Lunch settled the cabin into a work-quiet hum. Bowls stacked. Stove fed. Tools and bags reclaimed the places they always went without anyone telling them where. Outside, the sky leaned pale and clean over Libby, light biting at the borders of snow still clinging to eaves. The town sounded like a place that planned to keep existing: axes somewhere, a voice calling across the street, the lazy clank of a wrench against a truck frame. The south wind carried metal and pine in equal measure.
Kade stood by the shelf, testing a latch he and Gabriel had reseated that morning. It held. He let his hand fall, claws clicking once on wood. He had learned in a day the rhythm in Thane’s den: speak plain, work steady, eat when given, ask when unsure. He did not call what he felt home, not yet. But he could see how someone would. It sat in the corners like warmth you forgot was there until you needed it.
Holt leaned on the table, a mountain pretending to be furniture. “Window good,” Holt said, approving. “No more sing in wind. Gabriel happy. World safer.”
Gabriel, coiling a length of wire with a musician’s neatness, smirked. “The south wind can sing, just not through that latch anymore. Kade’s a fast study.”
Rime eased the door open with two fingers and listened. He had a way of tilting his head that looked like a bird in snow. “Street quiet,” he said. “Hank drilling men by east hole. Marta talk at City Hall.”
Mark finish-checked his list. “Then we—”
A fist hit the cabin door exactly twice. Not frantic. Official.
Rime had it open before the third beat could land. One of Hank’s deputies stood on the step, breath smoking, eyes locked to the Alpha like a compass finds north. Younger guy, nervous energy contained by training.
“Thane,” he said, not wasting air. “South gate.”
Thane was already shrugging into his coat, voice gravel and decision. “What, how many, how armed.”
“Pickup. Six men. All with rifles that look… maintained enough. They rolled up hard and started putting rounds into the gate. Hank sent me. He says they’re yelling for entry, food, supplies.”
“Anyone hurt inside?”
“Negative,” the deputy said. “Gates are holding. We reinforced them last month. You asked; so we did.”
Thane’s mouth twitched at the corner. Approval. He moved once, and the room moved with him.
“Holt, Rime,” Thane said. “On me.”
“Always,” Rime answered.
Holt’s big hands closed and opened. “Good,” he said, like a man who enjoyed carrying heavy things more than breaking them.
“Mark,” Thane continued. “With Hank’s line. Keep them organized. Make sure our rifles are eyes-on and cool heads only, no hair triggers.”
“On it.” Mark grabbed his radio and the wide leather strap of calm that he wore like armor.
“Gabriel,” Thane said, already halfway out the door. “With me. Kade—”
Kade straightened without knowing he’d done it.
“—on my left,” Thane finished. “You asked to be useful. Come see what the law looks like here.”
Kade nodded once. “Understood.”
They crossed town at a run that read as walking. People knew enough to get out of the way when Thane moved like that. Heads turned; doors cracked; a child on a porch counted wolves under his breath like a spell. The path bent to the south, past the square, past the radio shed that hummed like a living thing, past the racks where cut wood was stacked by height and season. The south gate rose at the end of the street, metal-clad and iron-braced, the fence on either side a wall of salvaged steel sheets and timber bolted into a kind of stubborn strength.
Noise met them before the view did: the bright, ugly clang of rounds hitting steel; the shouted laughter of men who did not understand what they were asking for; the overlapping bark of Hank’s people keeping order atop the walkway.
Thane and his wolves stepped into the gateyard.
The pickup idled twenty yards beyond, paint scabbed off in big flakes, grille punched by deer or anger or both. Six men. One in the bed with a rifle propped on the cab, two on either side with guns down at ready-shoulder, one in the passenger seat smoking like he’d trained for it, and the driver—big, burly, hat pulled low, jaw set hard enough to break teeth. He climbed out as Thane approached and swaggered forward like all the bad movies taught him to. Cowboy accent thick enough to pour.
Hank stood up top behind the crenels, wide stance, shotgun across his arms, eyes level. He saw Thane and flicked two fingers. All good. No breach.
