The snarls, the howls, the scratching, the wet crunching noises lasted for ten minutes before the two wolves emerged.
When the sounds finally ebbed, the silence weighed heavier than the screams that had come before. Every gaze at the treeline fixed on the dark mouth of the sally-port. Elara held her breath, silver pulsing low and hard beneath her skin. The child whimpered against Torvee's chest; even Caleb—bloodied, jaw set—tightened his grip on Corin as though bracing for a blow he couldn't see.
Then they appeared.
Garrett came first, huge and broad, golden eyes burning like banked coals. Blood clotted his fur in thick ropes, black where it had already dried, slick where it was fresh. Behind him Luke staggered, smaller but no less fearsome, his grey coat matted red to the shoulder, claws rasping wet across stone as he cleared the lip of the passage. They looked less like rescuers than nightmares that had learned to walk.
A hiss of breath moved through the gathered wolves and men. Someone behind Elara muttered something like a prayer that didn't remember its words. Torvee swore, low and steady. The child gave a thin, frightened cry and burrowed deeper into Torvee's arms.
From the trees, the Alpha stepped into the light.
Riven didn't hurry. He didn't need to. The clearing seemed to rearrange itself around him of its own accord. Gold gathered about him in Elara's sight, not flaring, simply present, like the sun had decided to stand on two legs. He didn't spare the humans a glance. His gaze went first to Garrett—measuring, acknowledging—then to Luke.
"Omegas, cover them," Riven said, voice cutting the clearing clean in two.
At once, a line of wolves surged past Garrett and Luke and formed a living wall at the tunnel mouth. Smaller, leaner, but bristling with purpose, the omegas slammed shoulder to shoulder as the first of the pursuing ferals burst from the dark. The impact shuddered through the ground. Teeth met teeth; claws raked. The wall held.
"That's a pack," Torvee said through her teeth, not surprised, not impressed—just grimly satisfied to see order where the keep had been chaos. She adjusted the child's weight on her hip and kept her eyes on the fight.
Caleb sank to one knee to lower Corin onto a bed of fern and leaf-mould at the treeline, breath ragged with spent strength and fear. Corin didn't stir. Blood had dried in a dark fan across his back where it had soaked through his shirt; her shoulder, torn by the bite, looked raw and ugly. Elara's stomach lurched, but her silver rose to meet it, steadying her hands. The flare of emerald beneath Corin's skin was still there—dim now, but sure. No one else could see it. No one else needed to, not yet.
Amber stood a pace in front of them, sword angled down, eyes fixed on the tunnel. She didn't look at Riven—she knew where he was without seeing. She didn't look at Garrett or Luke either, because the Alpha had given his order and the line at the mouth of the passage was the only line that mattered. Elara wished, abruptly and fiercely, that Ravenholt had ever moved this way—one voice, one shape, no gaps for panic to pour through.
The fight at the tunnel jammed into a brutal rhythm. The omegas didn't break to chase. They didn't snarl for the sake of noise. They leaned their weight and killed what was in front of them, and every time a feral tried to climb or slip or use the edges, two bodies shifted to make the hole smaller than a wolf. It was ugly work and they did it well.
Riven crossed the space between the trees and the two blood-drenched wolves without haste. As he drew closer, Garrett bowed his head, a low rumble sounding in his chest that wasn't submission and wasn't pride; it was the sound you made when your body remembered what it belonged to. Luke, at Riven's other side, lowered his gaze at once. The tremor in his legs took nothing from the steadiness of the way he held himself.
Caleb stared, jaw tight. "Monsters," he breathed, and then, as if the word tasted wrong in his mouth, added with a rough edge, "Our monsters."
Elara didn't flinch. Her silver raised every hair on her arms; her pulse beat a hard drum behind her eyes. But she stood where she was and watched. If she looked only with fear, she would see two beasts soaked in the ruin they had made. If she looked with what had woken in her, she saw the other thing: a shape cut to carry weight, to hold a door while others ran.
Riven stopped before them. The gold about him slid across Elara's sight and settled like weather.
He spoke to Garrett first, and there was no ceremony in it, only the clean exchange of information. "Report."
Garrett's great head dipped. When he answered, the sound was half voice, half growl, and every wolf in the clearing understood it. "Twenty at least in the passage. More behind. The first wave is down. The rest are bottlenecked on the stairs. If they push again they'll choke each other. The wall will hold for now."
