Our boots hammered the ridge like war drums, each impact sending shards of stone spinning into the void. The wind tore at my face, icy claws trying to rip the breath from my lungs, but I welcomed the burn. Behind us the howls and shouts of Valen's Royal Guard faded, swallowed by distance and the roar of the mountain itself. Leo was safe. Elias was safe. That truth was the only thing keeping my heart beating.
Ryan ran half a step ahead, blood trailing from the shredded meat of his shoulders, painting the rocks black in the moonlight. Every leap across a crevice cost him; I saw the tremor in his landing, the way his left leg almost buckled. Silver poisoning crawled through his veins like frost. He was slowing, and the hunters knew it.
High above, drones whirred into the sky—sleek black things with red targeting eyes. Their heat sensors would pick us out in seconds against the cold stone. Valen wasn't playing wolf anymore; he was playing soldier.
I grabbed Ryan's wrist and yanked him sideways, off the exposed ridge and down a near-vertical goat track I'd hunted as a child. Loose shale slid beneath us. We half-ran, half-fell fifty feet in a controlled avalanche, landing hard in a narrow ravine choked with dwarf pines. The drones buzzed overhead, confused by the sudden drop in temperature and the thick canopy.
Ryan's breath sawed in and out, wet and ragged. "They'll flank us in minutes."
"Then we don't give them minutes."
I took the lead.
He didn't argue. That alone told me how bad it was. Ryan Calder had never followed anyone in his life, yet he fell in behind me without a sound, trusting me with the same blind faith I had once given him. The reversal settled between my shoulder blades like a mantle made of fire.
We moved fast, ghosting along the ravine floor where the drones couldn't see. My senses stretched wide—every snapped twig, every distant engine thrum, every heartbeat of the men trying to kill us. The terrain was my birthright; I knew every crack, every hidden spring, every lie the mountain told to strangers.
The ravine spat us out onto a high plateau of broken basalt. Moonlight silvered the jagged ground. No cover. Nowhere to run except straight across eight hundred yards of open death.
Boots crunched behind us. A specialized kill unit—twelve wolves in matte-black tactical gear, night-vision goggles glowing green, suppressed rifles already raised. They had flanked us exactly as Ryan predicted.
We were out of room.
Ryan dropped to one knee, blood pouring fresh from a reopened wound. His eyes met mine, steady even through the pain. "Take them, Aria. I'm yours to command."
The words cracked something open inside my chest. I stepped in front of him, planted my feet wide, and let the Voice roll out like the end of the world.
"DROP."
It wasn't a request. It was creation undoing itself.
Eleven rifles clattered to the stone. Eleven bodies folded as if their spines had been cut. The twelfth—the unit captain—staggered but stayed upright, teeth bared, fighting the command with everything Valen had poured into him. I walked forward until we were nose to nose.
"Sleep," I whispered.
His eyes rolled back and he fell like a puppet with its strings cut.
Silence rushed in, broken only by Ryan's harsh breathing and the distant whine of more drones.
I turned. Ryan was staring at me like he'd never seen me before, like I was the moon and the claws and the crown all at once. Pride and something softer burned in his gaze.
"Never kneel to anyone else," he rasped. "Ever."
I hauled him up by the front of his ruined shirt. "Then keep up."
We ran again, across the plateau and into the throat of an ancient lava tube I'd discovered when I was nine and grieving my mother. The entrance was hidden behind a cascade of frozen vines. We slipped inside just as floodlights swept the stone we'd stood on seconds earlier.
The tube was pitch black and stank of bat guano and centuries of water. I knew it by heart. Ryan followed the heat of my body, one hand braced on my back to keep from falling. Behind us the hunters shouted, frustrated, voices echoing strangely.
We ran until the tube spat us out the far side, half a mile lower, into a narrow slot canyon carved by flash floods no living wolf had ever mapped. Spring melt roared somewhere above, a monster waiting to wake.
Perfect.
I grabbed Ryan's arm. "When I say run, you run. No heroics."
He managed a bloody grin. "Yes, my queen."
I climbed the canyon wall until I found the loose boulder I remembered—tons of granite balanced on a lip of softer stone. I braced my shoulder against it and waited until the first hunter silhouettes appeared at the upper end, floodlights slicing the dark.
Then I pushed.
The boulder rolled. A second followed. Then a dozen. The entire wall gave way with a roar that drowned out every scream. Thousands of tons of rock and ice and centuries of patience thundered down the slot, burying the canyon mouth behind a grave no wolf would dig through before dawn.
We ran.
The chase was over—for now.
We stumbled out the lower end into a stand of ancient firs just as the sky began to pale. Ryan's legs finally gave out. He went down hard among the needles, dragging me with him. I caught his head before it cracked against a root.
He was burning with fever, lips grey, the silver in his veins spreading in black lightning under his skin. I tore open what was left of his shirt and pressed both palms to the worst wounds, trying to force my own strength into him the way he had once done for me.
His hand came up, trembling, and cupped my cheek. "You were magnificent," he whispered. "My queen. My mate."
Tears I didn't know I still had slipped free and fell onto his chest. He wiped them away with a thumb that left a smear of blood on my skin.
I kissed him—hard, desperate, tasting copper and pine and everything we still had to lose. He kissed me back like a man drowning in the only water left on earth.
When we broke apart, dawn was bleeding across the valley far below. The stolen Royal SUV sat where we had hidden it weeks ago, half-buried under landslide debris, windshield spider-webbed, one tire flat, radiator hissing its last breath into the cold.
We stared at it together.
Ryan laughed once—short, broken, perfect. "Well. Looks like we're walking."
I rested my forehead against his. Somewhere far behind us, Valen's hunters were already regrouping. Ahead, the wilderness stretched endless and unforgiving.
We were stranded in the heart of enemy territory with no vehicle, no backup, and an Alpha bleeding silver into my arms.
I smiled against his mouth.
"Good," I said. "Let them come. I'm just getting started."
His answering growl vibrated through both of us, fierce and alive and mine.
The shadowed hunt was far from over.