There is a trigger warning for references to sexual assault on the first third of this chapter. Feel free to PM me for a chapter summary if you need to.

But on a slightly more cheerful note, this week we have a beautiful illustration by LittleLoneWriterGirl. You may know her from the comment section :)

Breakfast was quiet. I sat on the counter, swinging my legs back and forth while I bolted down a bowl of cereal. Liam was leaning against the countertop beside me, fiddling with the cuffs of his sleeves. His tie hung around his neck, and his bowl was sitting empty behind him. He ate a lot faster than I did.

The table itself was taken up by the girls from the boathouse. Charlie's mother bustled around them, refilling glasses of orange juice and loading their plates with fresh fruit. I'd discovered this morning that she had a mate - an implication I didn't want to think much about, given that she had children with him who were older than Charlie.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. That was the first warning I got. I glanced up to see Lilah coming into the kitchen, and I nearly choked on my Weetabix. It was the first time she'd left her room since she'd got here.

And ... she was dressed. She wore a long black dress, her hair was braided into an elaborate knot, and she had done her make-up for the first time since Mason had died. She wasn't a Luna any more, but she sure looked like one that morning.

In the blink of an eye, the quiet turned to silence. There were no more scrapes of metal against china and no more rustling of food packets. The girls went still and rigid. Eyes down, heads bowed, doing their best to look meek.

Because Lilah's wolf was coming down on them like a ton of bricks. I had a few guesses as to why they might be nervous of her, and I had a few guesses as to why she was so hostile towards them.

She stopped beside the table and fixed one of the older girls with a piercing stare. "Get out."

The girl remained frozen in place. I saw her throat bob, and her eyes darted around the room, as if she was looking for help. She didn't find any.

"I am not going to sit here and pretend like I can't smell my mate on you," Lilah said icily. "So I'll say it again. Get. Out."

Oh, shit. It was too early in the morning for things to go so horribly wrong. There must have been a whiff of Mason on her clothing. I certainly couldn't smell anything, but I was a lot further away. One glance at Liam told me that he was going to be no help whatsoever. Lilah sounded angry, so he was just standing there, heart thumping in his chest, hardly even breathing.

"Lilah..." I began cautiously. "It's not ... what you think."

She plastered on a sickly smile. "Oh, it's exactly what I think. Ellen's always had trouble keeping her legs closed. And that's fine, but it can be hard to stomach seeing so many pack sluts at the breakfast table."

I winced. I'd never seen Lilah be so vicious before, and it wasn't a good look on her. But beneath the anger, I was willing to bet there was a generous helping of hurt. How ever misdirected it may have been. She'd known all along that her mate had been chasing other tails. And perhaps it was the reminder of that, when she was about to bury him, which had made her snap.

"I think you have to enjoy it - to be considered a 'slut,'" Andrea said, in the same tone I would use to remark on the weather. She didn't even look up from her cereal.

"My apologies," Lilah snapped. "Prostitutes, then."

Andrea shook her head. Once again, cool as anything, but she wasn't smiling. Her voice was slow and mild. "We didn't get paid, Lilah."

I thought that might have given her pause, at the very least, but Lilah growled at her instead. "No. Don't even try it. I'm not falling for your shit. He wouldn't do that, and the fact that you're making that accusation now, when he's not here to defend himself ... it's despicable."

Andrea didn't have a reply to that. She just gazed at her former Luna, as if trying to burn the understanding into her skin. I knew it wasn't going to work. Lilah was too worked up and too blinded by the mate bond.

"Lilah ... look at their necks," I said quietly. Grieving or not, I wasn't just going to sit here and let her attack them. "Micah did that."

Some of the girls were wearing high-neck tops to hide the marks on their collarbones. But a few, Andrea included, were sitting there with Micah's tooth marks on full display. They all smelt like him, so maybe they'd figured that there was no point trying to hide it. Lilah's frown deepened the longer she looked at them.