Thane didn’t bother with the walkway. He nodded, and Hank’s men unbarred just enough iron to let a human-sized door crack open in the main gate. Thane slid through the seam with Rime, Holt, Gabriel, and Kade right behind. They rebarred the gap behind them: a statement. We are not foolish.
The raiders laughed at the procession like boys at a carnival exhibit. One called, “Aw, lookit! They brought the pets to talk.” Another tried a bark and made it sound like a coyote tripping over a bucket. The man on the cab spit over the side. “Heard all kinds about you dog-people.”
Thane’s face didn’t change. He stepped until he was ten yards out and no more. Close enough to see pupils. Far enough not to get flanked.
“Afternoon,” he said. The gravel took no effort. “This is the south gate of Libby. You’re at the wrong door if you came to sell Girl Scout cookies.”
The burly leader barked a laugh and planted boots shoulder-wide. “We ain’t selling,” he said, vowels long. “We’re collecting.” He gestured with his rifle barrel at the gate, at the town. “You got food. You got fuel. You got guns. We need all three.” He spit. “So… open.”
Thane glanced at the gate, then back. “No.”
The man blinked, offended by the letter count. “No? That it?”
“That’s it,” Thane said. “You can also have no with a please if you’re a manners man.”
The passenger with the cigarette leaned out his window. “We got six guns,” he called around his smoke. “You got… what is that? A couple house mutts and the town knitting circle up there. We’ll cut you up and wear you like coats.”
Holt smiled. It wasn’t friendly. Rime didn’t smile; he didn’t do theater. Gabriel folded his hands in front of him like a polite man at a funeral. Kade looked at the arrangement and thought, This is what he meant by mercy with teeth.
Thane lifted one hand, palm down, the gesture that did more than shouting. The town rifles along the wall stayed shouldered but did not track. No sudden flinches. No wasted bravado. The men up top breathed in and out the way Hank had drilled into them.
“Last chance to be a better story,” Thane said conversationally. “Turn it around. Go north, go east, go to hell—I don’t care. But you’re not coming through this gate.”
The burly leader’s smile turned into something sharp. “You think we’re asking?” He looked back at his men. “Boys, show the dogs why we don’t ask.”
The man in the bed of the pickup—edgy, young, stupid—did not wait for ceremony. He snapped the rifle to his shoulder and fired, not at the wall this time, but straight at the center mass of the wolf with the gravel voice.
The shot cracked the air. Sound hit first. Then the slug hit Thane’s left shoulder, square, and went through fur and fabric and flesh the way fast metal does. It snapped his jacket back, jerked him half a step. Holt’s snarl detonated like a small storm. Rime slid a foot and found a new angle. Hank’s men went statues with hot eyes.
Kade didn’t breathe.
Thane looked down at his shoulder. At the widening dark on the shirt. He rolled it once to test the mechanics. He flexed his hand. When he looked back at the raider leader, his smile had changed shape.
It had gone feral.
“I am getting pretty tired,” Thane said, and the words came out like new gravel being laid on an old road, “of random raiders ruining perfectly good shirts.”
The leader’s mouth opened, stayed there a second like his brain forgot which order words came in. The young shooter in the bed took a small step back. The passenger dropped his cigarette and missed it twice before he picked it up again. Something like a collective thought tugged at them: That is… not how humans react.
Kade watched the wound close. Not fast like a trick, not slow like a sermon—just steady, flesh knitting under the shredded fabric, blood drying faster than it had any right to. He felt a click in the deep part of himself that judged leaders without being asked to: This is the fire he meant. The one for cooking, not worship.
Thane let them see it. Let them watch proof demand new behavior. He took another step forward, not enough to close, just enough to underscore the arithmetic.
“You brought six guns and a truck that’s older than your best excuse,” he said. “You shot the gate of a town that did nothing to you, then you shot a wolf who asked you to be smarter. You’ve got two choices; maybe three if we’re generous.”
“Option one,” Thane continued as if he were ordering coffee, “you drop your weapons on the ground, very carefully, and you leave in your truck. You do not come back. You do not send friends. You tell anyone who asks that Libby is not worth the ammo it takes to annoy it.”
Holt’s teeth showed in a grin that promised nothing good if option one wasn’t selected.
