The report reached Kolton through a Delta named Reese, a boy who still flinched when Whitley looked at him too long. I heard about it secondhand, the way I heard most things now—filtered, late, already decided.

Rogue activity spiking at the Appalachian crossing. Whitley's wolf-sense, miraculously recovering, catching my scent near the border twice in the last week.

I hadn't been near that border in a month.

*She's building a story,* Sera said. *A defection story. She wants him to send you out there believing you're already halfway gone.*

I didn't argue with Kolton when the summons came. I didn't ask why intelligence from a mute rogue's 'recovering' senses outweighed six years of my own border instincts. I just packed my kit, checked my blade, and told myself the timing worked in my favor. Dylan was already moving toward the ridge. If Kolton wanted me on that trail, he was doing my work for me.

We rode out at dawn, forty deltas and gammas in formation, mist still low on the grass. I read the line the way I always had—horses too tight on the left, gaps opening on the right, a scout's whistle coming half a beat late from the tree stand.

*Wrong,* Sera said, and I felt it too, cold and clean down my spine. *This isn't patrol. This is a funnel.*

There was no way to abort. I couldn't scream ambush without proof, not standing this close to a formation that already thought I was the threat. So I did the only thing left—I shifted my grip on the reins, dropped back half a length, and put myself where I could see three directions at once.

They hit from all three.

Rogues came out of the tree line like the forest had exhaled them—too coordinated, too patient, waiting until we were fully inside the pass before the first one dropped from the ridge onto Silas's second unit. I heard Kolton's voice snap out commands, sharp and instinctive, and for three full seconds it worked. We held the line.

Then Whitley screamed.

It came out perfectly pitched—not too loud, not too controlled—the exact frequency that reaches straight into an Alpha's spine and short-circuits every other thought. I watched Kolton's head turn toward it before his body caught up, watched six years of discipline fold into pure reflex.

He wheeled his horse and drove through the fight toward her.

The eastern flank went with him. Just like that. Open ground where a wall of warriors had been standing a breath before.

I was the only one left covering it.

A rogue came in low, claws already out, and I didn't have time to be angry about the flank—I killed him first and felt angry after, ribs screaming where his claws caught me on the backswing, four lines opening hot and deep through muscle. I didn't look down. Looking down costs time I didn't have.

Sera poured everything she had left into my legs. *Move. Move, Jolie, they're sealing it—*

A second wave dropped in behind me, closing the corridor I'd just cleared. I turned and there was no way back through—just rogues, three of them, teeth bared, circling in on the smell of blood they could probably taste from thirty feet.

I fought them moving backward, toward the only high ground with a clean line of sight—the gorge ridge, where the trees thinned and the roar of water got louder with every step. I killed the first one clean. The second one cost me skin off my forearm and half my remaining strength. The third I barely remember—just teeth, and Sera screaming numbers at me that didn't make sense until I understood she was counting down how much blood I had left to lose before my legs stopped listening to either of us.

I broke into the clearing at the gorge's edge with my side soaked through, black spots crawling the edges of my vision, forty feet of white water roaring below me like something starving.

Behind me: rogues, closing, unhurried now, because they could smell exactly how little fight was left in me.

Across the clearing, through drifting smoke and the last stragglers of the fight, I saw him.

Kolton. Whitley pressed to his chest, unmarked, untouched, her face tucked into his throat like she belonged there.

He was looking at me.

I watched his eyes go from her hair to my ribs to the blood soaking down into my belt, and something crossed his face that might have been the start of understanding.

It was too late for it to matter. I was already out of ground to give.

Kolton took one step toward me.

Just one. His boot came down on the wet stone, weight shifting forward like his body remembered how to run to me even after his mind had forgotten why it mattered. Then the rogues surged into the gap between us—three of them, then five—and he stopped.

He didn't push through them. I want to be clear with myself about that, because I think some small, stupid part of me was still waiting to see if he would. He didn't. He planted his feet, curled Whitley tighter against his chest with one arm, and used the other to strike down the rogue closest to him, and then he called my name.

"Jolie!"

Just that. Like the sound of it could reach across the clearing and pull me back onto solid ground. Like calling for me was the same thing as coming for me.

Sera didn't answer him. She didn't answer anything. I felt her go still inside me, the way water goes still right before it freezes, and somewhere in that stillness I understood she had already stopped fighting for a future that included his name in it.

Rain started then, cold and thin, needling my face. It ran pink where it hit my side and dripped off my knuckles in threads. I watched it fall on Whitley's hair, perfect and untouched, tucked into the hollow of his throat like she'd been carved to fit there. I watched him look at me with something breaking open behind his eyes—too slow, six years too slow—and I understood completely.

He would always choose the one who needed saving over the one who never asked to be.

I had spent six years being strong so he wouldn't have to be. It turned out that was the one thing he could never forgive me for.

The rogues behind me went quiet, patient, close enough now that I could hear the wet drag of their breathing over the river's roar. There was nowhere left to retreat to. Forty feet of white water waited at my back, hungry and loud, and forty feet of solid ground stood between me and a man who wasn't coming.

So I stopped waiting.

I planted my feet in the mud and lifted my chin, and I found enough air in my torn-up lungs to make my voice carry over the rain and the river and the growls closing in around me.

"I, Jolie Williamson, former Luna of the Silverfang Pack—"

Kolton's head snapped up. I watched the understanding land in his face like a physical blow.

"—reject you, Kolton Myers, Alpha of the Silverfang Pack, as my mate—"

"No." It came out of him broken, disbelieving, no Alpha command left in it at all. "Jolie, don't—"

"—from this moment until my last breath."

The mark on my neck ignited.

It didn't feel like fire, not exactly. It felt like something being cut out of me with a dull blade, slow and total, six years of bonded warmth burning away in real time down to bare skin. I heard myself make a sound I didn't recognize. I didn't fall. I made myself stand through it, because I would not give this pack the sight of me on my knees twice in one lifetime.

Across the clearing, Kolton's chest caved inward like something had reached inside his ribs and torn out the load-bearing wall. His knees hit the stone. Whitley staggered back out of his arms, and for one strange, suspended second, her face wasn't broken or fragile at all—it was pale with something closer to panic, like she hadn't expected the vow to actually land, like she'd never truly believed I would go this far.

His wolf made a sound I felt more than heard, a low, collapsing groan that wasn't a howl. It was the sound of something enormous falling down a very long way.

I stepped backward.

The rogues lunged, but I was already past their reach, already past the last inch of solid ground, and the world tipped sideways as my heel found nothing but air.

I fell into the white.

The cold hit first, total and absolute, driving every remaining thought out of my head except one—Dylan, the ridge, the trail, hold on—before the current took me under and the roar of the water swallowed everything, even the sound of my own name still hanging in the air behind me, unanswered.

Kolton tore through the rogues in seconds. I wasn't there to see it, but Sera felt the ripple of it even as the river spun us both—his rage finally arriving exactly three heartbeats too late to matter, claws and fury clearing a path to a gorge edge with nothing left to save. He reached the ledge and found white water and rain and silence.

The bond didn't go quiet. That would have been a mercy. It went hollow—a frequency still open, still transmitting his every desperate pulse down a line that received nothing back, forever. His hands would start shaking before he understood why. His aura would dim like a bulb losing current. And for six hours, by every account that reached me later, the Alpha of the Silverfang Pack did not say a single word.