"He marked you? Why didn't you just tell Mase? He would've-" she trailed off then, her eyes widening as the realisation hit her. If Mason had really slept with that girl, then he had known that she was marked. And he hadn't cared.

I watched her look at each of the girls in turn, desperate for one of them to deny it, but they returned her stare with hollow faces and dead eyes.

The colour had drained from Lilah's face, and she clutched at the table like she was about to pitch over.

I jumped off the counter as she swayed on her feet. I put an arm around her and guided her into the chair before she could pass out. She might have been in the earliest stages of her pregnancy, but it wasn't worth the risk. Especially not while she was dealing with the trauma of losing her mate.

"Stay with us, yeah?" I asked her.

One of the girls slid a glass of water across the table for her, and another cleared the plate away in case she fell forwards.

"Oh, Goddess," Lilah said quietly. "I feel sick. I feel-"

I beckoned Liam over, and he stood behind her, ready to catch her if he needed to. That left me free to squeeze her hands and get in her face. "Just breathe for a minute, Lilah. Focus on me."

She didn't even try to. She seemed content to sit there while all the blood drained from her face and her eyes drifted around, glazed and unfocused.

"He knew?" Lilah breathed. It was barely audible, but Andrea heard and gave her a slow nod. "I'm so sorry, Andrea. I had no idea, I swear."

Andrea shrugged, as if it was no big deal. I could see a hint of worry in her eyes now, like she was feeling guilty for her part in this conversation. She shouldn't have. She was the victim in this situation, and Lilah would have found out sooner or later.

"He wasn't as cruel as the others, if it makes you feel better," she offered quietly. "He didn't hit us, and he was kind afterwards. We all preferred him to the other guys."

If anything, that made it worse. Mason hadn't been willing to cross that line himself, so he clearly knew it was wrong, but he had still allowed it to happen. There was no way he hadn't seen the bruises on them. He had picked these girls - the isolated ones, the ones without family to miss them or any means of support - and he'd left them to face the brunt of his fighters' cruelty.

"No, believe it or not, that doesn't make me feel better," Lilah snapped. "He's the father of my child. I thought I knew him."

Andrea stared down at her plate and said nothing.

"Let's go somewhere quieter," I told Lilah firmly, "and you can try to calm down."

Partly because I felt sorry for her, partly because I was worried about the baby, and partly because I wanted the girls to be able to eat their breakfast in peace. They were probably still coming to terms with everything that had happened to them. They shouldn't have to sit there, comforting the mate of the man who'd locked them in that rundown house and let his fighters do whatever they liked.

She didn't resist when Liam and I took her into the living room. Once she was away from the other girls, the tension seemed to fizzle out of her. I kept close to her, watching for another dizzy spell, but she seemed more ... numb than anything else now. She sat down on the sofa and gazed into space like she was the only one in the room.

Charlie was the only person in there. He was sat on the floor, suit and all, playing with the toddler.

"Are you bringing her to the funeral?" he asked Lilah. Her eyes snapped towards him, and it took her a moment to process the question.

"Yes," she said, her voice painfully quiet. "With everything that's going on ... I hardly want to take my eyes off her."

That was understandable. It was only the four of us going to the funeral. Charlie's parents would stay behind to look after the girls, because I didn't trust Micah not to pull a fast one while the rest of us were gone. Some of their friends from the Crochet Club were coming over to help. Hopefully, anyone he sent would see the crowd and think twice.

I still needed to put on my dress. His mother had lent me one, given that all my clothes were at the pack house, but I was in no hurry to get into it. Dresses were very foreign to me. I felt half-naked and confined at the same time, and it was probably my least favourite type of flockie clothing. And a lot of them were so narrow at the bottom that you couldn't even run.

Behind me, Liam swore softly. I turned my head to see him fighting with his tie. I seemed to remember a long session of YouTube tutorials and confusion the last time we'd been to a funeral. At the moment, it was closer to tangled than neatly knotted. He glanced up at me, as if asking for help, and I could only shrug at him. I had no idea how those things worked.

