LOGINThe wolf sat on my porch steps with an unnatural patience. I stood on the other side of the door with my forehead resting against the wood, one hand still wrapped around the knob, and tried to make my breathing sound less like fear.
Outside, the porch light cast him in soft gold and shadow. Black fur. Broad chest. Massive shoulders. The old silver scarred place along his ribs visible when he shifted, pale against darkness. And those eyes. Blue, impossible and watching me with a still“She’s coming home,” Colton said. Avery Hart had spent thirty one years being warned away from Moonbrook, away from the woods, away from names like Holloway and Blake. She was driving west with a dog in her passenger seat and a wounded hunter in the back of her clinic truck. That was not a woman coming home. That was a woman running toward the thing she had been taught to fear because every other road had become worse. Colton stood over the map, fever pale and still bleeding beneath his bandage. Gideon remained across from him, rigid with a grief so old it looked like anger because maybe that was the only shape it remembered how to hold. Mara broke the silence first. “If either of you starts behaving like a dramatic wolf monument, I will sedate you both.” Gideon’s eyes cut to her. She lifted one syringe from the tray without blinking. He looked away first. Bailey whispered, “I have never loved
For one breath, every wolf in Mara’s office seemed to lock onto Colton’s voice like a compass finding north. The panic did not vanish, I could still smell it beneath antiseptic and old wood and the bitter tinctures Mara kept uncorked on her shelves. James moved first. “Ben, Emily, Sophia,” he said into the radio, already striding toward the hall. “Ravensmere extraction." My stomach tightened. Avery’s scream still rang inside my skull. Glass breaking and an animal crying out. Her voice, sharp and furious, saying Moss, stay. Then nothing. The dead phone sat on Mara’s desk like a small black coffin. Colton stood in the middle of the room, one hand still curled around mine, his skin fever hot. He was too still, too quiet. The wolf behind his eyes had not retreated, it had only gone silent. Waiting. Gideon was worse. He looked carved out of old grief and violence, one hand white around the head of his ca
For a moment, the hallway seemed to narrow around the word. Veterinarian. She was not a hunter, an elder or hidden wolf in some fortified compound. She was a vet.My hand tightened around the folder until the papers bent. I looked down at the scan again. Avery Hart a veterinary surgeon at Ravensmere Wildlife and Domestic Care.My eyes snagged on the license number, the clinic address, the date of registration. The details were painfully ordinary. The kind of thing I would have glanced over without interest in another life.“She’s alive,” I said.My voice sounded too small. James’s jaw flexed. “We don’t know that.”Bailey flinched. Mara glanced at him sharply. James did not soften the words, but his eyes moved to mine with something like apology. “We know someone with the right trail existed recently. We know she used Evelyn Hart’s surname. We know she’s the right age range and profession. That’s all.”The right age range. I looke
“Then we find her first.” Colton’s words settled over the porch like frost. No one answered immediately. A woman who had spent her entire life as a secret, if she was still alive. A daughter born of wolf and hunter blood. Colton’s half sister, Gideon’s child and Grace’s lie. And now, apparently, the centre of an old debt that had woken with a vengence. The bracelet lay in its square of worn cloth, small enough to fit in my palm. Faded blue thread, frayed with age. One tarnished silver bead threaded at the centre. Colton’s gaze stayed fixed on it. “You kept it,” he said. Gideon’s face was turned toward the trees. “Yes.” “Why?” The old Alpha’s jaw tightened. “Because grief makes fools sentimental.” Grace had come back to the lodge doorway at some point. Of course she had. Guards, exhaustion, and co
“Your daughter lived.”The words did not echo, they should have. In a clearing ringed by wet pines and silent wolves, in a place where every breath seemed held beneath the low grey sky, words like that should have bounced off timber walls and stone paths and come back changed.Instead, they sank. Straight into Gideon Blake. The old Alpha did not move. His cane stayed planted in the earth. His shoulders remained squared. His cold blue eyes stayed fixed on Colton’s face.But something in him broke. I saw it before he hid it. A flicker, a fracture, a flash of such naked grief that my own breath caught as if I had stumbled upon something private and wounded in the woods. Then it was gone.“What did you say?” Gideon asked again.Colton’s jaw flexed. “You heard me.”Gideon took one step forward. The clearing reacted instantly. James moved from near the lodge doors, Sophia turned sharply and Ben stopped halfway down the path from the in
The howls went on long enough for my bones to learn them. They rolled through Grimfang land in waves, rising from different places in the trees until I could almost picture the pack by sound alone. North border, western slope and somewhere near the creek. Voice answering voice, grief and fury threaded together, the forest carrying it all like a warning.No one in the infirmary looked surprised by the noise. Evan lay unconscious on the exam bed, his skin damp with fever, one hand curled against his chest as if still holding the strip of my cardigan. Mara had pried it loose gently after he passed out. It sat now sealed in plastic on the steel counter, purple fabric smeared with dirt and blood, the silver nail beside it in a separate tin.My cardigan and my scent. I stared at it until Mara snapped her fingers in front of my face.“Nora.”I blinked. “Sorry.”“Don’t be sorry. Be present.”Colton sat on the second exam bed because Mara
Trap! For one suspended second, no one in my kitchen moved. Grace’s voice came through the phone small and steady, but there was something beneath it I had never heard from her before. Not fear exactly. Grace had always treated fear like an unwelcome guest she might offer tea to be
“I came because you left the porch light on.” For a moment, all I could do was stare at him. The kitchen was too warm. Too small and ordinary for what had just been laid bare between us. The kettle sat cooling on the stove. My mug of tea steamed weakly between my hands, untouched,
By the time Colton’s truck disappeared down the road, the lemon cake in my hand had gone warm. I stood on my porch far longer than necessary, staring at the place where he had been as if the gravel might offer commentary. The motion lights sat quiet under the eaves, harmless in daylight, but I fe
Colton held the second snare up in the porch light to show proof.The wire glinted pale, moonlight’s cruel twin, looped and ready to cinch around anything warm blooded and unlucky. My stomach rolled as if I could already feel it tightening.I opened the door only after I’d checked the lock twice, b







