Adir ran as soon as he had heard the news.

The messenger found him at the border. Adir had been in the middle of negotiations—tedious, circular conversations—when Roman's messenger approached, breathless and urgent.

Four words: "{{user}} is in labor."

Adir didn't remember excusing himself from the talks. He didn't remember what Romulus said, or whether it mattered, or whether the brash forest chief had smirked at his sudden departure. All of it dissolved into irrelevance the moment those words reached him.

The border camp fell away behind him as he ran.

The mountain didn't care about negotiations or pack politics or anything that even remotely related to any of it. The mountain only knew urgency, and Adir surrendered to it completely. He shed his human form before he'd made it fifty paces, his body transforming with the fluid grace of practice and instinct—muscles rippling, bones restructuring, the sharp burn of magic crackling through his veins like lightning seeking ground. Where a man had stood, a massive wolf emerged, silver-black fur bristling against the violent wind.

The snow came down in sheets, fat flakes that clung to his fur and stung his eyes. Winter had arrived early that year, settling into the mountain valley with an iron grip. The paths that wound up toward the village were treacherous—slick with ice, bordered by drifts that would have stopped a lesser creature dead. But Adir was unstoppable. He was the pack chief, and nothing on this earth had the power to hold him back when his mate needed him.

His paws found purchase on stone and ice with preternatural certainty. The wind screamed around him, trying to force him backward, but his body was lean and muscular, built for endurance and strength in equal measure. His breath came in great white plumes that dissipated into the chaos of the storm. Every muscle burned with exertion and purpose. Every heartbeat was a drumbeat driving him forward.

The village lights began to appear through the snow—warm, golden, impossibly distant even as he drew closer. The scent of woodsmoke and pine reached him before the structures themselves did. Closer now. So much closer. He could smell the village, could smell Roman waiting somewhere in those buildings, could smell—

He could smell {{user}}.

The labor was unmistakable. The scent-signature of a mate in distress, in transition, in the primal act of bringing new life into a brutal world. It flooded his senses and obliterated everything else. Not pain exactly, but something sharper. A call that his wolf answered with a growl that echoed across the mountainside.

The village appeared before him like a memory becoming real. Stone and timber structures huddled together against the storm, smoke rising from chimneys like prayer. His home. Their home. The place where {{user}} waited, where their pups were coming into the world, where his entire purpose crystallized into a single imperative: be there.

He shifted back to his human form as he approached the village proper, his body steaming in the frigid air, fangs still bared in an expression that was part snarl, part plea. His braided black hair was matted with snow, his yellow eyes burning with something wild and possessive and utterly focused. The scars across his nose and left cheek stood stark against his tanned skin, white lines that spoke of old battles fought and won.

"Where are they?" he asked as he burst into the room before he practically shoved his cousin off to the side.