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The Crimson Order fell apart one by one once Elisabeth Mays lay dead, breaking the way ice cracks free in the river come spring.

One operative lowered his blade. Then the woman beside him. Then three more, glancing at the red shape on the frozen ground, then back at each other, and lastly back toward the tree line where Crown soldiers stood in their neat gray ranks and hadn’t lifted a finger to help.

They were outnumbered. Their commander was dead. And the Crown’s soldiers had watched them bleed.

I shifted back to human form. “Drop your weapons and you can walk away,” I told what remained of the Order.

Let them go, I told the pack. Anyone who drops a blade walks out. It’s over.

Some of my wolves didn’t like it. I felt their anger through the bond, hot and bitter, the adrenaline of battle still in their veins. But they listened. They drew back and allowed the operatives to walk out of our territory with their hands empty, stepping carefully around their dead.

That left Mervyn.

He’d turned his horse toward the road, and he’d have made it, if Imogene hadn’t anticipated that. A dozen wolves closed around him in a ring of teeth and raised hackles. His horse whinnied and reared. Mervyn clung to the saddle, his gold-edged cloak flapping, while his face paled to the color of old snow.

I walked across the meadow toward him, slowly, my side burning where the silver had been.

I could have ended it. Every instinct I had knew how. One leap, and the man who’d countersigned decades of crimes would never sign anything again. My wolf yearned for it. Standing below that rearing horse with the smell of his fear filling my nose, I wanted it too.

Then I thought of talking to Ruby by the fire. I’d had enough of killing. It didn’t solve anything.

I stood in front of him and breathed through the bloodlust.

Ruby walked past me, carrying her knife. A strip of linen was tied around the cut on her forearm. She stood in front of Mervyn’s horse in nothing but her shirt and trousers, her braid coming loose, with frost on her boots and blood on her sleeve, and she looked up at the Crown’s liaison the way she’d looked at me through my cottage door. Assessing.

“Mervyn,” she stated.

He stared at her. “You’re Mays’s girl.”

“I’m Ruby.” She tilted her head. “My grandmother said the Crown had never told her no. Was that true?”

“The Crown never authorized any of this,” he said quickly. Too quickly. “The Order acted independently. Whatever Commander Mays claimed, she had no warrant from⁠—”

“No. You were very careful about that.” She drew a folded paper from inside her shirt and held it up. “But you were less careful about this. A land grant. Parcel eleven, transferred after a pack was declared thinned. To a holding in the name of my grandmother’s sister.” She tapped the bottom of the page. “Countersigned by you.”

What little color he had drained away.

“There are forty years of these,” Ruby said. “And before you arrived, copies of all of them went over the mountains with two of the pack’s fastest runners. To people you can’t reach.”

I turned toward Imogene, who was now standing at the edge of the wolf circle.

When? I asked her.

While you were chopping wood you didn’t need. A flicker of dry amusement came through the bond. She came to me. Said you’d want to die with honor and she’d rather we lived with leverage.

My mate. Planning for our survival while I brooded at a woodpile.

“If the Crown ever sends so much as a surveyor into this territory again,” Ruby told Mervyn, “every one of those grants goes to their rivals, the courts, and the printers in the capital. Your name is on every page.”

Mervyn looked down at her for a long time. He turned to me, then to the soldiers, whom he’d left behind at the trees when he’d reared off on horseback. They’d heard Commander Mays admit to murdering her own son and were now listening to his actions. They were in no rush to aid him.

“The Lockridge pack,” he said stiffly, “is of no further interest to the Crown.”

“Good,” Ruby said. “Then leave us.”

Us. Ruby as part of the pack. My wolf hummed in contentment.

The wolves opened the ring. Mervyn turned his horse and rode out down the Wetherel road without looking back.