A few hours later, the convoy of shadows came to a halt deep in enemy territory.

Derek crouched at the treeline with his men spread out behind him, all of them cloaked in the dark, watching the camp below.

Tents clustered around a dying central fire. A handful of guards loitered near the entrance, slack-shouldered and bored, passing something between them that was probably not water.

Derek’s eyes moved over the whole of it, slowly, marking every tent, every gap, every shadow that could hide a blade.

Listen well, he said into the wide mind-link, his voice cold and clear in every skull. We move in four units. Declan, you take the eastern flank, push them toward the centre. Bruce, your men hold the western treeline; nothing gets out on your side, not a wolf, not a rabbit. Marcus, your unit circles to the rear and cuts off the escape route along the stream. My unit takes the front gate.

No one engages until every unit is in position. You confirm through the link, then you wait for my word. We squeeze them from all sides at once. I want Rolf dead. But his Luna alive. Everyone else who raises a claw is fair game.

He paused, then added, And remember what I told you. The Umbras wear faces, but they don’t wear memories. If you come across someone you know in there, a familiar face, a friendly voice, you test them before you trust them. Ask them something only the real one would know. Hesitation is your answer. Kill anything that hesitates.

A ripple of grim acknowledgement came back down the link.

Positions.

The units melted away into the dark, one after another, until the link lit up with four quiet confirmations. The camp sat below them, surrounded on every side and entirely unaware of it.

Now.

They shifted as one.

Bone cracked, fur surged, and a tide of massive Lycan bodies poured down out of the trees from every direction at once. The loitering guards at the front barely had time to turn before Derek’s unit was on them.

It was over in seconds, quick and brutal, the bored faces never even managing a proper howl of warning. The Lycans swept into the camp.

And that was when the wrongness began.

The first tent Derek tore open was empty. So was the second. The third held nothing but bedrolls and a cold cooking pot. The deeper his men pushed into the camp, the more the same reports came rippling down the link. Empty. Empty. Empty.

Where was the resistance? Where were the trained gammas, the layered defences, the war camp of a man planning to take Dravengard?

Something was fishy. Derek could feel it crawling up the back of his neck.

He left his men to handle the scattered wolves who had finally come stumbling out to fight, and went hunting himself, tearing through tent after tent in search of the only faces that mattered.

But every canvas flap he ripped aside revealed the same thing. Frightened wolves, thin and wide-eyed, who took one look at the enormous black Lycan filling the entrance and fled screaming in the opposite direction. Not Umbras or gammas. Just terrified creatures scattering like spooked birds.

Bruce. Declan. He fired the words down the link as he shouldered out of yet another empty tent. Any sign of Rolf? His Luna? Anyone?

Nothing on my side, Bruce returned.

Nor mine, said Declan.

Bruce. Derek’s mental voice went flat and hard. Are you certain about this location? Absolutely certain?

I’d stake my life on it, Your Grace. Rolf was here. I scouted it myself with my men. He was here.

Well, he isn’t now. Derek swung his great head, scanning the chaos of the camp. It doesn’t seem like anyone of consequence is.

Declan’s voice cut in from his flank, tight with a new urgency. Derek. These men fighting. They’re not Rolf’s gammas. They don’t move like soldiers, they don’t fight like soldiers, half of them can barely shift properly. And there’s not a single Umbra among them.

He paused a bit. I think they’re captives. He left us his prisoners.

Derek slowed.

It tracked. Every wolf he had faced tonight had fought like prey, not predator. Flailing, panicking, running. Rolf’s actual forces were nowhere. The camp was a shell.

He stopped dead in his tracks.

Unless, he said slowly, the thought landing cold in his gut, Rolf knew we were coming.

Very likely, Declan replied grimly.

But how? Bruce asked. This information was classified.

Derek turned in place, his eyes sweeping the tent he had just entered with new and terrible attention. The bedroll. The cold lamp. The wooden chair sitting innocently in the corner.

And the small device strapped neatly to the chair’s leg with a tiny light on its side, blinking in the dark.

His blood turned to ice.

IT’S A TRAP! he roared down every channel of the link at once, already hurling himself toward the entrance. RETREAT! ALL UNITS, RETREAT NOW! GET CLEAR OF THE TENTS!

He burst out into the open air.

Too late.

The explosion went off behind him with a force that swallowed the world, and as if answering it, blast after blast erupted across the camp, tent after tent going up in fire and smoke and screaming light, one after another after another, until the whole night was burning.

***

Far away, in the bright marble calm of Aethelwulf Centralis, Kira had just arrived back at her hotel.

Connor and the guards flanked her in a moving wall as she crossed the lobby and started down the long corridor toward her suite, Petra a step ahead.

Kira walked with her hand gripping her clutch, her mind circling and circling the same poisonous little message.

Meet me by the pool in an hour.

She had no intention of going. She had every intention of telling Connor if she had to. She just had not worked out how to do it without explaining everything else that came attached.

"My Queen!"

A woman’s voice rang out down the corridor.

The guards moved instantly. Connor and two others peeled off and intercepted the stranger in a heartbeat, forming a wall of shoulders between her and Kira, while Petra’s hand closed firmly on Kira’s arm and steered her onward without breaking stride.

"Please," the woman’s voice came again, cracking with desperation behind the wall of guards. "Please, I must speak with the Queen. Alone. It’s important. I beg you, it’s so very important!"

"The Queen is tired," Connor said flatly. "Leave now, madam, or you will be removed."

Kira barely glanced back. Her nerves were already strung wire-tight from Brian’s texts, from the long day, from a creeping unease she could not name, and the last thing she had room for tonight was a stranger in a hallway. She let Petra guide her on toward her door.

And then the woman screamed past the guards.

"My Queen, it’s about your mother! It’s about Claire!"

Kira stopped dead.

The name went through her like a blade. She turned, slowly, and looked back down the corridor, past Connor’s shoulder, at the woman straining against the guards’ grip.

And froze.

She knew that face. The middle-aged woman from the mall some time ago. The one who had stopped in the middle of the mall stared at her like she had seen a ghost and called her by her mother’s name.

Kira’s eyes went wide.

"You?"