"Come here, Liam," Charlie said gently.

I watched Liam stiffen almost imperceptibly as he got closer to his brother, but that was all. He didn't flinch away when Charlie reached for his collar. For all my mixed feelings about Charlie, it was good to see Liam trusting someone who wasn't me. We had become a lot more co-dependent since coming to Silver Lake, to the point where I got upset every time I was away from him. This could only be a good thing.

"Mason never taught you?" Charlie asked. He sounded ... surprised.

"No. He just did it for me."

Charlie's hands were very close to Liam's throat as he gently untangled the tie and set about tying it properly. I didn't think Liam was breathing. And Charlie seemed to realise that too, because the second he was done, he stepped away, leaving Liam to tighten it himself.

I gave him a little smile as he passed me. If he kept playing the big brother, the two of us would get along just fine. It was a role that Rhodri had fallen into over the years, but Rhodri wasn't here now to look after him ... at the time when he probably needed it most.

***

We walked to the funeral. It was only about two miles, and I was sure the flockies would have preferred to take the car, but it was a nice day and we didn't give them much time to argue. We all took our turn carrying the toddler, who turned to lead in your arms after a few minutes. As always, I was astounded that someone so little could weigh so much.

We were shadowed the whole way there. Our tails were not as subtle as they liked to think - I could hear twigs crunching under their boots most of the way. I had no doubt they were the same men who had spent the night camped outside the house. For the moment, they were content to watch and wait, but I suspected that wouldn't last much longer.

The reception itself went past in a blur. We stood in a corner with Lilah, making a point of not eating anything which had been set out. Micah wasn't the sort to use poison, but it was better to be safe than dead.

He kept trying to come over, probably intending to talk to Lilah, but every time he tried, a new person would come up and give him their condolences or grovel to their new Alpha. And the vast majority of those people were members of the Crochet Club, sent by Charlie on a mission to keep him as far away from Lilah as physically possible.

The dangerous part came during the service itself, when we all had to go outside and stand around Mason's coffin and act miserable. Flockies were weird. They put their dead into the cold, hard ground with only tears to keep them warm.

"Although the Alpha was taken from us before his time," the priestess was saying, "we can find solace in the fact that he devoted his life to caring for this pack and bettering the lives of everyone around him. And the Goddess will reward him accordingly."

I wanted to snort. There was a lot of waffle like that. I would have been a lot more tolerant of Silver Lake's obsessive religion if they had actually respected the principles of their teachings. It seemed to me that they just used it all to feel morally superior while ignoring the parts where the Moon Goddess told them to be charitable and merciful and understanding of other people.

I let my eyes wander. Liam and I were standing close behind Lilah, who had her daughter in her arms. The little girl had fallen asleep five minutes into the ceremony. Micah stood directly opposite us, his dark eyes fixed on his sister-in-law and decidedly malicious.

And across the graveyard, the third Vaughan brother stood apart from the crowd. I had no idea why Micah had let him come, but there he was, his hands cuffed behind him, watching the funeral. He was flanked by two guards and far enough away that he couldn't have caused trouble if he'd wanted to. And there wasn't much danger of that - even from a distance, I could see how ill he looked. His face was pale, he was sweating, and he was shaking. Withdrawal symptoms. There wasn't any heroin in jail.

I was surprised to feel a drop of pity for him. It was the first time he'd been clean in a decade, probably, and he had to watch them bury his brother while he stood falsely accused of the murder. It was the very definition of a 'rough day.'

"Mason Vaughan was an example to us all. His bravery, his kindness, his unwavering dedication to the Goddess ... these are things to be admired," the priestess was saying now. "We should all strive to follow his example."

My eyes kept wandering. Mason's headstone was freshly engraved, and the polished stone caught the morning sun. The next grave along was Liam's. I couldn't seem to stop looking at it. It was jaded by years of exposure to the elements, and there was a thin coating of lichen, but other than that, it looked well-maintained. Almost like someone had been taking care of it all these years.

