10
Savannah’s POV
“Mom, I played basketball with Tommy today.” Finn was stuffing his water bottle into his backpack with the specific seriousness that six-year-olds bring to important announcements.
“But when I jumped I kept thinking — not too high, not too high, not too high.”
I crouched down in front of him and pulled the zipper closed for him.
“You did great, baby.”
He considered this.
“Tommy can’t jump as high as me.”
“No, he can’t.”
“Because he’s human.
Right?”
“Right.” I held his face in both hands and looked at him.
Those amber-brown eyes looked straight back, waiting, taking it seriously the way he took most things seriously.
“That’s why we’re extra careful.
Some things are only ours to know.
You understand?”
Finn nodded.
Solemn, squared up, like a small soldier receiving classified orders.
“Also.” I took a breath.
“Day after tomorrow, we’re going to meet someone.
Your grandfather.
My father.”
His eyes went wide.
He dropped his voice like we were exchanging state secrets.
“The Alpha grandfather?”
“That’s him.
He wants to meet you.”
Finn absorbed this with the focused expression he used for new information he planned to process thoroughly later.
Then he picked up his backpack, both straps, very businesslike.
“Okay,” he said.
“I’ll be good.”
My throat did something I didn’t have time for.
I kissed the top of his head, stood up, and took him to school.
Zoe was waiting at the training base entrance, which I was starting to understand was simply a thing she did.
Copper hair in a thick braid today, eyes bright, radiating the energy of someone who had already had two coffees and was enjoying herself enormously.
“There she is.” She fell into step beside me and looped her arm through mine with zero hesitation.
“Okay, so I have to tell you — people are placing bets.
About you and Declan.
Specifically about when—”
“Zoe.”
“I’m just reporting the news!
I’m a journalist of pack gossip, I have a duty to—” She dissolved into laughter before she could finish, the kind of laugh that has nothing calculated in it, just pure amusement bubbling up and spilling over.
It had been a while since someone laughed around me like that.
Like there was nothing to be careful about.
“Okay, okay, I’m done.
But you were in his office for a long time yesterday.
What did you actually talk about?”
“Training schedules,” I said.
“Training schedules.” She repeated it slowly, with enormous theatrical weight.
“In that particular training jacket.”
I looked at her.
She blinked at me, the picture of innocence.
“Zoe.”
“What?
I didn’t say anything.”
I kept walking.
She kept pace beside me, still grinning, and I decided that being around her required a specific kind of tolerance that I was apparently going to have to develop.
I spotted them from twenty meters out.
The Blue Blood She-wolf from yesterday, plus two others flanking her, positioned near the center of the training ground.
That arrangement wasn’t random.
Half a semicircle, angles calculated, spacing deliberate.
Someone had thought about it beforehand.
The rest of the trainees were giving the formation a wide berth, already watching, already knowing what this was.
I walked in at the same pace I’d entered at.
“Let’s settle this properly,” the She-wolf called out.
She pitched her voice to carry — she wanted an audience and she’d made sure she had one.
“Can someone with no wolf actually teach someone who has one?
Or are we just pretending?”
She shifted before she’d finished talking.
Fast.
Cleaner than yesterday, I’d give her that — the transformation was smooth, practiced.
A grey wolf, not small, head low, weight loaded forward.
She charged.
I waited until the last possible moment, then stepped to the side — not away from her, *with* her, same direction as her momentum.
My hand came down against the pressure point at the base of her skull as she passed, and I used every ounce of her own speed against her, redirecting the weight forward and down.
She hit the ground hard.
The impact sent a shudder through the floorboards I felt through the soles of my feet. You are reading on g.com, the official source.
I dropped to one knee beside her, two fingers placed at the junction of her neck and skull, and held steady for three counts.
Still.
Controlled.
Done.
The fur receded.
She was human again, flat on her back, chest heaving.
She stared up at me with an expression I recognized — the specific look of someone who has never been beaten this way before and doesn’t yet have a category for it.
Her two packmates shifted and came at me simultaneously.
I stood, turned, and gave them both exactly what they’d given me — their own momentum, redirected.
One redirect, one pivot, two bodies meeting each other on the way down.
They landed in a heap.
Silence.
Not the held-breath kind.
The kind that comes after something has been settled.
I looked around the room.
At the trainees who’d been whispering about my lack of scent for two days.
At the ones who’d been watching to see what would happen.
At Zoe, standing near the door with both eyebrows raised and something that looked like deeply satisfied pride on her face.
“Anyone else have questions about my qualifications?”
Nobody moved.
Nobody spoke.
“Good.
Then we can start the actual session.”
“Enough.”
The voice came from the side entrance.
Not loud.
It didn’t need to be — that particular voice had a quality that reorganized a room without raising itself, and every wolf in the space felt it before they consciously processed it.
Declan walked in, and the light was behind him, and his eyes came to the three wolves on the ground first, held there for exactly one beat of assessment, and then moved to me.
He looked at me for a moment longer than was strictly necessary.
Then he faced the room.
“This is Savannah Cole,” he said, his voice carrying to every corner without any apparent effort.
“Your new combat instructor.” He paused, just briefly.
“What she can teach you is considerably more than you’ve been assuming.”