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“I’ll stay.”

Chris felt the tension in his shoulders release.

“But I train alone.”

“Sloane.”

“I train alone, Chris. No partner, no supervision, no rotation watching me hit the heavy bag for two hours.” She lifted her chin. Her eyes were steady now; the fury burned down to a harder heat beneath. “If Garrett comes for me, I want to be ready. Not pack-ready. Ready. The kind of ready where he puts his hand on me and I break it.”

He held her gaze. He could feel her resolve through the bond, bright, sharp, the kind of certainty that came from a place beyond argument.

“When he comes,” she said, “I want to be the one who ends it.”

He wanted to fight her on the training. He wanted to tell her that going alone was a risk, that the woods weren’t safe, that Garrett had people in those trees and she was painting a target on herself by leaving the compound without cover.

He didn’t.

Because she wasn’t asking his permission. She was telling him what she needed, and the woman standing in front of him, with her fists clenched, her eyes burning, her body braced for the fight she’d been running toward since she was six years old, deserved to be heard.

“Okay,” he said.

She blinked. She’d been ready for the argument. He could see it in her posture, the squared shoulders, the weight forward on her toes.

“Okay?”

“You train alone. But you tell me when you leave, and you tell me when you’re back. Every time.”

She studied him. Looking for the catch, the condition, the fine print she’d been trained to expect from every concession she’d ever been given.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

She held his eyes for a long beat. Then something in her face shifted, not a softening, not surrender, but a recognition. An acknowledgment that the man in front of her had just given her what she asked for without making her pay for it.

“Five-thirty tomorrow morning,” she said. “I’ll be in the north clearing. Back by eight.”

“I’ll have coffee ready when you get back.”

She turned toward the compound. Walked three steps. Stopped.

“Chris.”

He waited.

She stood with her back to him, the late sun catching the blonde of her hair, turning it gold at the edges. Her hands had unclenched. Her shoulders had dropped half an inch from where they’d been.

“Thank you for not trying to stop me.”

He watched her walk back toward the main building. Her stride was even, measured, the walk of a woman who had chosen to stay, who had weighed the door and the alternative behind it and planted her feet on this side of the line.

The bond carried her to him as she crossed the compound. Steady. Warm. The low hum he’d learned to read over weeks of living beside her, sleeping through her walls, making coffee she pretended to hate.

She was scared. He could feel it, a thin current beneath the resolve, the old fear she’d carried since childhood, woven so deep into her that she probably didn’t notice it anymore.

She was also angry. Not at him, not at the pack, not even at Gideon for laying her father’s plan on the table in front of six people. She was angry at the man who’d spent her entire life telling her she belonged to him, and she was going to channel every ounce of it into the training yard until her body could deliver what her mouth had promised.

Chris stood at the tree line with his hands in his pockets. The sun moved behind the compound roof. The shadows lengthened across the grass.