Chapter 3

The trees started an hour before the border did.

I noticed it the way I noticed most things about a new contract — clinically, cataloguing details instead of feeling them. The highway narrowed to two lanes, then to something that wasn’t quite a highway at all, pressed in on both sides by pine dense enough to swallow the light a full hour before actual sunset. My driver, a quiet pack-contracted human who didn’t offer conversation and didn’t seem to expect any from me, slowed twice for checkpoints that weren’t marked on any map I’d have found on my own.

By the second checkpoint, I understood why Marcus’s broker f*e for this one had been unusually specific about ground transport. Ashwood territory didn’t advertise itself. You had to already know where you were going, or you weren’t getting in.

I’d done six residencies before this one. I knew the particular quiet that settled over a car as it crossed into pack land — the shift from human road noise to something older and more watchful, the sense of being catalogued by senses you couldn’t see. Ashwood’s version of that quiet had a harder edge to it than most. Even the birds seemed to be listening for something.

The compound itself came into view the way most pack seats did, all at once after nothing — a break in the treeline, and then a sprawl of timber and stone that looked less like a mansion and more like a fortress that had learned, over generations, to also be a home. Old-growth logs, a wall that wasn’t decorative, watchtowers I clocked immediately as functional rather than aesthetic. Whoever had built this place had built it to survive something, and whoever maintained it now was still expecting to need that.

I straightened my jacket before I got out of the car. Habit, mostly. First impressions mattered less to me than they used to, but they still mattered.

The man waiting at the gate was tall in the specific, coiled way that read as dangerous even standing still — not broad for show, but built like someone who used every inch of himself for a reason. He had the kind of face that gave away exactly as much as he wanted it to, which right now was not very much at all.

“Ms. Vance.” Not a question. He already knew who I was, the way pack Betas usually did — they’d have had my file before my car crossed the first checkpoint. “Gideon. I run point for Alpha Ashwood on most matters that aren’t strictly pack law.”

“Which makes this one of those matters.”

Something that might have been the ghost of amusement crossed his face and left just as fast. “It makes this one of those matters, yes.”

He didn’t offer his hand, and I didn’t expect him to. Pack etiquette around Conduits ran the gamut from reverent to wary depending on how superstitious the territory was, and I could already tell Gideon fell somewhere in the measured middle — professionally respectful, personally unreadable, saving his real opinion for whenever he decided I’d earned hearing it.

“I’ll walk you in,” he said. “The Alpha’s finishing a border briefing. Selene asked to receive you first, if that’s acceptable.”

“That’s fine.” It was more than fine. I’d take the fiancée before the client any day of the week — softer landing, generally, and useful information before I had to sit across from the man actually signing the check.

We walked the compound’s main path together, and I let myself do what I always did on a first walk-through: read the place the way I’d read a client’s face. The training yard off to the left, currently occupied by a handful of warriors running drills with an intensity that had nothing performative about it. A row of dwellings that looked recently reinforced, fresh timber against older, weathered wood. Pack members who noticed me — and all of them noticed me, there was no version of walking into unfamiliar pack land unnoticed — with expressions that ranged from polite curiosity to something colder.

One woman, mid-thirties, sharp-eyed, watched me the entire length of the courtyard without bothering to disguise it. I held her gaze for exactly as long as it took to make clear I wasn’t going to look away first, then let it go. Not worth the energy on day one.

“They’ll settle,” Gideon said, without me having asked. “Give it time.”

“I don’t need them to settle. I need them to sign off on paperwork and stay out of my way for the duration.”

“That’s not usually how pack land works, in my experience.”

“No,” I agreed. “It usually isn’t.”

He didn’t push further, and I appreciated that more than I let on. I’d had Betas over the years who wanted to manage me, smooth me over for pack consumption like I was a problem to be pre-solved before I ever got in a room with their Alpha. Gideon walked me through the compound like I was exactly what my contract said I was — a professional, here to do a job, deserving of exactly as much handling as that required and not one ounce more.

“Can I ask you something,” I said, mostly to fill the last stretch of the walk, “that isn’t in the contract?”

“You can ask.”

“How bad is the border situation, actually? Not the broker version.”

Gideon’s stride didn’t change, but something in his face did — a fractional tightening, there and gone. “Bad enough that this contract matters more than most people outside this compound understand. Bad enough that I’d think carefully, if I were you, about how deep you want to plant yourself here before you’re sure you’re staying for the whole nine months.”

“I don’t plant myself anywhere I’m not contracted to be.”

“Good,” he said, and there was something almost like approval in it. “Keep it that way. It’ll be easier on everyone.”

I filed that away — not a threat, exactly, more like a warning offered in good faith, the kind you gave someone you didn’t want to see get hurt by circumstances that weren’t their fault. I appreciated the honesty even as I noted, privately, that Gideon clearly expected this contract to test that particular resolve of mine harder than my last twelve combined.

He was, it would turn out, not wrong. I just didn’t know that yet.

We reached the main house’s entrance — heavier doors than the outbuildings, iron banding worked into old wood, the kind of craftsmanship that said this door has held against things rather than this door looks nice. Gideon paused with his hand on the handle.

“Selene’s waiting in the east sitting room. She asked that I mention — she knows this isn’t an easy position for you to walk into either. She wanted you to hear that before anything else.”

That caught me off guard more than anything since the checkpoint had. In six residencies, no intended mate had ever once sent a message ahead softening the ground for me. Usually I got frost, or performative warmth so brittle it cracked by the second meeting, or nothing at all — a woman who couldn’t quite look at me directly for the first several weeks.

“That’s unusual,” I said carefully.

“She’s an unusual woman.” Gideon opened the door. “You’ll see.”

I stepped through into the warm, wood-smoke air of the Ashwood pack house, and told myself, the way I told myself at the start of every new contract, that I already knew exactly how this one was going to go.

I was wrong about that too.