Where The Ice Gives Way Chapter 113

**Charlotte**

Finally, the first howl tears out of me and rolls through the diner. I feel it leave my chest, feel Shanti carrying it with all that deep, impossible calm, and for one breathless second, it works. A few of the rogues drop where they stand. I feel it—the pull loosening. The rage slipping. Their humans rising. Hope hits me so fast it almost hurts. Maybe we won’t all die here today. Then everything turns. The rogues still trapped inside themselves snap toward me at once, fury tearing through them so violently that it almost burns. It is sudden, ugly, and immediate. Rage. Pure and mindless and directed straight at me, their beasts clawing and thrashing to keep hold of what I am trying to take back.

One peels away from my father outside, another tears free of the patrol wolves at the front. Another twists out from under Alpha Gareth the second he reaches the diner with the rest of the pack behind him, all of them surging into the lot with snarls and shouted orders and boots and paws pounding over broken glass. Still, the rogues come for me—every last one of them. Shanti rises higher inside me.

Blake steps forward before I can move, and the sight of him steals the breath from my lungs for one hard second. He plants himself in front of me, broad and solid and furious, every line of him set toward the fight with an intensity that could shake the whole room around us. Glass crunches under his shoes, and blood streaks his knuckles. His chest rises and falls in hard, heavy pulls, and the bond between us burns bright and full and alive enough that I can feel him all the way through me. He glances back over his shoulder quickly. “You’ve got this, girls,” he says, his voice low and rough and certain. Then he turns back toward the charging rogues and becomes exactly what the book said he was—a shield.

He meets the first rogue head-on, catching him in the middle and driving him backward hard enough to slam both of them into the broken frame where the front window used to be. Another comes from the side, and Blake turns, gets one hand to his throat, and throws him into the counter so violently that crockery explodes across the floor. He does not stop moving. He does not hesitate. Every strike is clean. Every shove lands with bone-deep force. Every time one of them tries to break left or right to get around him, he is already there. Holding the line, making the space.

Terry is still at the front with two patrol wolves, and outside, I can hear Alpha Gareth shouting over the chaos. At the same time, my father fires again somewhere near the parking lot, but inside the diner, inside this one broken room, everything narrows to Blake and the path he is carving between me and the rogues, trying to tear their way through him. Shanti presses into me, and we bear down.

The chaos around us keeps moving around us, but I let it all fall away. I cannot concentrate on that while doing this, too. I reach inward, past the wreck of the diner. Past the fear. Past the violence still scraping at the edges of the room. I go straight to the thread inside me that ties me to Blake and Lex. To the place they showed me in that field. Where the grass bent under the wind, and our wolves lay together breathing in the same rhythm. The place where peace was not weakness, where stillness held weight, where I did not have to reach for safety because it already existed. I grab hold of it. Shanti does too.

The bond answers immediately, bright and full and warm enough to hurt. I feel Blake through it, not the violence of what he is doing, but the centre of him. The certainty. The force. The way he stands between me and ruin because that is what he was made to do. Lex is there too, fierce and steady, the storm to Shanti’s calm, the line that holds while we gather what we need. I hold onto all of it. Then I push it outward.

The second howl tears out of me harder than the first. There is nothing soft about it. It rips through my chest and bursts out of me with so much force that the remaining windows explode. Glass erupts inward and outward all at once, shattering into a storm of glittering pieces that rain across the floor, the parking lot, the counters, the broken tables, everything. The sound of it is swallowed immediately by the howl itself, by the power rolling through the diner and out into the night, stretching wider than walls, wider than fear, wider than the violence that had us all locked inside it. It hits everything. The rogues stop. The wolves stop. My father freezes in the parking lot with his gun half lifted. Alpha Gareth holds still at the front entrance, his hand still wrapped in the scruff of a rogue that had been trying to force its way inside. Terry goes rigid beside the broken window, chest heaving. Even Blake stills.

He is still between them and me, shoulders squared, body braced for the next impact, but the howl catches him too, holding everything in place for one immense, impossible second. The diner goes silent. The rogues stand where they are, every one of them held fast, their eyes wide, their bodies shaking as the rage inside them buckles under the force of what Shanti and I have thrown into the room. One by one, I watch the fight leave them. Shoulders drop, hands unclench, mouths close over bared teeth, and heads bow. Some fall where they stand, to their knees, to their hands, to the broken tiles, breathing hard and staring at nothing as if the world has been ripped out from under them.

I stand in the centre of the wreckage, my chest burning, my throat raw, my whole body trembling under the force of what just came through me. I stare at the diner full of wolves and men and rogues and pack, every one of them locked in that impossible stillness. The violence is gone. The chaos is gone. Everything has stopped. And in the centre of it all, Blake turns to look at me.