(Rhea POV)

Aldric pulled back.

Not slowly, not in the grinding stages of a force running low on momentum. He pulled back fast — all three companies withdrawn to camp by noon, the south wall approach abandoned, the siege perimeter shrinking to a defensive arc around the Council camp. By 1400, the field between my walls and his camp was empty.

We should have been relieved. Two assaults repelled, walls damaged but standing, casualties manageable. Maren was already running the repair calculations. Sera's fighters were rotating off the wall for rest. Torren was organizing the southeast breach rebuild.

I stood in the command room and looked at the map and couldn't shake the feeling in my chest.

"He pulled back too fast," I said.

Kieran was at the table. He'd been studying the Council camp's new configuration — the positions visible from the watchtower, the patrol pattern that had shifted from offensive to holding. He looked up.

"He's not giving up," Kieran said. "He's changing targets."

"What do you mean?"

"The frontal assaults cost him. We held both times — once because of the intel, once because of the breach defense. Aldric doesn't repeat losing tactics. He eliminates the obstacle or he goes around it." He traced the camp outline on the map. "He doesn't need to take the territory. He never did. The sovereignty challenge is the official justification. His real objective fits in a safe house."

Lily.

I'd known it since the unmarked scouts kicked in the safe house door. Since Aldric's questions about 99.97 percent. Since Kieran said Vera with the passage gaping at our feet. But hearing it said plainly made it heavier.

"How many passages does Vera know?" I asked.

"I don't know. She lived in this valley for thirty years. There could be more."

"We sealed the one in the supply building."

"One. If she drew Aldric a map, there are others."

I looked at the map. My territory — the walls I'd built, the tunnels I'd dug, the defensive positions I'd designed over six years. All of it built on land that someone else had known first. And that someone had spent six months in exile with nothing to do except remember every crack, every passage, every forgotten path through the rock.

"We move Lily," I said. "Southern tunnel. Sera's territory in the mountain pass."

Kieran shook his head. "If Aldric knows the old passages, he may know the southern approach. Moving her through terrain we don't fully control is riskier than holding her here with maximum guard."

He was right. The calculation was ugly but clear: keep Lily in the center, inside the most defensible structure, with every fighter we could spare around her.

"Triple the guard on the safe house," I said. "Torren's best people. Seal every sub-grade opening in the compound — if there's a crack wide enough for a wolf, I want it filled with stone by nightfall."

We spent the afternoon sealing. By dark, we'd found and sealed three more fissures. None as large as the supply building passage, but all of them ways in that I hadn't known existed because I'd built on top of them.

The strike came at 0200.

Not from the passages we'd sealed. From one we hadn't found — a narrow channel that entered the compound through the drainage culvert on the north side, a stone-lined overflow I'd built in year three for spring runoff. The channel was eighteen inches wide at the surface. Beneath it, someone had widened the passage enough for a wolf in human form to crawl through.

“Four wolves. The same unmarked configuration. Torren's north patrol spotted them thirty seconds after they emerged — four dark shapes moving through the compound in the specific formation of a team that knew exactly where it was going.

They were heading for the safe house.

Torren intercepted at the inner courtyard. His blade took the first one down before the wolf registered the threat. The second engaged him — close quarters, fast.

The other two broke through.