His hand closed around her wrist to stop her falling, and for one suspended heartbeat neither of them breathed, because the moment his skin touched hers something ancient and unmistakable roared awake between them, exactly as it had on a dance floor five years before.
That was hours later. First, there was the warning.
Nora's letter, the only correspondence Wren still permitted herself, had arrived that morning with three words underlined twice. They are coming. Wren had read it standing at her stall with both children playing at her feet, and felt Grey Harbour's ordinary morning noise, gulls and rope and the shouted business of the docks, recede into something distant and unimportant, exactly as another crowded room had once receded around her.
"We are leaving tonight," she told Finn and Briar that afternoon, packing their few belongings with hands that would not quite stop shaking. "Quietly, and quickly, and you are both going to be very brave for me."
"You always say that." Briar, five now and no less stubborn than she had been at one, crossed her arms in a gesture so precisely her father's that Wren's chest ached to look at it. "When do we stop running?"
"When it is safe," Wren said, the old worn answer, and hated, not for the first time, how thin it had become.
They almost made it to the evening ferry. They were three streets from the docks, moving fast through the gathering dusk, when the first of Sable's men stepped out from between two shuttered stalls with the particular unhurried confidence of a hunter who believed the prey was already cornered.
Wren did not think. She shoved both children behind a stack of fishing crates, put her own body between them and the stranger, and was still calculating, with cold and desperate speed, exactly how far she could get before he closed the distance, when a second shadow fell across the alley from the opposite direction, tall and broad and moving with a stillness that made the hunter's confidence falter for the first time.
"I would reconsider," said a voice Wren had not heard in five years and would have known anywhere, in any darkness, "whatever it is you believe you are here to do."
Sable's man did not stay to argue. Something in the newcomer's stance, some quality of restrained violence held on a very short leash, sent him bolting back into the alley's shadows before Wren had fully processed who stood between her and the danger.
She processed it the instant he turned.
Kade Thornwood, five years older, harder around the jaw and heavier with a weariness she had never once seen on him at that masquerade, looked at her across the narrow street, and for a moment his expression held nothing but the ordinary, distracted focus of a man who had just intervened in what he assumed was a stranger's misfortune.
Then his gaze caught, fully, on her face, and something in him simply stopped.
"You," he said, and the word came out of him like the last piece falling into a puzzle he had spent five years assembling by touch alone. "It is you."
Run, every instinct Wren had built over five careful years screamed at once. Take the children and run before he understands what standing three feet from you means.
She did not run. She could not. Whatever thread had connected them since that dance floor pulled taut between them now, undeniable, and beneath her fear something long-starved and helpless rose to answer it, the same recognition, the same terrible rightness, exactly as it had been the first time.
"Wren," she said, because there was no longer any use pretending otherwise. "My name is Wren."
His hand closed around her wrist then, cold as it had been that first night, steadying her when her knees threatened to give beneath the weight of five years finally, unbearably meeting themselves in the middle of a fish market. For one suspended heartbeat neither of them breathed.
Then Briar, small and furious and entirely unable to stay hidden behind fishing crates a moment longer, stepped out with her chin raised in exact, unconscious mimicry of the man standing in front of her, and said, in the clear, carrying voice of a child who had never once been taught to lie about herself, "Are you the one Mama says we can't talk about?"
Kade went very still. His gaze dropped from Briar's face to Finn's, half hidden still behind the crates, and Wren watched five years of careful hiding collapse in the space of a single held breath as recognition, raw and staggering, moved across every line of his face.
"They are." He did not phrase it as a question. His hand had not left Wren's wrist, and his voice, when it came again, had roughened into something she had never heard from him before, not even in the low golden hours after the masquerade. "They are mine."
"Kade." Wren's own voice cracked around his name, four years of exhaustion and terror and a grief she had never allowed herself to fully feel breaking loose all at once. "There is no time for this conversation. There are men behind us tonight who mean to kill them for exactly what you just said out loud."
As though summoned by the words themselves, a horn sounded from the direction of the docks, sharp and deliberate, and Wren turned in time to see a full column of Sable's soldiers moving in formation down the harbour road, torches lit despite the lingering daylight, moving with the unmistakable purpose of men who had finally cornered what they had been sent to find.
Kade's expression shifted in an instant from shock to something harder, older, the look of a man who had spent five years failing to protect the only thing he had ever wanted and had just been given, by cruel coincidence, one final chance not to fail again.
"Take my hand," he said, already pulling Wren and both children toward the narrow alley the first soldier had fled through moments before, "and do not let go, whatever happens next. I did not spend five years searching every port in this kingdom to lose you again in the space of one bad evening."
Behind them, the horn sounded a second time, closer now, and somewhere in the gathering dark Wren heard Sable's soldiers begin to shout the same words she had heard once before, years and a lifetime ago, in a burning town by a frozen millstream.
Find the Alpha's heirs. Bring them alive, if it can be managed. Bring them regardless, if it cannot.