While I'd been daydreaming, the service had finally come to its end. And now, at last, Lilah crept forwards to lay a handful of flowers on her mate's grave. I could see her fighting the tears - her chest shuddered with every breath, and her eyes were red-rimmed.

She stayed there for a moment, head bowed, calming herself. And then she lowered the toddler to the ground so she, too, could lay a flower beside her father's headstone. The little girl was still half-asleep, but she did it with more solemnity than I would expect from a two-year-old.

The rest of the pack took their turn next. They came up in two and threes to lay their own flowers on the grave. They weren't wildflowers, but rather poppies and lilies taken from the gardens around the pack house. Liam and I stayed back so we didn't have to take our eyes off Lilah.

The pile of flowers was growing by the minute. Soon, it became large enough to spill onto the adjacent graves. Liam's included. I saw him staring at his headstone more than once. It must have been very surreal for him, but he was doing a good job of hiding it.

One elderly couple came shuffling forwards with a handful of flowers that were not like the others. There were forget-me-nots and daisies and buttercups, like they had picked it all themselves. The man had his arm around the woman as she bent to put a handful on Mason's grave ... and then, to my surprise, a handful on Liam's. There were tears in her eyes when she stood back up.

I cast a sidelong glance at Liam, trying to gauge his reaction. It was easier said than done. He'd been distant through the entire funeral. His eyes were on the elderly couple, and the muscles in his jaw were writhing in place. It was the only indication I got.

"Do you know them?" I asked him in an undertone.

And suddenly there was enough misery in his eyes to give me pause. "Not ... well. They're my grandparents."

His mother's parents. Another complicated situation, given that Mason and Liam had been raised by the man who'd killed their daughter. I had no idea if they'd been allowed to visit their grandchildren. I watched them shuffle back into the crowd with no small amount of pity.

I leant a little closer to Liam to whisper, "You can tell them, you know. That you're alive. I'm not gonna argue."

He gazed after them with weary eyes. "I don't know if they'll care, Eva. I've talked to them ... twice, maybe? And that was a long time ago."

The way they had looked at his grave told me that they did care. They cared an awful lot. But I wasn't going to push him. Not today.

We both had to shut up anyway, because Micah was coming towards us. His eyes were glazed, but not from grief. He was bored. He chucked his flowers down, and then he seemed to realise that the entire pack was looking at him and made an effort to look sad for ten full seconds. He wasn't torn up over Mason - that much was obvious.

When he was done, he wandered towards us, trying to look casual about it. He seemed to decide that he didn't want to put his back to Liam, so he stood in front of me instead. And that was his mistake.

I didn't have any pockets in my dress, so Liam was carrying my knife for me. I slipped my hand into his pocket and closed my palm around the handle. He wouldn't kill her so publicly, I didn't think, but it still made me feel better.

"It's time you came home, Lilah," Micah said. His voice was warm, but his smile was not. "You're much safer in the pack house."

"I'm happy where I am," she told him mildly. I admired her calmness - really, I did. He hadn't bothered to hide the threat in those words.

His sneer betrayed his irritation. "I just can't help worrying for you. That close to the border ... there's no telling what might happen. As much as it pains me, there are a lot of people who would want to see you hurt. Do the right thing for the baby, Lilah. Come home."

Lilah lifted her chin a fraction higher and returned his smile. How she could manage to put so much warmth in it was beyond me. "That's sweet, Micah, but you don't need to worry. I can assure you that I'm well-protected. Anyone who lifts a finger against me or my daughter will come to regret it."

She had a talent for subtlety, that girl. Presented in such a way that even Micah, with his limited capacity for critical thinking, could hear the dagger behind the words. He shot her one last nasty look, set his jaw and then turned his eyes onto Liam and leaned close.

"You are very lucky," he said softly, "that I'm not inclined to start a fistfight at my brother's funeral. Get your bloody wolf under control and take your eyes off me, or we're going to have a problem."