Riven's gaze flicked past him to the line of omegas. "Hold it," he said, though they were already doing exactly that. The wall leaned, snarled, killed, leaned again. One omega went down to a rake of claws along the flank and another stepped into his place before the feral finished falling.
"Wounded?" Riven asked.
Garrett moved his weight slightly; Elara saw him keeping one hind leg lifted by a fraction. "I'll mend."
Riven turned his head. "Omega?"
Luke's ears flattened. Up close, even in wolf form, Elara could see what the passage had cost him: one shoulder furred dark with blood where teeth had punched deep; a line of gouges along the ribs; the tell-tale tremble that meant the body had been asked to hold past the point it remembered it could. The grey of his coat seemed lighter around the wounds, as if the moonlight had scoured colour away.
"I stand," Luke said, and lowered his head further.
Riven's eyes narrowed—not doubting, measuring. He turned then, not to the wolves, but to the humans gathered in the cusp of the trees. When he spoke, the words were for all of them and none. "This place is not safe. We move. Delta and Gamma will set the line for the march. Omegas hold until the signal, then fall back by pairs. No one breaks shape. Do you understand?"
The wolves did. They didn't need to say so. The men standing amongst them stiffened as if their bodies recognised command even where their minds baulked.
Caleb swallowed. "We can't just leave them." His gaze flicked, helpless, towards the smoke rising from Ravenholt. He meant the ones still inside, the ones who would never reach the trees. He meant the idea of home, maybe, more than the place.
"We are not leaving them," Riven said, and the plainness of it made Caleb lift his head, confused. "We will be alive enough to come back, or we will die trying now and give the ferals more meat for their courage. Those are the choices. Choose the one with teeth."
Amber's mouth tilted the barest degree. It wasn't humour. It was recognition.
Torvee, jaw set, nodded once as if ticking a box on a list. "He's right," she said to Caleb. She didn't make it gentle. "You can't shoot with empty hands and you haven't any bullets left to be noble with."
Caleb's breath went out of him like a punched sack. He looked down at Corin—white, still, blood drying dark—and flinched as if the sight could bruise. "She's cold."
"She's alive," Elara said. She didn't offer hope. She offered fact. "We have to move or that stops being true."
For a heartbeat he met her eyes and something like surrender uncurled in his shoulders. Not defeat. Decision.
Riven had already turned away. His attention returned to Garrett and Luke. He lifted his head a fraction—the hand on a dial turning from "order" to "reckoning".
"You did well, Omega," he said.
The words slid through the clearing with the weight of something older than the keep and the people who had died in it. Luke's body went still in the way of a wolf hearing its name and its place in the same breath. Pride and ache crossed his posture like a gust of wind crosses a field.
Riven's gaze held him. "Now," he said, every syllable measured, "come here, and receive your recognition."
Elara felt Caleb tense beside her, felt Torvee's hold on the child tighten, felt Amber's attention sharpen like a blade turned on a whetstone. Garrett shifted his weight so that he stood braced and ready if the line at the tunnel mouth wavered, but his eyes didn't leave Luke's.
Luke stepped forward.
One pace, two. He did not limp. He did not lift his head. At the third pace, he stopped of his own choosing and bowed his neck and shoulder as if offering himself into the shape of what was about to happen. His breath came fast, but it did not hitch. He knew. Instinct told him. He accepted.
"What's he—" Caleb began, and took half a step, fury and fear breaking through at once. Elara caught his forearm and held, silver singing under her skin like wire pulled taut.
"Wait," she said. "It isn't punishment."
The child whimpered, eyes squeezed shut. Torvee whispered, "Don't look, love," and turned the little head into her shoulder. She herself did not look away.
Riven did not ask again. He moved.
For a heartbeat there was only stillness—the whole clearing pulled tight around a point of quiet—and then the Alpha lunged.
His jaws snapped shut on Luke's shoulder with a wet, tearing crunch.
Blood ran bright and clean in a sheet. Luke dropped to one knee under the calculated weight of the bite, head bowed, teeth clenched against the pain. He did not resist. He did not cry out. He bore it.
"Hey!" Caleb roared, surging against Elara's grip. "What are you doing—he saved us!"
Elara's silver flared so hard her skin felt cold to the touch. "Caleb, stop," she said, and for the first time there was command in her voice that didn't belong to practice or fear; it belonged to the room. Caleb froze as if he had hit a wall.
Riven held a heartbeat longer, breath hot against torn flesh, then—