Chapter 5 What Six Days Buys

KATE POV

The pack war room isn't what I expected — no maps with red string, no whiteboards, just Jesse, Sam, Gina the pack's healer with hands stained faintly herb-green, and a boy no older than nineteen who turns out to be their best tracker, all of them crowded around a table with the Guild's stolen manifests spread across it like a crime scene, because that's exactly what it is.

"Holt's summit isn't a summit," Sam says, tapping a logistics sheet I recognize — troop movement, timed to the exact hour of the treaty gathering. "It's a kill box. He's routing three units through the eastern pass, timed to hit during the toast, when every Alpha in the region will have their guard down for the one night a year we're all supposed to pretend to trust each other."

"He's not just coming for us," Jesse says, and something in his voice has gone very still, the stillness of a man doing math he doesn't want to finish. "Every pack sends a representative. He's not planning to win a war. He's planning to end one, permanently, in a single night, and blame the wolves for starting it. Just like Millhaven. Just bigger."

I stare at the sheet until the numbers stop swimming. "He's not going to stop with a tracker on you. That was never the whole plan. I was just supposed to make sure the one Alpha with proof his own father died protecting couldn't warn anyone in time."

"Which means we have six days to warn every pack in the region," Gina says, "convince them a hunter's word is worth trusting, and stop an attack that's already in motion, using evidence stolen from a man who taught you everything you know about lying convincingly."

"When you put it that way," I say, "it sounds impossible."

"It sounds like Tuesday," Sam mutters, and it's the first time he's looked at me like I might actually be useful instead of a threat wearing a pretty face.

We work until the room goes gray with dawn, building something out of nothing — a route to reach three neighboring packs before the summit, a way to authenticate the manifests without revealing I stole them, a plan for getting my grandmother out of Guild custody before Holt realizes I've turned. Jesse doesn't leave my side the entire night, and somewhere around three in the morning, exhausted and running on nothing but adrenaline and the particular clarity that comes from finally telling the truth, I catch him watching me instead of the map.

"What," I say.

"Nothing." But he doesn't look away. "I spent ten years thinking the girl I pulled out of that fire died anyway, eventually, just slower. Turns out she didn't. She just took longer to come back."

I don't have an answer for that. I don't think there is one, not yet, not with six days between us and whatever Holt has planned, not with my grandmother's life sitting on a scale I still don't fully control.

My phone buzzes. Not the burner. My real one, the number only one person has, the number Holt doesn't know exists because I built it myself, six months ago, in case I ever needed a way out he couldn't trace.

They moved Grandma, the text reads, from the nurse I've been quietly paying to watch her. New facility. Higher security. She kept asking for you. Come quick, sweetheart. Something's wrong. She's not herself. Something's very wrong.

I read it twice. Three times. The war room goes distant and small around me, every plan we've spent all night building suddenly balanced on the edge of a message I can't unread.

"Kate." Jesse's voice, close, careful. "What is it?"

I look up at him, at the man I was sent here to destroy, at the only person left alive who remembers the same fire I do, and I understand with total, sickening clarity that Holt didn't wait for six days.

He never intended to.

"He knows," I say. "He already knows."