All Chapters of THE ENEMY'S CLAIM: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

NOT FINISHED YET Sera's room didn't look like a bedroom anymore. It hadn't for days, Rain suspected. The bed was still made — Sera was Sera — but the desk had consumed everything else. Files stacked in columns. Printed sheets covered in numbers and handwritten margins. A whiteboard propped against the wall with three separate diagrams and a timeline Rain didn't fully understand. Two empty coffee cups. One that was still half full and had clearly been forgotten. Sera was standing when they arrived, one hand on the desk, eyes already moving to the door before Rain had finished knocking. "Close it," she said. "Both of you, sit." Damien looked at Rain. Rain looked at Damien. They sat. Sera didn't begin with context or comfort. She picked up the first file and opened it flat on the desk between them and pointed. "Healing rate." Her finger moved along a column of numbers. "Standard wolf recovery from a significant laceration — tissue closure begins within four to six minutes. Full

WHAT MARCUS KNEW Marcus hadn't slept properly in four days.The room Damien had given him had become something between an office and an obsession — files covering every surface, his laptop open to three different windows, a board on the wall with names and dates and connections drawn in red marker that meant something to him and would have meant nothing to anyone else.He had been going through every pack organization he had ever encountered in twenty years of operating in the spaces between legitimate and not. Cross referencing. Eliminating. Following threads that went cold and picking up new ones.On the fourth day he found it.Not a person. An organization.Old. Older than most of the packs currently standing. They had no public name — just a symbol that appeared in the margins of certain documents, on the backs of certain transactions, in the corners of certain communications that had been passed between powerful people for decades. A small circle with a line through it. Simple.

YES They were in bed when he started talking. The city was quiet outside. The room was dark except for the light coming through the windows — that particular late night glow that made everything feel both small and significant simultaneously. Rain was almost asleep when she felt him shift beside her. Not restless. Deliberate. The particular stillness of someone who has decided to say something they have been carrying. She opened her eyes. "Tell me," she said quietly. He did. He told her about The Aegis. About Marcus finding the name in documents that predated most living pack records. About seventy years of documented activity. About rare bloodlines tracked and acquired with patience so complete it felt inhuman. About the symbol — a circle with a line through it, simple and unremarkable — appearing in the corners of every transaction, every communication, every record connected to them. He told her about Cole recognizing it. About the abandoned building in the forest on Lena'

ALREADY SPOKEN FOR The knock came at the wrong hour.Damien knew Lily's knock — unhurried, three even beats, the kind that didn't demand but didn't apologize either. He had heard it at reasonable hours, at unreasonable ones, at moments that had turned out to matter more than they looked. But this was late even by Lily's standards. Past eleven. The compound had gone quiet an hour ago.He looked up from the desk."Come in."She entered the way she always did — without urgency in her body, which somehow made the urgency more present, not less. She closed the door behind her. Crossed to the chair across from his desk and sat down without being invited, which was also typical, and which he had stopped finding presumptuous a long time ago.She folded her hands in her lap."I need to tell you what I saw," she said.He set down his pen.She didn't preface it. Lily never prefaced things. She simply began, and Damien did what he always did when Lily spoke about her visions — he went completely

LET THEM COME Nobody slept well. Rain knew because she heard them. The compound had its own nighttime language — the particular sounds of a building full of people who were awake but pretending not to be. Footsteps at two in the morning. The low murmur of Cole on a call somewhere down the hall. The sound of Jace moving through the kitchen at four, not eating, just moving. Marco she didn't hear at all, which meant he had gone outside, which meant he had needed to think with the dark and the ground under him. She lay in the quiet and felt the bond sitting in her chest like a low, steady flame. That part was new. That part she didn't mind. By seven they were all in the main room without anyone having called them there. That was the thing about a pack that had been through something together — the timing became instinctive. Nobody needed a message or a summons. They simply arrived, one by one, with coffee or without it, and arranged themselves in the particular way they arranged th