I lower the phone. The silence in the car is absolute.
"Twenty-four hours," Kade says quietly. His voice is a low rumble against my ear.
"We can't fight an army," Kieran says from the front seat.
"We don't have to," I say. I open my eyes and look at the tablet in Morgan’s hand. "We just have to resolve the storm before they get here."
When we arrive at the compound, the air feels different.
The wards are humming at maximum capacity. The pack is on high alert, but it’s a quiet, disciplined alert. The integration school has done its work. The wolves are not panicking; they are holding the perimeter, their fields woven together in a low-level defensive lattice.
I am escorted directly to the medical wing. Margot is waiting.
"Field exhaustion," she says immediately, running a scanner ove
