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He decided it would do.

Chapter 16 - Sloane

The bag was already swinging when the horn sounded.

One blast, held for three seconds, then nothing. Not the siren. The siren meant teeth already in someone’s throat. This was smaller. A perimeter flag.

Sloane caught the bag with both hands and stilled the chain. Gravel crunched behind her, more than one set of boots, moving fast. She was stripping her wraps before Viktor reached the gate, Damian a step behind him, both dressed for the field already.

“Eastern line,” Viktor said. “Marker four.”

“Contact?”

“No contact. He came up to the ward stones, stood there long enough for Reyes to get a look at him, then turned around and left before she closed the gap.”

Something cold dropped through Sloane’s stomach, the kind of cold that used to come with a particular knock on a particular door. “Description.”

“Grey wolf. Heavy scarring across the left flank. Reyes says he didn’t run like he was scared. He ran like he was finished.”

Damian’s mouth had gone flat. She’d learned that look on him over the past weeks. It meant he’d already done the math and didn’t care for the answer.

“He wanted to be seen,” she muttered, closing her eyes.

“That’s my read too,” Viktor said.

She walked the line with them anyway, because standing still felt worse than moving toward whatever was waiting. Marker four sat at the edge of a stand of birch, the ward stone half-buried in moss, undisturbed. No blood. No prints past the treeline. Reyes stood there with her arms crossed, describing the same three details she’d already given Viktor twice.

Sloane crouched at the stone and pressed her palm flat against it. The ward hummed under her hand, intact, unbothered, as though nothing had happened here at all.

She’d told them this would happen. In the briefing room, days ago, she’d laid it out on the table, and they’d listened and nodded and adjusted their patrols. And here it was. Exactly as she’d described it, down to the timing, down to the clean retreat, down to the absence of anything to read in the dirt.

She should have felt vindicated. She felt sick.

Because knowing her father’s patterns meant she’d learned them the way a child learns weather—not from books but from living inside it, from years of reading the pressure in a room and knowing whether the storm would pass or land. She knew he’d send a scout. She knew the scout would let himself be seen. She knew the ground would be clean. She knew all of it because she’d spent her childhood studying the man the way prey studies a predator, and the knowledge sat in her stomach like something swallowed whole.

“Forty yards inside the line before Reyes spotted him,” Viktor said quietly. “I’ll double the eastern rotation.”

Sloane nodded without standing. Viktor left. Damian followed. She stayed at the stone with her hand on the moss, alone, until the cold crept through her knees and she couldn’t feel her fingers anymore.

When she returned, the sun had shifted. She stopped when she reached the kitchen gardens, seeing Olivia on the stone bench with a book upon her knee.

Their eyes met. “You heard?” she asked, her voice smaller than she would have liked.

“Everyone heard.” Olivia closed the book. “How are you?”

“Fine.”

“You said that fast.”

Sloane sat on the edge of the bench, elbows on her knees, and looked at the training yard through the hedge line, at the bag still hanging where she’d left it that morning. “I keep running the numbers. Forty yards inside the ward line before anyone saw him. If it had been Garrett instead of a scout, that’s forty yards of nothing standing between him and the residential block.”

“You’re not responsible for the wards.”

“I’m responsible for knowing my father.” She dug her thumbnail into the seam of her palm, a habit she hadn’t managed to break since she was small. “I know what a message like that means. He’s telling me he can get in whenever he decides to. He’s telling me the only thing keeping him out right now is patience.”

Olivia was quiet for a moment, watching her the way she watched most things, without hurry.

“You have a right to defend yourself,” Olivia said. “In whatever way that means for you. You don’t have to do it the way the pack does it, or the way Chris does it, or the way anyone tells you it’s supposed to look.”