The wounded soldier didn't move. He lay on his back in the churned mud of the valley, one leg bent at an ugly angle, his dark uniform torn and wet with blood. His weapon was gone — lost in the retreat, or maybe crushed under the stampede of lycan feet. His face was a mask of disciplined pain. He wasn't screaming. Men like this were trained not to scream.Elias crouched beside him. He said nothing at first. He simply studied the man the way he had once studied tracks — reading the signs, learning the weight of what stood before him.The soldier was young. Twenty-five, maybe. He had the lean, honed look of someone who had spent years being shaped into a tool. His jaw was clenched tight. His eyes — grey, flat, utterly controlled — stared up at the sky. He was waiting for the kill.He had been trained to expect it."No one is killing you," Elias said quietly.The soldier's eyes flicked to him. A micro-expression of surprise, quickly suppressed."Not yet," Fenris growled from behind. The l

Her name was Soren. She said it like a wall — two syllables, nothing more, nothing given.They sat in the open air at the edge of the ridge, the valley spread out below them like a wound in the earth. The other soldiers were at a distance, watched by two of Ronan's pack — not imprisoned, not restrained, just observed. The distinction mattered, and Elias had been careful to make it.Small gestures. They added up.Soren's hands were folded in her lap, her back straight, her face a practised blankness that Elias recognized immediately. He had worn it himself, in the years before he understood what was underneath."How long have you been with the network?" he asked."Long enough," she said."Long enough for what?"The corner of her mouth tightened. "Long enough to know that this conversation is either a very smart move or the last mistake I'll ever make.""Which do you think it is?""Undecided," she said. "Ask your questions."He did. He asked them carefully, methodically, the way he had

The three days were not peaceful. Nothing about them suggested peace. But they had a kind of purpose, and purpose, Elias had learned, was the closest thing to peace that a life like his could produce.He worked alongside the pack. Not above them, not below them. Alongside.It was harder than it sounded. The lycans had centuries of muscle memory in terms of how they related to outsiders — which was to say, they didn't. They were a closed system, a culture built around the logic of survival in a world that had always wanted them dead. Trust was not a luxury they extended casually.But work was a different language.Elias spent the first day mapping what Soren had told him onto the terrain. He was meticulous, patient, cross-referencing her intelligence against what the other soldiers had confirmed, noting inconsistencies, flagging gaps. He sat on the ground with pieces of bark and a stick of charcoal, sketching the layout of the facility with a precision that made Maren — who crouched be

It was exactly what Soren had described, and it was worse than any of them had imagined.The facility sat in a carved-out hollow between two ridges, the kind of topography that provided natural concealment from above and natural sound absorption from the sides. If you flew over it in good light, you might see the edges of the complex where they merged imperfectly with the rock — the straight lines that nature didn't produce, the absence of natural debris, the too-clean drainage channels running along the base of the south wall.From the ground, in the dark, with no prior knowledge, you would see nothing.They approached from the northeast, using a dry streambed that Soren said would put them within forty meters of the facility's secondary access point — a maintenance entrance that was monitored but not heavily guarded. The main entrance, she said, was the lethal one. Four armed posts, redundant sensor arrays, and a hardened blast door that would take industrial equipment to breach.Th

The corridor was different with an alarm in it.Sound behaved differently — it fractured, multiplied, arrived from multiple directions at once. Light changed too: the steady strip-lights cut to amber emergency mode, painting everything in a yellow-orange wash that made the stone walls look like the inside of something biological. The world contracted.Elias moved to the front.He had a mental map of the facility now, built from Soren's intelligence and supplemented by everything his senses had gathered since they'd entered. Scent of the air flows. The sounds of machinery, which told you where the power systems were — and therefore which walls were load-bearing, which corridors were serviced most frequently, which areas were most and least likely to have staff moving through them in an emergency.He had eleven rescued captives behind him, at varying levels of mobility. Soren. Luna. Drev.Six people capable of fighting. Eleven who needed to not be in a fight.The mathematics were unfavo