The rain started an hour before we reached the ridge.

It came down hard and fast, the kind of late-autumn storm that turns mountain roads into rivers. Mason had both hands on the wheel, leaning forward slightly to see through the windshield. The wipers couldn't keep up. I watched the guardrail appear and disappear in sheets of water, close enough to touch if I'd rolled down the window.

"We should pull over," I said.

He shook his head. "We're almost through the pass. Ten more minutes and we're on flat ground."

I didn't argue. I just looked out at the drop beyond the guardrail—nothing but gray air and the faint shapes of trees far below—and felt my wolf shift restlessly behind my ribs. She didn't like this. Neither did I.

But I'd spent three days at that cabin smiling at Mason, letting him hold me at night, pretending everything was fine. I could survive ten more minutes.

The SUV hit the curve too fast.

I felt it before I saw it—the back tires losing traction, the steering wheel jerking under Mason's hands. He swore and yanked it hard to the left, but the road was slick and the vehicle was already sliding, already committed to a direction neither of us could control.

We hit the guardrail sideways.

Metal screamed. The world tilted. My seatbelt locked across my chest and I felt the SUV tip, roll, slam into the rock face on the passenger side. My door caved inward. Something in my leg snapped—a sound I felt more than heard—and then there was just pain, white and total, and the smell of gasoline and rain.

I couldn't breathe.

I tried. My ribs wouldn't expand. There was weight on my chest, pressure I couldn't identify, and when I looked down I saw the crushed door pinning me from the waist down, metal folded around my leg like it was trying to hold me in place.

Blood. There was blood pooling beneath me, dark and spreading.

"Mason," I said. It came out as a whisper.

He was moving. I heard him grunt, heard the driver's-side door creak open above me—we were on our side now, the SUV wedged against the cliff—and then his boots scraped against the frame as he pulled himself up and out.

I waited for him to come back. To reach down through the shattered windshield, to tell me to hold on, to do something.

He didn't.

Instead, his mind-link flared open—not to me, to someone else—and I felt the exact moment the connection locked into place because his whole body went rigid.

Kenzie's voice tore through the link, high and frantic. *Mason, oh God, Mason, you have to come back—rogues breached the eastern border—they're at the den, they're trying to get to Ryder, I can't—*

I watched his face through the rain.

I watched him look toward the road, not down at me. I watched him scan the empty stretch of asphalt like he was already calculating distance, time, how fast he could get back.

"Mason," I said again. Louder this time. My voice cracked.

He didn't look at me.

A truck appeared around the bend—a rogue trader's rig, battered and mud-streaked, the kind that ran goods between packs without asking questions. Mason stepped into the road and flagged it down with both arms, and I felt something in my chest crack wider than my ribs ever could.

The truck stopped. Mason ran to the passenger side, wrenched open the back door, and hauled Buster out of the wreckage. The wolfhound was whining, twisting in his grip, trying to get back to me. Mason shoved him into the truck's cab and climbed in after him.

I tried to mind-link him. *Mason. Mason, please.*

Nothing. He'd already shut me out.

He leaned out the window, looked back at the wreck—not at me, just at the wreck, like it was an obstacle he'd already moved past—and shouted over the rain, "I'll send someone back!"

The truck pulled away.

I watched the taillights disappear into the storm, and I understood, with a clarity that felt like drowning, that he wasn't coming back. That no one was coming. That I was alone on a cliffside road in the rain with my leg shattered and my ribs caved in and my mate bond still humming faintly in my chest like it didn't know it was already dead.

My wolf howled.

She threw her head back inside my mind and howled, raw and desperate, the kind of sound that should have brought the whole pack running. I opened the mind-link as wide as I could and screamed into it—*Help, someone help, I'm on the ridge road, I'm trapped, please*—and felt my voice disappear into empty air.

No one answered.

The rain kept falling. The blood kept spreading. My vision started to blur at the edges, gray creeping in, and I thought about the notebook in my study. The loyalty oaths locked in a safe-deposit box thirty miles away. The Infidelity Clause I'd memorized. All of it useless if I died here.

I wasn't going to die here.

I shifted.

It was the worst pain I'd ever felt. Worse than the wolfsbane. Worse than the crash. My bones were already broken and the shift forced them to break again, to reshape around fractures that hadn't healed, and I screamed through teeth that were becoming fangs, my body convulsing as fur tore through skin slick with blood.

But I was smaller now. Compact. The crushed door that had pinned me as a human left just enough space for a wolf.

I clamped my jaws on the seatbelt strap and pulled.

Inch by inch. My hind leg dragging useless behind me. My ribs grinding with every breath. I pulled myself free of the wreckage and onto the muddy shoulder, and then I kept pulling, because stopping meant dying and I wasn't done yet.

I crawled.

I don't know how far. The world narrowed to rain and mud and the taste of blood in my mouth. My wolf was still howling, quieter now, a sound that lived in my chest like something broken.

When the headlights found me, I thought I was hallucinating.

But then there were voices—unfamiliar, urgent—and hands lifting me, and the last thing I remembered before the gray swallowed me whole was the scent of pine and iron, foreign but not hostile.

Allied pack. Thornfield.

I let go.