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“You were quiet in there today too,” she said eventually. “After I finished. You didn’t say a word until everyone left.”

“I was observing.”

“To what?”

“To how they listened to you. Gideon wrote down everything you said.” He glanced at her. “That matters more than trust does, some days.”

She didn’t answer right away. The wind picked up, carrying the smell of pine and the cold mineral edge of the creek somewhere below the ridge. When she finally spoke, her voice had lost the flat control she used in briefings.

“When I was five, he came home from the tavern in Alder’s Bend and found my aunt’s necklace on my dresser. My mother’s, before that. Garnet stones, small ones, nothing worth what he thought it was worth.” She kept walking, kept her eyes on the trees. “He asked where I got it. I told him Aunt Iris gave it to me for my birthday. He said I didn’t deserve things that weren’t earned, and he took it out to the fire pit and dropped it in while I watched.”

Chris said nothing. He knew better than to fill silence that wasn’t his to fill.

“I tried to pull it out. He grabbed my wrist before I got close. Hard enough that I couldn’t hold a pencil the next day at lessons. I told the tutor I fell.” She finally looked at him. “I learned that day what things I was allowed to want. Nothing that was mine. Nothing that came from someone who loved me instead of him.”

The image sat in Chris’s chest, ugly and specific, a five-year-old reaching for fire because a man thrice her size had decided a memory of her mother was a debt he was owed. He thought of his own hands, of what they’d do to Garrett given a clear stretch of ground and no one watching.

“He’s dead,” Chris said. “Whatever’s left of him walking around out there, that part of him is dead. You understand that.”

“I understand it in the day. At night it’s harder to remember.”

They reached the bend in the fence where the tree line pulled back, and the ground opened into a wide, moonlit clearing. Sloane stopped there, arms crossed, looking out at nothing in particular.

“I know why you did what you did to Caitlynn now,” Chris said. “I didn’t, before. I thought it was cruelty for its own sake.”

“It wasn’t for its own sake.”

“I know that. You’d watched someone soft get destroyed by someone who claimed to love her, and you knew he’d keep coming back. You… You wanted to be protected, but you also wanted to be respected because you never were. You wanted a voice.” He kept his voice even, careful not to let it sharpen into judgment. “I understand where that came from now. I still don’t think it was right.”

Sloane’s arms tightened around herself, but she didn’t look away from him. “I know it wasn’t right.”

“Then why—”

“Because knowing it wasn’t right doesn’t hand me a better option.” Her voice cracked at the edges, thin and tired in a way he rarely heard from her. “You grew up with people who loved you—badly sometimes, but loved you. I grew up learning that love was a leash. I didn’t have a map for anything else. I still don’t. I know what I did to Caitlynn was wrong. I don’t know what the right version of surviving my father would have looked like.”

Chris stepped closer, close enough to feel the warmth radiating off her despite the cold. “Maybe there isn’t a clean version. Maybe it’s just this. Getting stronger. Not letting him decide who you become next.”

“I want to be strong enough that when he comes, it isn’t a question.”

“Then we get you there. Both of us.”

She nodded once, and for a moment the clearing held nothing but the two of them and the sound of wind moving through the pines.

Then a howl split the quiet, sharp and close, cut off halfway through.

Chris was moving before he finished processing the sound, Sloane a step behind him, both of them breaking into a run toward the gate. The alarm bell followed a heartbeat later, clanging hard against the stillness, and through the trees he caught the first flash of movement, low and fast, four shapes converging on the northern gate from the ridge above.

“Four,” Sloane said, already stripping her jacket as she ran. “Maybe five.”

“Garrett’s pack?”

“I can smell them from here.”

They hit the gate together. The first wolf came over the fence in a leap, jaws already open, and Chris met it mid-air, shifting the instant before impact, fur and muscle replacing skin. The collision knocked them both into the dirt. He rolled clear, snapped for the throat, and felt the wolf go still beneath him seconds later.

Beside him, Sloane had already shifted too, a lean grey shape darting low around a second attacker, using its own momentum to drag it off balance before her teeth found the back of its neck. She fought the way she talked in briefings, economical, reading the pattern before it finished forming.

A third wolf broke past them toward the residential path. Chris turned to give chase, and Sloane was already there, cutting the angle, driving it back toward the gate where two guards from the night patrol arrived at a dead run.