Chapter Four: Marlowe Territory

"You're not answering me."

Sloane sat rigid in the back seat, arms crossed tight over her chest, watching streetlights blur past the window faster than felt safe. Griffin drove while Cassian sat beside her, close enough that she could feel tension radiating off him in waves. Dax had taken the front passenger seat, twisted around to keep glancing back at her like he expected her to bolt from a moving car.

"We're answering what we can," Cassian said carefully. "Some of it isn't ours to explain yet."

"That's not an answer, that's a dodge."

"Werewolves," Griffin said flatly, eyes fixed on the road. "That's the short version. We're werewolves. You reacted the way you did because of something in your blood, something tied to us specifically. That's as much as makes sense to say right now."

Sloane laughed, short and disbelieving, then stopped when nobody else laughed with her.

"You're serious."

"Dead serious," Dax said, and something in his voice told her he wasn't exaggerating for effect.

She turned to stare out the window again, jaw tight, trying to fit the word werewolf into a day that already included a mark that glowed and a man with inhuman strength dragging her into an alley. None of it made sense. All of it was somehow, impossibly, starting to.

"The man who grabbed me," she said quietly. "He wasn't one of you."

"No," Griffin said, and his hands tightened on the wheel. "He wasn't."

"Then who."

Nobody answered that one. The silence stretched long enough that she stopped expecting a response, and instead watched the city thin out around them, buildings giving way to trees, streetlights giving way to darkness broken only by the car's headlights cutting through it.

They passed through a gate she almost missed, tall and half hidden by overgrown trees, and the moment they crossed it something in the air changed. She couldn't explain how she knew. She just felt it, a pressure behind her eyes, a hum under her skin where the mark sat quiet against her collarbone.

The house that came into view wasn't a house. It was closer to a compound, low sprawling buildings connected by stone paths, lit by lanterns rather than streetlights, tucked so far into the trees she doubted a map would ever find it. People stood scattered outside, more than she expected this late, and every single one of them turned to watch the car pull in.

Sloane's stomach dropped.

They weren't curious looks. They were sharp, assessing, several openly hostile. A woman near the entrance crossed her arms and muttered something to the man beside her that made his expression darken further. A younger man near the tree line didn't bother hiding his glare at all, eyes flicking to Sloane the second she stepped out of the car like she'd personally wronged him.

"Ignore them," Dax muttered, appearing at her side faster than she'd registered him moving. "They don't know anything yet. They're just reacting to a stranger on pack land."

"They're reacting to me like I'm a threat."

"You might as well be, to them," Cassian said, not unkindly, just honest in a way that made her skin crawl. "An unknown human on Marlowe territory isn't exactly welcome, mark or no mark."

She wrapped her arms tighter around herself, following the brothers up the stone path while dozens of eyes tracked her every step. 

Somewhere behind her she heard low voices, not quite quiet enough, words like outsider and risk and does Griffin know what he's doing drifting through the cold night air. She kept her chin up. She refused to let them see how badly her hands were shaking.

Inside, the house was warmer, quieter, thick wood and low lighting that should have felt comforting and instead felt like being swallowed. Griffin led her to a room near the back and told her to wait, that they needed a few minutes, and someone would bring her something to eat.

She didn't sit.

Instead she crept toward the half open door once his footsteps faded, some old instinct refusing to just wait quietly for people to decide what she was allowed to know. Voices drifted from down the hall, low, urgent, unmistakably Griffin and Cassian.

"She can't know yet," Griffin was saying, voice tight with something close to desperation. "Not until we understand it ourselves."

"She deserves to know what she's walked into."

"She deserves time. If she finds out about the curse before she trusts us even a little, she'll run, and next time we might not reach her in time."

The word hit Sloane like a physical thing, curse, hanging in the air long after Griffin said it, and her whole body went cold in a way that had nothing to do with the night outside. 

She pressed herself flatter against the wall, straining to hear more, heart hammering so loud she was terrified they'd hear it too.

"She already almost got taken tonight," Cassian said. "How long do you think we actually have."

Griffin didn't answer. Sloane stood frozen in the dark hallway, one word echoing louder than every question she'd asked all day.

Curse.