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All this mate business aside, I needed Silas. He was why I had come here in the first place.

I had heard rumors—whispers, really—of a wolf leading a rebel pack in the mountains. A shifter fighting against his own kind. I hadn’t believed it at first. I had thought it was just another desperate story, the kind people told themselves when they needed hope.

But then I’d started to think, and the more I thought about it, the more I wondered: could it be him? Could it be the same wolf who had turned on his own kind and saved my life all those years ago?

I had taken a chance, heading toward the Rockies, hoping and praying that the rumors were true. Somehow, by sheer luck, or fate, or whatever the hell ruled this world, I had found him. Now I just had to convince him to help me, to help the humans in the city before it was too late.

It had started small: whispers in the underground, murmurs passed between those desperate enough to cling to hope. A cure, they called it. A way to fix the wolves’ infertility problem—so that they would finally stop taking human women, stop breeding us like cattle.

At first, it sounded too good to be true.

Then we saw proof.

Glass vials smuggled through the Resistance network, each one filled with a clear, shimmering liquid. The drug was supposed to make our babies fertile for them. For a moment, we believed it. For a moment, I thought maybe—just maybe—our time as the wolves’ breeders had come to an end.

Then came the warning.

I had been in the warehouse when it happened, Mariah at my side, watching as one of the human traders pulled out a shipment of the drug. The room was dim, sputtering oil lamps barely cutting through the darkness. Boxes lined the walls, filled with stolen supplies, medical goods, whatever could be scavenged or traded.

Thenhewalked in. A wolf, but not one of theirs. His coat was torn, his face gaunt, exhaustion etched on every inch of him. He stumbled into the room, gasping for breath, his wide amber eyes wild with panic. He should have been the enemy, but instead, he begged us to listen.

“They’re lying to you.” His voice had been hoarse, ragged, like he had run miles just to get here. “This drug—it works, but not the way you think. It won’t save you. It’ll kill you.”

A cold chill had crept down my spine. No one moved. No one breathed.

“You’re full of shit,” I’d ventured.

The wolf shook his head vehemently. “I saw the research. I worked in the labs—I know what they’re doing.” He stepped forward, gripping the edge of the table for balance. “The drug makes human women carry fertile female shifter babies, yes, but the cost is your lives. If a human woman carries a shifter child to term, she’ll likely die. If she survives childbirth, the drug will still kill her—it will strip years off her life. Decades.”

Silence. Pure, suffocating silence.

Then Mariah spoke. “How do we know you’re telling the truth?”

The wolf’s face twisted, his body shaking as he reached into his coat. For a second, I thought he was reaching for a weapon. Instead, he pulled out something small and fragile: a data chip.

“Because I stole this from the labs before I ran.”

We plugged the chip into a stolen console and then we saw everything.

Charts. Research logs. Pages and pages of medical reports, warnings about how the drug was never meant to be released in its current state. Notes about human test subjects—women who had been forced to take the drug. None of them had lived past the first pregnancy. Some died during childbirth.

I had felt Mariah go rigid beside me. Someone cursed under their breath. They weren’t saving us. They were exterminating us.

I sank deeper into the water, my breath shuddering as I let the memory settle over me.

I had barely escaped. The moment the wolves found out that someone had stolen the research, they had come for us. The warehouse was burned to the ground. The traitors were executed.

I had barely made it out alive. In the chaos, Mariah, my closest friend, had been taken, and I’d been forced to go looking for help on my own.

I needed Silas.

I had risked everything to find him, to bring him back into this fight. He was the only one who could stop what was coming; the only wolf strong enough to fight his own kind and win. No matter what it took, no matter what I had to say, what I had to do, I would make him see that.

The warm water lapped gently against my skin, the heat sinking deep into my sore muscles, coaxing them into a rare, loose softness.

I let out a slow breath, dragging the soap over my body again, working it into the aches and bruises. The bar was smooth against my skin, perfuming the air with the faint scent of the deep parts of the forest after a storm.

I closed my eyes, sinking a little deeper, letting the steam curl around me.