Chapter Seven — The Hunter

The wolf did not back down.

Tyra pressed her palm flat against the cold glass and watched from her window as it held its ground in the middle of the dark street below. Every hair on its body raised. That low growl rolling out of it like thunder that had not broken yet.

The man at the mouth of the alley had not moved.

He was tall. Lean in the way that meant nothing soft had survived long enough to stay. Dark clothes that sat on him like a second skin. A face she could not fully make out from two floors up but a stillness about him that unsettled her. Troy had a stillness too but Troy's felt like control. This felt like someone who had simply run out of things that surprised him.

"I am not here for the wolf," he said again. His voice was even. Almost friendly. Like he was commenting on the weather. "I am here for the girl."

The wolf growled louder.

The man tilted his head and looked directly up at her window.

Tyra stepped back from the glass.

She grabbed her coat off the chair, pulled it on over her nightclothes and looked around her small room. One door. One window. One way out and a stranger standing at the bottom of it.

She pressed her back against the wall and listened.

The growling stopped.

Silence.

Then footsteps. Slow. Moving away down Marren Lane. Getting quieter. Then nothing at all.

She waited three full minutes before she moved.

She crept to the window and looked down.

The street was empty.

The wolf was gone too.

She stood there staring at the empty alley and told herself that was a good thing. He left. Everything was fine.

She did not sleep again that night.

She spotted him the next morning before he spotted her.

He was sitting outside the bread house across from Piet's stall with a cup in front of him, watching the market crowd with that same easy stillness from the night before. In daylight he looked ordinary enough. Dark hair cut close. Sharp features. A thin scar running along his jaw that looked old and put there on purpose.

Then his eyes found her.

Grey. Pale and sharp and missing nothing.

She looked away and kept walking and felt those grey eyes follow her all the way to her stall.

She was arranging her roses with hands that were not entirely steady when Troy appeared beside her.

"Do not react," he said quietly.

"He is here," she said without looking up.

"I know."

"He came to my window last night." She kept her voice low and her hands moving. "Stood in the street below. Said he was not there for the wolf." She paused. "Said he was there for me."

Troy said nothing for a moment.

"Did he come inside," he said.

"No. The wolf was there. It held its ground until he left." She glanced at Troy carefully. "Do you know him."

A pause. Too long to mean nothing.

"His name is Kael," Troy said. Flat and quiet. "He is a hunter. The best one there is. He does not ask questions. He does not negotiate."

"What does he want with me," she said.

Troy looked at the market crowd. His gold eyes moving carefully.

"Troy." She turned to face him. "What does he want with me."

He looked at her. Those gold eyes finding hers and holding them with something heavy moving underneath.

"You healed in the market," he said carefully. "Word travels fast to people who look for exactly that."

"What kind of people look for that."

"The kind you do not want finding you," he said.

She stared at him. "That is not an answer."

"It is the only one I have right now."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true." He shifted slightly, putting himself between her and where Kael was sitting without making it obvious. "Keep selling your flowers. Act like nothing is wrong. Do not look at him."

"Act like nothing is wrong," she repeated. "A man came to my window in the middle of the night and you want me to act like nothing is wrong."

"Yes," he said simply.

She turned back to her roses.

"You are the most infuriating person I have ever met," she said under her breath.

"You have said that before," he said.

"It keeps being true," she said back.

Something shifted in his expression. Brief and warm and gone before she could hold it.

She picked up her trimming knife and got back to work.

Across the market Kael watched the girl with the brown curly hair pick up her knife and go back to cutting stems like a man had not stood outside her window the night before.

He picked up his cup.

He had hunted a lot of targets. Most of them ran the moment they felt watched. Most of them fell apart under the weight of knowing something was coming for them.

This one squared her shoulders and cut flower stems.

He looked at the man standing beside her stall.

Troy.

Standing at a flower stall in the middle of a human market like a wolf who had forgotten what he was.

Kael set his cup down slowly.

He pulled out his small notebook. Opened it to a fresh page. Wrote two words in clean careful letters.

Compromised. Both.

He closed the notebook.

Looked at the girl one more time.

She was laughing at something the old bread seller had said, her whole face open and warm, her brown curls catching the morning light.

She had no idea.

That was always the hardest part of this job.

He stood up, buttoned his coat, and walked away into the crowd without finishing his tea.

He had seen everything he needed to see.