(Rhea POV)

Day twenty-two. Aldric stopped being patient.

The third assault wasn't like the first two. The first had been tactical — feints, redirections, the calculated approach of a commander testing defenses. The second had been a siege escalation — sustained pressure, breach attempts, the systematic application of force against identified weak points. Both had been the work of a strategist.

The third was arithmetic. Three hundred and fifty wolves. Every unit Aldric had. No reserves held back, no diversionary elements, no secondary objectives. A full-force assault on every section of wall simultaneously, designed to overwhelm through volume what tactics and strike teams had failed to achieve.

They hit us at dawn from three directions.

South. East. Northeast. Three companies advancing in parallel, close enough that our defenders couldn't concentrate on any single approach without exposing the others. The math was brutal and transparent: we had a hundred and forty wolves spread across three walls. They had three hundred and fifty coming at all of them at once.

The south wall took the heaviest impact. Two full companies — the best units Aldric had — hitting the section we'd rebuilt after yesterday's breach. The new mortar was still green. It held for forty minutes before the first crack appeared.

Kieran was on the south line. He'd positioned himself there before dawn — the sector where the assault would be hardest, because he knew Council assault doctrine and knew that Aldric would put his best units where the wall was newest. He called adjustments before the Council formations finished forming — shifting defenders, rotating tired fighters out, anticipating each wave's approach angle because he'd designed the playbook they were running.

Sera held the east with her thirty-seven. They fought like more than that. Whatever Sera lacked in numbers she made up in the specific ferocity of wolves who'd chosen to be here and were defending that choice. Her fighters moved in pairs — the tight, instinctive coordination of wolves who'd survived together long enough that communication was unnecessary.

Torren was in the inner compound. Not on the wall — inside, commanding the civilian protection and the reserve force, the last line between the fighting and the people who couldn't fight. It was the hardest assignment I could give him. He was a wall fighter, a front-line wolf, a man whose instinct was to stand between the threat and everything behind him. Putting him inside meant asking him to listen to the wall being hit and not be on it. But someone had to hold the center, and Torren was the only person I trusted to make the decisions that the center might require.

I was on the south wall. At the front. Where the wall was cracking and the fighters were bleeding and the first of Aldric's wolves were starting to come through the gaps.

The south wall breached at 0720.

Not a clean break — a progressive failure, the mortar splitting in stages, stones separating, the gap widening from a crack to a fissure to an opening wide enough for wolves to push through. Council soldiers poured in. Our fighters fell back to the secondary line. The fighting moved from the wall to the courtyard — close quarters, chaotic, the kind of combat where formations dissolve and everything becomes individual.

I fought in wolf form. The gray wolf was faster in tight spaces, better in the rubble of a broken wall where footing mattered more than reach. I took a hit at the breach — a Council wolf caught my left side, the same rib that had cracked during the rogue attack, and I felt it go again. Not a crack this time. A break. The pain registered as a white flash and then settled into something hot and constant that I shelved the way I'd shelved every injury since the day I started building this territory.

Kieran's voice from the south line — directing fighters, calling positions, the steady command presence that held the defense together while the wall fell apart around it. He was fighting and commanding simultaneously, the dual function of an Alpha who'd spent eight years doing both.

We held. Not the wall — the wall was gone. But the line behind it. The secondary positions, the fallback points, the defensive depth that Torren had built into the compound design because he'd always planned for the day the walls wouldn't be enough.