“Option two,” Thane went on, “is you try your luck.” He tilted his head toward the wall. “Those rifles up there do not miss unless I tell them to, and I’m not telling them to today. I would prefer not to stain the snow with you. The town kids have to walk this way to the forest.”
Rime’s eyes never left the driver’s hands. He shifted half a degree, a calculation that had kept a hundred mornings intact.
The burly leader found his voice. “What’s option three.”
Thane smiled, small. “You apologize to my gate.”
A twitch. Confusion. “What?”
Thane pointed, patient as a drill sergeant with humor. “You had your boy there put holes in a door that has done nothing wrong this week. You apologize. Out loud. So the men on the wall hear you. You tell my gate you made a bad choice, and you’ll be trying better ones soon.”
Rime’s mouth almost curved. Almost.
Gabriel exhaled a laugh that sounded like trouble deciding to be kind.
The leader stared. The world pivoted under him and he hated it. He looked at the gun in his hand like it had betrayed him. Then he looked at the hole closing in Thane’s shirt and did the math everyone did in this town now: blood plus time, minus panic.
The man in the bed moved first. He put his rifle down on the cab gently, like it might explode if insulted. His hands lifted. “Boss,” he said, voice high and eaten-out, “I don’t get paid enough for… for wolves that talk.”
“Nobody pays you,” the passenger muttered, ash trembling. But his gun went down too. One by one the others followed, steel touching dirt with small hollow notes. The leader was last. He held on as long as pride could. Then he laid his rifle on the ground like he loved it.
Thane nodded once. “Good. Now the apology.”
The leader swallowed. “You can’t be serious.”
“Very,” Thane said. “We do not let men leave with a story that says ‘we got away clean.’ We send men away with a story about how they knelt to a gate because they were not brave enough to kneel to a town.”
Silence pulled tight.
Kade watched the leader’s throat work. Watched shame wrestle ego. Watched a man realize which memory would travel farther.
The leader turned, slow as sap. He faced the metal-clad gate with its scalloped patches and ugly welds that had saved lives. He cleared his throat. The men on the wall leaned out despite themselves.
“I’m… I’m sorry,” the leader said. The word cracked. “For shooting the gate.” He stood there like the apology had length.
Thane lifted his chin a quarter inch.
The leader clenched his teeth, then unclenched them. “Was a bad choice. We’ll make better ones.”
From up on the wall, someone snorted. Hank did not. He nodded, solemn. “Apology accepted,” he called down, voice like an old fencepost. “The gate will try to forgive you.”
The leader stuttered. “So you’re just… letting us go.”
Thane’s eyes were winter under lantern light. “I am teaching you,” he said. “Next time you pull up on a town with a plan like this, you’ll remember that the world still has rules. And that there are people who will enforce them.”
Gabriel folded his arms tighter to keep from clapping.
Rime did not blink.
The men moved slow. They climbed into the truck without turning backs to the wolves because fear had made them careful. The engine coughed, caught, rattled like something with opinions.
Thane lifted a hand. “One more thing,” he said, and every muscle in the pickup cab went rigid. “You tell the next men that ask—that Libby still stands, and that wolves guard it.”
The leader met his eyes. And in that second—the exact length it takes to lose or keep your life—he found enough sense to nod.
“Yessir,” he said. The sir landed by accident, because he was a man built by a world that still remembered the sound.
They drove. Not fast. Not slow. The tires crunched old snow and new fear. The pickup rattled away down the south road and faded behind the bend, leaving only exhaust and a story that would cost them pride every time they told it. Hank’s men held positions until the truck was long gone, then started breathing like men who had not moved for a small eternity. On the wall, someone finally laughed like a pot releasing steam. “He apologized to a gate,” the man wheezed. “Gonna be telling that one to my grandkids.”
Thane stood a moment more, listening to the space that violence had wanted and did not get. He rolled his shoulder. The hole in his shirt was ugly but old already. He looked at the gate.
“Good work,” he told it.
Kade had not moved.
He watched Thane watch the space. Watched the way Rime’s stance returned to easy without ever dropping readiness. Watched Holt grin like a man who liked that the world got to keep spinning. Watched Gabriel’s eyes shine with a kind of earnest pride that sometimes embarrassed him and sometimes saved him. Watched the town above relax like a net easing off its catch.
