KAI POV
The starting line felt like a graveyard, the kind that hummed with energy, daring me to dig my own hole and climb right back out of it. My lungs were too tight, adrenaline already flooding me like poison turned sweet. The course stretched out before me in the faint light before dawn, ugly and brutal and familiar as the scars on my own skin. I knew every obstacle by heart. Ropes, walls, pits, mud. My family had built this thing to forge wolves into steel. I had bled here before. I had sweated, bruised, and cursed here more times than I could count. And tonight, with the flag waiting at the end, this course belonged to me.
Only one thing was different: my family stood there, guarding each piece like sentinels. Pops Alan. Papa Alek. Daddy Aaron. And behind them, my brothers.
Not ju