Liam didn't lower his gaze or make any effort to smother his wolf. He was staring, and he had been staring from the moment that Micah had first come towards us. This was the danger when he didn't take his pills. His wolf was wide awake and considerably pissed off. The sheer volume of dominance coming off him was enough to make me feel dizzy, and it wasn't even directed at me. I could imagine how Micah was feeling.

My knuckles whitened around the knife hilt, but Micah had already turned away without waiting for Liam to obey. He was gone the next second, falling in among a group of his Deltas and leading them back towards the pack house.

We were left in peace. For now, anyway. With the way Micah had been talking, I didn't think it would be long before he made a move against the cottage. By now, he knew that all his missing eggs were in the same basket and that Liam and I were the only ones guarding it. I stood there as the flockies began to trickle away, wondering how much time we had left before he lost patience.

Lilah didn't leave her mate's grave, even when the rest of the mourners were long gone. Most of the pack had come to the funeral, and they had worn a wide, muddy trail to the pack house. Grass was trampled underfoot. Flowers were torn and crushed.

Liam and I stayed to guard her. And there wasn't much to do except wander amongst the graves. Beside Liam's headstone was a grave which read 'Adrian Vaughan,' and then 'Keith Vaughan,' and on and on it went, stretching back generations. I wondered how many of them had been killed by my family. Probably a lot.

"That date..." I began hesitantly, looking at the headstone in front of me. Under Liam's name, they had written the year of his birth and the year of his 'death,' and if my limited numeracy skills weren't failing me, there was twelve years between them. "Is it right?"

He followed my gaze and then gave a wary nod. "I think so."

As best I could tell, his mother had raised him for the first few years in relative isolation before his father had decided to claim him. And when she had died, everything she'd known had died with her. His birthday was one of those things. Because he'd been entered into school late, he wasn't even sure what year he'd been born. It might be that the year on his headstone was just a best guess, but I wasn't so sure.

"That would make you ... what? Almost nineteen?" I asked.

At the very youngest. If he'd been born at the start of the year, he would have turned nineteen already. He was closer to Nia's age than mine. That shouldn't have been surprising as it was - years of abuse was one sure way to stunt someone's emotional growth. He had been so quiet so much of the time as a kid that it had been really hard to tell how old he was.

There was something incredibly hesitant about the way Liam nodded again, his throat bobbing. He knew the implications as well as I did. If this was true, he was already eighteen. And he had been eighteen for quite some time, and he knew that. If that was true, it should have clicked by now.

"And you've never felt anything? For anyone?"

It was barely more than a whisper. Lilah was not very far away, and this was not a conversation she could hear. She thought we were mates.

He didn't answer right away. He didn't want to say no - I could see it on his face. Because if he said no, then he would kill the last dregs of hope.

"Everyone says it's ... like ... obvious," Liam began quietly. "Like you know for sure if someone's your mate or not."

I watched him with wide eyes, because I had no idea where this was going. My heart was suddenly skipping along in my chest.

He rubbed the back of his neck. "But sometimes, I do I feel things. That aren't ... obvious. And not clear-cut. And it doesn't make me think I've found my mate, but it did make me wonder ... you know ... what else it could be."

"Yeah?" I mumbled. "Did you ever figure it out?"

He nodded slowly, cautiously. "Yeah. I think I know now."

My forehead furrowed. "Well? What is it?"

Liam just gazed at me, the answer written all over his face, but he didn't say it. He couldn't. It didn't take a genius to guess the only feeling that could be mistaken for a mate bond. I found myself staring back, a lump in my throat as I tried to figure out how to answer that.

"You don't have to stay with me," Lilah said, all of a sudden. She broke the spell, both of us turning our heads sharply to look at her. I couldn't tell if I was grateful for her intervention or not, because I wasn't sure if I had wanted to finish that conversation.

"Of course we're going to stay with you," I told her. "Take as long as you need. We've got nowhere else to be."

Lilah chewed on her lip. "Thank you. And thank you for everything else, too. I won't forget it."

