Reid's POV
Reid had done a lot of reckless things in his twenty-eight years.
Running into a burning building to pull out two Silverwood pups when he was nineteen. Challenging an alpha twice his size at twenty-two with nothing but speed and fury. Taking over a broken pack at twenty-three after watching his father and brother destroy each other, standing in the blood-soaked remains of everything he'd grown up with and deciding to build something from it.
But sprinting through a dark forest half-shifted, following a bond that felt like it was going to pull him apart if he slowed down, toward a girl he'd never met, to fight off seven hired wolves while Jake and Marcus handled three others, all within the first ten minutes of meeting his fated mate?
Even by his standards, tonight was a lot.
The hired wolves were gone now. Scattered the moment three alphas hit them at full force. Whoever sent them had underestimated what three bonded alphas fighting in the same direction looked like. Reid almost felt sorry for them. Almost.
What mattered was Sophie was safe.
She was standing ten feet away in the clearing with her arms wrapped around herself and her eyes still tracking the tree line because apparently his mate had the survival instincts of someone who'd been preparing for a threat her whole life without knowing it. He respected that more than he could say.
Jake was talking to Marcus in low urgent tones on the other side of the clearing. Planning. Strategizing. Being exactly what they always were.
Reid walked straight to Sophie.
She turned when she heard him coming and opened her mouth like she was going to say something practical and reasonable and Reid didn't let her. He pulled her against his chest and just held on.
She went still for exactly one second.
Then she grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands and held on back.
Reid closed his eyes.
The bond settled into something he had no words for. He'd heard older wolves describe fated bonds his whole life. The pull. The completion. The feeling of a missing piece clicking into place. He'd always thought it sounded like something they said to make themselves feel better about losing their independence.
He'd been completely wrong.
This wasn't losing something. This was finding out he'd been walking around with half his chest empty and hadn't noticed because he'd never known what full felt like.
Sophie was warm and real against him and through the bond he could feel her fear slowly dropping, not disappearing, she wasn't naive enough for that, but settling into something manageable. She was brave. She was holding herself together by sheer will and she was doing it well. Reid had known seasoned pack wolves who'd have been completely useless after the night she'd just had.
She pulled back after a moment and looked up at him.
"You came from the west." She said it like she was filing information away.
"Silverwood territory." He looked down at her. "Reid Hayes."
Something moved through her eyes. Recognition. She already knew his name somehow. Her parents probably. Or just the bond feeding her information. "You're the youngest one."
Reid kept his face easy. The words landed in the usual place, the place where his age and his pack's size and the constant awareness of being measured against Jake and Marcus all lived together in a pile. He was used to it. Didn't mean he enjoyed it. "That a problem."
Sophie looked at him with those gold eyes that saw too much. "I didn't say that like it was a problem."
He studied her face and decided she meant it.
Then the bond did something new.
It expanded. Sideways, somehow, which didn't make physical sense, but Reid felt it ripple outward and connect to something on his left and something on his right. He turned instinctively and found Jake and Marcus both looking in his direction with the same startled expression he suspected was on his own face.
The three of them stared at each other.
Jake was the last person Reid would have chosen to be bonded to through a shared mate. The man was controlled to the point of being unreachable and had been treating Reid like a liability since Silverwood's civil war. Marcus was borderline impossible to read on a good day.
But what Reid felt through the new connection was nothing like what he expected.
From Jake, underneath all that cold discipline, something almost desperate. A hunger for connection that the man would rather die than admit to. From Marcus, underneath all the strategy and control, something raw and shocked and completely unguarded in a way that Marcus Thorne never was.
Both of them were just as undone by this as Reid was.
And for the first time since he'd become alpha of the smallest and weakest pack in the territory, standing next to the two men who made him feel his own inadequacy most sharply, Reid felt something level out between them.
They were equal here. In this clearing. With her.
All three of them, for the first time, starting from exactly the same place.
Jake moved before the moment could breathe. Of course he did.
"We need to relocate. Now." Jake was already scanning the tree line again, assessing the dark the way Reid recognized from his own nighttime patrols. "Those wolves reported back to someone the second they ran. Whoever sent them knows we're here. We have maybe forty minutes before they send more."
Marcus was already agreeing with his expression before Jake finished talking.
Reid tightened his hold on Sophie slightly before making himself let go. He didn't want to. Everything in him was against moving even one foot further from her. But Jake was right about the timeline and Reid had enough experience with ambushes to know that staying in a known location after a failed attempt was exactly what the enemy counted on.
He took Sophie's hand instead. She didn't pull away.
"Where." Reid directed the question at Jake.
"Mountain compound. Northern boundary of neutral territory." Jake's eyes moved to Sophie. "It's secure. My people built it specifically for situations where pack movement can't be tracked."
Sophie looked at him steadily. "You're telling me. Not asking."
Jake paused. Something shifted in his jaw. "I'm telling you because there's no time to ask. The people who sent those wolves wanted all four of us in one place and unprotected. We need to move."
Sophie held his gaze for a moment that was longer than comfortable. Jake didn't look away either. Reid watched the two of them and felt the bond hum with a tension that was about a hundred things at once.
Then Sophie said, "My family. Grace and my parents are back at my apartment."
Jake answered immediately. "I'll have people with them within fifteen minutes."
Something in Sophie's face decided. "Okay."
They moved.
Jake set the pace and Marcus flanked the right and Reid stayed at Sophie's left shoulder with her hand still in his. The forest was dark and they moved fast and Sophie kept up without complaint, which Reid noted and stored away as one more thing that made her different from what he'd expected.
They were halfway to the compound when Sophie spoke quietly, just to him, low enough that the others couldn't catch it over the movement.
"The wolves that came tonight." She didn't look at him when she said it. "They weren't just any hired wolves, were they."
Reid kept his eyes forward. "What makes you say that."
"They moved in a pattern. Not just surrounding us. Separating us. They were trying to pull you three apart from each other." She paused. "If you hadn't all moved together they might have managed it."
Reid felt the truth of that land in his stomach. He'd noticed the pattern too, in the middle of the fight. The hired wolves weren't going for kills. They were going for distance. Trying to draw each alpha away from the others.
Away from her.
"Yeah." He kept his voice level. "I noticed."
"Which means whoever sent them knew about the bond before tonight." Sophie's grip on his hand tightened slightly. "They knew all three of you would be in that clearing. They knew the bond would make you distracted." She finally looked at him. "Someone with pack knowledge. Someone who had enough time to plan this."
Reid looked down at her and felt something cold settle in the back of his mind.
Someone in one of the three packs had set this up. Which meant someone had known about Sophie before tonight. Before her transformation. Before any of this became public.
Someone had been waiting.
He was about to say it out loud when Jake stopped moving.
They all stopped.
Twenty yards ahead where the tree line broke into a small trail clearing, a figure was standing. Still. Waiting. Not moving. Not running.
Just standing there like they had every right.
Reid knew who it was before Sophie made a sound.
He felt her react through the bond first. Not fear. Something worse than fear.
Recognition.
Sophie's grip on his hand went tight enough to hurt.
"That's not possible," she whispered. "She's been dead for two years."