He stepped forward, slow, and stopped beside Thane at the same angle a soldier reserves for men he has chosen to—not forced to—follow.
“That,” Kade said, voice low and not thin, “is exactly the kind of Alpha I am looking for.”
Thane didn’t make a scene of it. “Is it.”
“Yes,” Kade said. He looked down at the torn shirt, the drying blood, the unbent quiet. “You took the shot. You didn’t make theater out of it. You taught them a lesson that will go further than pain or death.” He swallowed. “I would be honored to stay. If you’ll have me.”
Holt made a pleased noise that sounded like a log catching. “He stays,” Holt decided to the universe.
Rime’s nod was a piece of iron. “He earned look. More later. But yes.”
Gabriel didn’t bother with cool. He grinned, teeth flashing. “Welcome home, Pathfinder.”
Mark, coming down off the wall with Hank, caught the tail end and lifted his brows. “That was fast.”
“Some choices take all winter,” Kade said. “Some take a single breath when someone teaches the right lesson.”
Hank clapped Thane’s shoulder—the uninjured one—with a palm like a workbench. “We’ll police the road,” Hank said. “If they’re dumb enough to stop inside a mile, we’ll help ‘em regret it.” He glanced at the drying patch on Thane’s shirt and shook his head as if at a familiar dog who’d rolled in mud again. “Gonna start charging raiders by the shirt.”
“Put it on Marta’s fee schedule,” Thane said. The corner of his mouth gave away laughter he rarely let anyone buy. He looked back to Kade. “House rules still stand,” he said.
Kade nodded once, slow. “Understood.”
The unbar, rebar, and return into town took minutes. Inside the gate, people gathered with questions they didn’t need answered because they’d watched the whole calculus from above. Thane lifted a hand and said, “Back to it,” and they did—because a town that lives knows how to let the moment resolve and turn it into work.
Back in the gateyard, Mark handed Kade a small, battered notebook like his own. “If you’re staying,” Mark said, “this is in case you start keeping your lists. It’s how I make sure days stack into a life.”
Kade ran a thumb over the cover. “I will.”
Rime cut a glance south one more time, then looked to Thane. “We sweep?” he asked.
“Take Holt,” Thane said. “Out and back to the bend.”
“Good,” Holt said, as if given dessert. He clapped Kade once on the shoulder on his way by. “You stay,” he repeated, satisfied. “We teach you everything. Even how to drink coffee.”
“Especially that,” Gabriel said.
They shook out like a banner and returned to their day. Hank’s deputy walked back to the station with his spine a little straighter. The wind fussed at the top of the fence and then got bored and went to bother the pines.
As they crossed back toward the square, Kade matched Thane’s stride without thinking about it. The blue light of winter held on the edges of roofs. Somewhere a radio test tone peeped and died. The world looked like a place that had chosen to be something decent, and it showed.
“Thane,” Kade said.
“Mm.”
“I meant what I said,” Kade told him, eyes forward, voice not performing. “I would be honored to stay in your pack. Under your rules. Under your oath.”
Thane didn’t stop. He didn’t fill the air with words. He let the statement sit. Then he reached over and tapped the notebook still in Kade’s hand.
“Write it down,” he said. “Promises are better when they live in more than mouths.”
Kade opened the little book. He scratched three neat lines in tidy block letters with a pencil Gabriel produced from nowhere.
- Stay.
- Earn.
- Do not make him regret it.
He closed the book and slid it into his belt. Then, because he understood that a lesson wasn’t finished until the teacher nodded, he looked at the Alpha.
Thane’s answer was simple as a door opening. “Welcome,” he said.
Kade let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been rationing since before the north went bad. He adjusted his coat, flexed his hands, and turned toward the cabin that smelled like metal and bread and something he could spend a winter learning to call by a larger word.
Behind them, the south gate watched the road and remembered an apology. In front of them, the day asked for wood, wires, and a dozen small kindnesses.
Kade stepped in time with the pack and did not need to count trees anymore to know where he was.