LOGINThat night, I latched the garage window so hard my fingers hurt. Once, twice. Checking it the way you check a door after a nightmare, the way you check your own skin for bruises, you swear you can still feel. The little metal catch clicked into place with a sharp finality, and I stood there staring at it as if the sound could rewrite what had happened.
A rational person would’ve told herself: A wounded animal found its way out. You helped. It left. End of story.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
For one suspended second, all I could see was purple. Not the blood. Not the silver flashing near the young man’s shoulder. Not the way Colton’s face had gone empty with rage or how Mara was already moving with her medical bag banging against her hip. Purple.A torn strip of my cardigan, clenched in a shaking hand. I had worn it two mornings ago while drinking tea on my porch, barefoot despite the cold, pretending my world had not begun to fill with teeth and secrets. I had hung it over the back of the chair when the kettle whistled.And someone had taken it. Someone had stood close enough to my door to steal something that smelled like me.The clearing tipped sideways. Grace’s hand found my elbow. “Breathe, Nora Jane.” “I am.” “No, you’re not.”A sound left the injured young man, low and broken, and whatever panic had been dragging me under snapped clean in two.He was bleeding. Mara reached him as Ben and E
“Hello, Father.”Two words should not have been able to chill an entire clearing. But they did.The pack went quiet in a way that was different from fear. Older than fear. Habit, or maybe memory. The kind of silence a house kept after too many storms had rattled its windows.Gideon Blake stood at the edge of the path with one hand wrapped around the head of his cane, looking at his son as though Colton were just a disobedent pup.Colton stood in front of me. A wall made of flesh, bone, and warning.Gideon’s cold blue eyes flicked from him to me again. “You look like hell.”Colton’s voice stayed flat. “You came all this way to compliment me?”A few people in the clearing looked down very quickly. Gideon’s mouth moved, almost a smile and not nearly warm enough to be one. “I came because word travels fast when the Alpha brings a human woman into protected land after hunters mark the border.”“She has a name,” Colto
The next morning tasted like normality, trying too hard. Sunlight slid across my lilac wall as if it had every right to be cheerful, as if I hadn’t spent the night with my nerves stretched thin as thread. Listening for the slightest sound from the garage, replaying a pair of deep blue eyes that did
The man on my doorstep didn’t look like someone who brought injured animals to strangers. He looked like the kind of man people stepped out of the way for without realising they were doing it. Tall. So tall the garage doorway seemed to narrow around him. Broad shoulders under
I didn’t mean to fall asleep. I told myself I was only resting my eyes, only letting the last of the adrenaline drain out of my veins, only giving my shaking hands a chance to remember they belonged to me. I sat on an overturned storage crate near the workbench, the garage lamp turned low, and list
The night met me at the bottom of the porch steps. Cold air slid into my lungs, crisp with pine and wet moss, and I forced myself to breathe slowly, one inhale for courage, one exhale for control. My flashlight beam cut a pale tunnel through the dark, catching the shine of dew on grass and the occa