"You don't have to thank us, Lilah," I snorted. "It's the least we can do."

Given that I was the reason she was in this mess in the first place. If I hadn't gotten stabby, she would still be living safely in the pack house with Mason. But since she knew none of that, she just smiled at me, which made me feel guiltier still.

And then, because she was still looking at us, I stepped away from Liam. I could feel his eyes on me as I wandered through the gravestones, trying to put some distance between us. It wasn't long before something caught my eye. Near the back of the graveyard, there was a pair of headstones which were covered in graffiti.

It took me a moment to decipher the names under the layer of paint. Alex Saunders and Evie Saunders.

My grandparents. They had lived and died in this pack long before I had been born. And I didn't know very much about them, truth be told, because my mam didn't know very much about them herself. Like Liam, she'd been adopted by the Llewellyns when she was young.

But it was obvious that they hadn't been popular here. There were a lot of hateful words scrawled in paint. Most of it looked old, but a handful of the slurs were written in brighter, fresher colours. Things like 'rogue lovers' and 'simpers' and 'traitors' featured quite heavily. It was a lot of hatred for people who had been dead for almost forty years. And I got the feeling that this war had been going on for a lot longer than I'd thought.

***

"They can't track us like this?" Liam asked. "You're sure?"

Charlie shrugged at him. "In theory, they could. But we don't have to worry about that. No one in this pack knows what a proxy server is, let alone how to counter it."

I perched on the chair beside Liam and frowned at the screen. We didn't exactly have computers in our camps, but I'd used phones often enough that I could get the gist of it. Luckily, Liam had grown up with these things, and he was in charge of it today.

Charlie was hovering. It was his laptop that we were using, and it looked like he was getting nervous about this. "You still haven't told me what you're going to do..."

No. We hadn't. And we weren't going to tell him. At the end of the day, he was still a flockie, and he was going to object to us murdering his pack mates. I turned my head to give him some side-eye, but I kept my mouth shut.

"Thank you, Charlie," was all Liam said. It was a gentle dismissal, but a dismissal all the same, and his brother didn't push the issue. We both watched him leave the room with many backwards glances and narrow-eyed looks.

Liam opened an internet tab. It took him about ten seconds flat to reach the pack's server. He was bouncing his leg, and I would have been worried about that if it wasn't for the little smile playing about his lips as he typed in Mason's login details.

"Lilah might know the password," I said.

He turned to look at me, and I could see the faint amusement glinting in his eyes. Without a word, he typed in a password and pressed enter. I watched the little circle turn itself over and over ... and then we were into the home page. With admin privileges.

I stared at the screen with wide eyes. "Come on. Seriously? How'd you know it?"

Liam shook his head in fond disgust. "He was my brother, and he's used the same password since he was twelve."

He opened a portal that was dedicated to the pack's defence. Another password window popped up, and once again, Liam unlocked it within seconds.

"I hope he's watching this and getting really pissed off," he murmured.

I just snorted.

I wasn't very good at reading. Especially not on screens, and especially not when he was clicking through it all so quickly, but we eventually ended up in a section called 'Exodus Team.'

"These are the guys who respond to reports of rogues near the territory," Liam explained. One by one, he was deleting the names from the list and adding new ones. "They send out a minimum of fifteen for each sighting. Enough to take on a raiding team if they happen to run into one."

But today we had three raiding teams across the border, and the flockies who went out with such confidence to run down a lone would find themselves outnumbered for the first time in their lives.

"And they won't notice that we're changing it?" I asked warily.

"No. Micah's been fiddling with the rota so much that I doubt he'll even remember who was supposed to be on duty. If I click this, they all get notified that they're on call, and that means we're ready."

It was becoming pretty obvious that Mason had done a lot more than earmark him for the Beta position. He had also trained him for it. If he'd known how all this worked at ten years old, then ... shit. He'd been more involved in the pack than I'd thought.

