(Rhea POV)

Seventeen days later, with two days left before the main army arrived, the compound was running on preparation and exhaustion.

Sera's voice carried across the yard from dawn until dark. Drills, formations, wall assignments. She'd divided her three hundred wolves into four groups: wall defense, ground response, reserve, and what she called the mobile unit. Forty wolves who could shift and move fast, covering whatever section needed reinforcement.

"Again," she shouted. "Tighter. If I can fit my arm between you, I can fit a wolf between you, and a wolf between you is a wolf behind you."

The fighters ran the drill again. They'd been running it for three days. They were good. Disciplined. Motivated in the way that wolves who chose their fight are motivated. But three hundred against three thousand is three hundred against three thousand, and no amount of drill changes arithmetic.

Maren was on the south wall, directing a crew that was reinforcing the gate hinges with iron brackets. She'd designed a secondary barrier behind the main gate, a timber-and-stone structure that could absorb an impact if the gate went down. She worked with her one arm and her voice, pointing, correcting, measuring distances by eye with an accuracy that made the wolves holding the measuring rope feel unnecessary.

Torren had moved the medical supplies to a secondary location inside the compound. An interior room with thick walls and a heavy door. If the outer walls were breached, Isla would need somewhere to work. He'd also stockpiled water, food for three days, and bandages in quantities that told me he was planning for what happened if the walls didn't hold.

I spent the day moving between them. Checking progress, answering questions, making decisions about things that shouldn't have needed deciding but did because we were preparing for a war with seventeen days' notice and half the resources we needed.

By evening, the compound was as ready as it could be. The walls were reinforced. The fighters were drilled. The supplies were positioned. Everything that could be prepared had been prepared.

Everything except the part that mattered most: whether the wolves on the other side of those walls would choose to fight.

Night.

Lily was asleep in her bed. The wooden wolf, the bird, and the bear lined up on the shelf above her pillow. Her breathing was even. Her face was smooth. Whatever she could feel from the bond network, it wasn't reaching her in sleep. Small mercy.

I closed her door and went to our room.

Kieran was at the window. Not looking at anything. Standing in the dark with the kind of stillness that meant he was somewhere inside his own head, walking through scenarios, mapping probabilities, doing the work that former military commanders do the night before everything they've planned meets everything they can't control.

I sat on the bed. The springs complained. The sound was ordinary, domestic. Ridiculous, given what was coming.

"How bad is it?" I asked.

He turned from the window. Came and sat beside me. Close. Our shoulders touching. The same position from the birthday, from the morning routine, from every moment when proximity was the only language that fit.

"The advance force will test our response. Five hundred wolves, probably positioned on the northern ridge. If they don't find weakness, they'll wait for the main body. If they do..." He let the sentence trail off. He didn't need to finish.

"If this doesn't work," I said.

"It will work."

"If it doesn't."

He was quiet. The quiet that filled the space between us was not silence. It was the weight of two years. The siege. The fire on the south wall. The embargo. The south gate and the wolf that sat down. Every moment we'd stood together and watched the world try to take what we'd built.