(Rhea POV, then Aldric POV — third person)

Kieran left through the last tunnel — the deep western passage I'd dug in year five, the one that exited two miles past the ridge and three miles south of the Council supply route. It was the longest tunnel in the system, narrow in places, unstable in others. I'd only used it twice.

Vera didn't know about it. She'd left the valley before I built it. That was the margin we were betting on.

Ten wolves went with him. Sera's fastest scouts, two of Torren's fighters, and Kael — the seventeen-year-old who ran perimeter checks and overheard things and had turned out to be one of the best terrain navigators in the territory. They moved light: blades, no packs, the stripped-down configuration of a team that needed to be fast more than it needed to be supplied.

They left at 1300. The supply corridor window opened at 1400. One hour to cover two miles of tunnel and a mile of open ground. Tight. Possible. The kind of timing that requires everything to work and nothing to go wrong.

I went back to the south line and waited.

The stalemate held through the afternoon. Council's assault force was still at the breach — not advancing, not retreating, locked in the grinding equilibrium of two sides that had fought each other to exhaustion. I rotated fighters on thirty-minute shifts. Isla's medical team was running out of bandages and using torn clothing instead.

At 1530, the first sign came. Not from the west — from the east.

Three wolves appeared at the eastern tree line. Not Council. Not from Sera's territory. Three unfamiliar wolves, approaching the wall from the forest with the cautious body language of animals who'd been traveling and had arrived at something they'd come a long way to find.

Sera identified them before they reached the wall. "Rogues," she said. "Independent. I recognize the lead female — she runs a group in the northern valleys."

They came in through the east gate. Three wolves. Then, an hour later, five more from the south. Then four from the northeast, arriving in the gap between Council patrols.

Rogues. Independents. Exiles. Wolves who lived outside the pack system the way Ashenmoor's people did — scattered, small, surviving on the margins of a world that had no place for them. They'd heard about the siege. A woman's territory, surrounded by four hundred Council wolves for three weeks, still standing. An Alpha King who'd thrown down his insignia and walked across a battlefield. The kind of story that travels through the rogue underground the way water travels through cracks — slowly, reliably, reaching places no one expected it to reach.

They came in ones and twos and small groups, filtering through the gaps in a siege perimeter that was stretched thin by the assault. By 1600, twelve new wolves were inside the walls. By 1700, twenty-three. Not an army. Not even a significant tactical addition. But each one was a signal — a wolf who had looked at the situation and decided that what was happening inside these walls was worth standing next to.

At 1800, the Council assault force at the south breach began to pull back. Not a full retreat — a disengagement, the orderly withdrawal of units that had received new orders. They moved in stages, rear elements first, then the forward positions, leaving the breach empty and the secondary line unmanned.

Something had changed.

Kieran came back through the western tunnel at 1930. Ten wolves, all accounted for. He had blood on his hands and a cut across his forearm that he was ignoring the way I was ignoring the rib.

"Done," he said. "The supply corridor is blocked. Fallen timber across the choke point, reinforced with stone. They'll need three days to clear it or six miles to go around it."

Three days. Without supplies, Aldric's three hundred and fifty wolves would start feeling the pressure within twenty-four hours. Food. Medical. Ammunition. The logistics that keep a siege army functioning would begin to fail, and an army without logistics was a crowd with weapons.

"He'll have to choose," Kieran said. "Commit to a fight he can't sustain, or pull back and regroup."

"Which one?"