It wasn't a bad thing. I'd been worried that we wouldn't have any idea how to run the pack if, by some miracle, we ever pulled this off. Now it turned out that he'd known this whole time. And every time I realised something like that, I had to readjust my impression of him, just a fraction. But those little fractions had really been adding up these last few weeks.

"What?" Liam asked me, and I wondered if there had been something in my stare that had tipped him off.

"Nothing," I said, smiling.

He regarded me with a bemused look, clearly unconvinced, and then he turned back to the screen to finish changing the names. A few of them I recognised vaguely from around the pack, and none of them had left good impressions on me. The rest ... well, I'd just have to take his word for it. I knew he had got some names from the boathouse girls. Obviously without telling them why. We couldn't kill every douchebag in the pack at once, but it was a good start.

***

It was going to rain. I could feel the heaviness in the air. And that was a good thing, because it would do a brilliant job of covering our tracks. The closer Liam and I got to the border, the more I found myself glancing over my shoulder.

"The next patrol-" I began nervously.

"Won't be for hours," Liam assured me, with a tiny smile on his lips. "I checked."

I just grunted. Micah was clearly not as cautious as his big brother had been. One day as Alpha, and he'd already thrown a blow-out party which had left most of the fighters too drunk to do their job. And now he was fiddling with the patrol rota so the few who weren't hungover could join him for a rugby game. It was like he was begging us to raid him.

The bone fence loomed ahead. Charlie's mum lived so close to it that I hadn't even bothered to put my coat on for the walk. It was safe enough to leave Lilah there when we could be back in a minute flat, should she need us. I stepped over a ribcage and winced as another bone cracked under my shoe. The stench of flockie piss was overwhelming.

They were closer than I had thought they would be. Nia was nearest - leaning against a tree trunk with her hands in her pockets. Her face broke into a grin when she saw us. Mam wasn't far behind her, spinning a knife between her fingers while she waited.

"Damn, look at you," Nia said with a low whistle. "All dressed up."

I glanced at Liam, biting back a smile. He hadn't changed since the funeral. His shirt was untucked and unbuttoned at the collar, his tie was loose around his neck, and his hair was tousled. But he still looked an awful lot smarter than rogues were used to.

She certainly didn't mean me. I was in tracksuit bottoms and one of Liam's shirts, because I hadn't wanted to stay in that dress a second longer than necessary.

"And you look like you've rolled in a bush, Nia," Liam retorted. It only made her laugh. I wanted to give her a hug, but that would have been very unwise. I didn't want to consider what might happen if we went back to that cottage smelling like rogues.

"Everything's ready," Mam told us. Straight to business, as usual. "We just need to know the where and the when."

"Right here," Liam said. "Soon as we're done, I'll raise the alarm."

"How many?"

"Fifteen. If you can manage that."

She gave a slow nod, a smile creeping across her lips. "I can manage fifteen without losing a single rogue. Especially if they come cocky and clueless."

"This close to the border, they'll always be cocky. I'll make sure they think they're just running down a lone. It won't be hard to split them up."

While he was explaining, I edged closer to Nia. I had a request that I wanted to make in person, and we didn't have a lot of time. A pointed look told her that I wanted to talk. Privately. And preferably without attracting undue attention. She pushed herself off the tree and walked with me for a few paces, until we were out of earshot.

"You can turn your scent off, right?" I asked quietly.

Nia's eyebrows went wandering upwards. "For an hour or two, yes..."

I was still having a hard time getting my head around that. Every time I looked at her, I wondered how I hadn't seen it before. She had the Llewellyn eyes and skin a shade too dark to pass for a sun-tan. Our parents had been lying to us, all these years, and we'd been too trusting to doubt them.

"How would you feel about sneaking onto the territory tomorrow?" I asked her.

"Well, you know me, Eva. I live to trespass. What exactly would I be doing?"

"I was wondering if you could help him. You know, with..." I tapped my temple by way of explanation. "It's okay if you don't want to. I can think of something else-"

She put her hand over my mouth, even as she started grinning like mad. "Of course I want to, dumbass. I ain't never helped kill an Alpha before. Just tell me when you need me."

