They couldn't track in the pitch black, and navigating the ravine at night was a death sentence. Bram called a halt.
They made camp under the overhang of a massive shale cliff, shielded from the worst of the wind. There was no roaring fire. Fire meant smoke, and smoke meant broadcasting their location. Instead, they built a Dakota fire hole, a small, intensely hot ember pit dug into the dirt, entirely invisible from ten paces away.
The wolves sat in a tight circle, absorbing the heat, eating strips of dried venison in tense silence. The revelation of an infected pack roaming their borders had shattered any lingering hostility toward Gwen. Now, it was just cold, hard survival.
Declan took the first watch, disappearing into the shadows of the rocks. Finn and Una curled together under heavy pelts, their breathing slowing as they dropped into a light, instinctual sleep.
Gwen sat cross-legged near the edge of the pit. She had stripped off her gloves. In her hand, she held a small square of oiled cloth, methodically wiping down her silver knives. Draw, wipe, inspect, sheath. A ritual.
Bram sat across from her. He was watching her hands.
"You don't sleep," he observed quietly, his voice a low rumble beneath the whistling wind.
"I sleep when I'm safe," Gwen replied without looking up.
She turned the blade, catching the faint orange glow of the embers on the polished silver.
"You're surrounded by the deadliest predators in the mountains," Bram said. "You're as safe here as you are anywhere."
Gwen paused. She looked up. The firelight threw harsh shadows across Bram's face, deepening the exhaustion etched around his eyes and highlighting the jagged silver scar on his neck.
"The deadliest predators in the mountains are currently being hunted by something worse," she pointed out. She slid the knife into the sheath on her thigh. "Besides. I'm not used to company."
Bram shifted, leaning his weight back against the cold stone of the cliff.
"Aldus kept you hidden. Why?"
Gwen didn't answer immediately. She wasn't used to being asked about herself. She was used to taking orders, receiving coordinates, and returning with proof of a kill. Talking felt like exposing her throat.
But there was something entirely disarming about Bram. He wasn't asking to find a weakness. He was asking because he genuinely wanted to know the shape of the tool he was working with.
"I'm a bastard," Gwen said, her voice devoid of self-pity. Just stating facts. "My mother was a scullery maid. She died of winter fever when I was six. Aldus didn't want me in the castle. Bad for his image. So he sent me to the old hunting lodge on the edge of the black wood."
She picked up her second dagger, beginning the cleaning process again.
"The lodge keeper was an old man named Corin. He used to hunt for the crown before he lost an eye. He didn't know how to raise a little girl, so he raised a hound instead. He taught me how to read the mud, how to walk without snapping twigs, how to throw steel."
"And when you got good?" Bram prompted.
"When I got good, Aldus realized I was useful. The valley has pest problems. Vampires in the crypts. Ghouls in the graveyards. Feral shifters in the woods. You can't send an army to kill things that hide in the dark. Armies are loud and expensive. You send one person who doesn't exist." Gwen shrugged, a tight, mechanical movement. "I was his dirty secret. The ghost that kept his trade routes clean."
Bram listened in silence. He looked at the silver arrayed around her, the lethal, practiced grace of her movements. He saw a mirror of his own life, distorted but recognizable.
"He turned you into a weapon," Bram said softly.
"Weapons don't cry when they're left in the cold," Gwen replied smoothly. She nodded toward his neck. "What about you? Kings usually sit on thrones, not in the mud tracking rot hounds. Where did the silver scar come from?"
Bram touched the jagged tissue on his neck. His fingers traced the burn instinctively.
"I wasn't born a king," Bram said. "My pack was small. Scavengers, mostly. We lived off the scraps the larger packs left behind. When I was nineteen, we starved. The winter was brutal. I broke the old treaty and went down into the valley to steal sheep from a baron's estate."
He stared into the glowing red embers of the fire pit.
"The baron was waiting. He had hired a mercenary, someone who knew how to use silver. I got greedy. I lunged for a lamb, and the mercenary caught me with a silver chain whip. Wrapped right around my throat."
Gwen stopped wiping her blade. She knew exactly what a silver chain whip did to werewolf flesh. The sheer agony of it was enough to drive most shifters permanently insane.
"How did you get away?" she asked.
"I didn't," Bram said, his voice flat. "I tore my own throat open pulling away from the chain. I bled out in the snow. The mercenary thought I was dead. Left me to rot. My brother found me, dragged me back to the caves, and poured boiling pine sap into the wound to stop the bleeding."
Gwen winced internally. Boiling sap on raw, silver-burned tissue. It was a miracle he could speak at all.
"I survived," Bram continued. "But my brother died two weeks later from a hunter's arrow. That's when I realized that living like rats meant dying like rats. So I fought the alphas of the local packs. I won. I united them. I forced them to build the Iron Crag. I made them a kingdom, so we wouldn't have to steal sheep to survive."
He looked at Gwen. The shared understanding between them solidified in the freezing air.
"You're a weapon your father forged to protect his gold," Bram said. "I'm a shield I forged to protect my people. We're both just tools trying not to break."
Gwen looked into the Wolf King's eyes. For the first time in her life, she didn't see a target. She didn't see an employer. She saw an equal. Someone who carried the same bone-deep exhaustion of violence that she did.
She reached out, handing him a strip of dried venison. Bram took it. Their fingers brushed. His skin was burning hot, radiating the intense fever heat of a werewolf. Hers were cold, calloused from leather and steel.
The moment hung there, quiet and fragile, suspended in the dark.
Then the wind shifted again.
It wasn't a howl. It was a low, vibrating chitter. A sound like grinding bones and wet tearing, echoing down the rocky defile.
Instantly, the fragile peace of the campfire shattered. Finn and Una snapped awake, their eyes flashing yellow in the dark. Declan dropped down from his watch post, landing without a sound next to Bram.
"They caught our scent," Declan hissed, his hands tightening on his axes. "They're coming up the ridge."
Bram stood, the weariness vanishing from his face, replaced by the cold, terrifying presence of the alpha. He drew his broadsword. The steel sang in the cold air.
"Kick dirt over the coals," Bram ordered.
Gwen was already moving. She kicked a spray of frozen dirt over the ember pit, plunging them into total, blinding darkness. She didn't need to see. She drew her silver blades, stepping up beside Bram, her shoulder lightly brushing his.
"How many?" Gwen asked, her voice a calm, deadly whisper.
"Too many," Bram replied, his eyes piercing the gloom.
Down in the dark, the chittering grew louder, accompanied by the heavy, frantic crunching of claws on ice.
The rot pack had found them.