crackled through my mind link, and the second I heard it, I already knew the day had gone sideways. “We’ve got movement at the west edge, and it’s not ours.”I was halfway through checking Lily’s nursery shield notes when that the news got to me, and I looked up so fast I nearly knocked the folder off the table. “How many?” I asked, and I was already walking before he answered.
~Amelia~The door opened before either of us could keep needling the other, and Kaden walked in looking like he had already had a bad five minutes somewhere else and was now ready to turn the rest of the room into a funeral. He stopped halfway in, looked at the way Blake and I were standing over the same table, and his eyes narrowed so fast I could almost hear the jealousy was about to strike him.
Blake had asked me to review the inner defense route with him while I had Lily with Eli for the moment.I was standing over the central map table with a stack of guard notes in my hand, when Blake came in from the side hall carrying a narrower route chart and looking way too calm for somebody who had spent the last few days getting side-eyed by half the pack.He dropped the chart onto the table and said, “You got a minute, or are you still pretending you can do five jobs at once without any help?”
~Kaden~Caleb called to one of the guards, “Get a marker line on this right now, and move the patrol lamp two yards back, because if somebody comes through here in a storm, I want them lit up before they make five damn steps.”The guard nodded and hurried off, and I kept staring at Blake while he stayed crouched by the fence like some overgrown problem. “You got all that from one pass?” I asked.
~Amelia~Caleb lifted a brow. “You planning to trust Blake with zero access?” he asked.Kaden’s expression turned mean in a second, and I could literally see the jealousy wake up. “Blake does not need nursery access,” I gave him a flat stare. “Nobody said he did,” I deadpanned.
~Amelia~By sunrise, the whole territory was on full watch, but somehow I knew something bad was still going to happen when the second I stepped out of the house and caught that metallic smell drifting in with the wind. It was not the usual forest damp or pack smoke, because this one had that nasty edge that always showed up when something dead had been left where it should not be.