I knocked her hand away. "Cheers, Nia. Don't want him getting hurt over this."

Nia just kept grinning at me. She inclined her head in Liam's direction and let her eyes glint suggestively. "You two getting along now?"

I glanced at him, feeling my cheeks heating under her scrutiny. I shoved my hands into my pockets and eyed her warily. "Yeah. But not like that."

"Suit yourself, pup," she sighed, not bothering to hide her exasperation. "Suit yourself."

My mam's conversation seemed to have come to an end, and that meant ours had to do the same, luckily for me. She and Liam were watching us with slightly bemused expressions. Nia saw it too and leaned over to ruffle my hair up before sauntering back over to the group.

"Let's not push our luck," Mam said. "Get back to the house and send the flockies our way."

I didn't really want to leave. Even though this meeting was strictly business, our brief visit to the camp felt like an awful long time ago, and I was homesick.

"Rhodri?" I asked.

"He's doing better," Mam told me, her voice guarded. "Sitting up for a few hours at a time. We're trying to get him back on his feet. Him and Eira fight like wildcats whenever they're left alone - you know what they're like. They wind each other up."

I was just glad that he was well enough to argue with her. He was the only one of us who hadn't started falling over himself to be nice to Eira when she'd got ill. No, he had treated her the exact same way he always had. She didn't seem to mind, and if anything, I had a suspicion that she sought him out whenever she got too fed up with the rest of us and our incessant niceness. Maybe it would help Rhodri now to have someone doing the same thing for him.

"Tell him to behave himself - and that we miss him," I murmured, not really knowing what else to say. 'He's doing better' didn't mean much, given how bad he had been when we'd last seen him.

"He knows that, Eva," she assured me, and suddenly there was nothing left to say. No reason to delay the inevitable. She was looking at Liam expectantly.

He closed his eyes to extend a simultaneous mind-link to both his boss and Micah himself. "I can smell rogues near the north border. It's fresh. What are your orders?"

That easily, he had their attention. I felt Micah distance himself to mind-link other people - hopefully the exodus team - while the Delta remained focused on Liam. "How many rogues?"

"Two females."

There was a moment of silence as they conferred somewhere I couldn't eavesdrop, and then..."Follow the scent trail, if you can, but keep your distance. Reinforcements are ten minutes out."

Liam glanced at me, his eyes wary. If he joined the flockie pursuit, he'd end up in the ambush with everyone else, and we needed to avoid that at all costs. A lone survivor was suspicious or a coward, and I wasn't sure which was worse.

"My mate is with me," he said. "I don't want to leave her."

Tactful. No one could fault him for that. And it halted any questions about why my scent would be intertwined with the rogues'.

The Delta swore across the link. "In that case, hang back. If there's a house nearby, get inside it. You're not on duty this morning, are you?"

"No, sir."

"Then stay with her. Let us worry about the rogues."

And with that, the link ended. Liam opened his eyes once again, blinking at the sunlight, and there was a cold satisfaction on his face the likes of which sent a shiver down my spine.

"They're coming," he told Mam.

She smiled at us - the lazy, sly kind, and then she turned and melted into the trees. Nia paused just long enough to give us a mocking salute and a wink before following on her heels. They didn't have time to hang around, not with fifteen flockies on their way.

And we had orders to follow. We could almost see the house from the border. White-washed walls against a backdrop of tree trunks and vibrant green. It was barely two minutes before we were safely back inside it.

Eleven minutes later, the flockies came running past. I stood at the window to watch them stream towards the border. They ran in a pack, jostling for lead position and panting from the heat of the day. They were yipping their excitement, and a few stopped to give long, wavering howls. Hunting howls.

As far as they knew, they were going to tear apart a pair of lone females and be in home in time for lunch. They had no idea that there were dozens of rogues lying in wait in those woods. Those fifteen men were the very worst of this pack, and if this worked, they were all about to die.