Chapter 3

Selene POV

"I need you to step back," I said.

Colt Ashford did not step back. He stood at the foot of my porch steps and watched me with those storm grey eyes and the mate bond pulled between us like a current in deep water, strong and patient and completely indifferent to the fact that I had been rejected less than twelve hours ago.

"I understand this is overwhelming," he said.

"Do you." It was not a question.

"I felt it the same moment you did."

"Then you understand why I need you to step back."

He took one step back. Just one. Enough to show me he was listening without pretending the distance was going to change anything.

I sat down on the porch step because my legs were not entirely reliable and I pressed both hands flat on my knees and I breathed. The bond was nothing like what I had felt with Damien in the beginning. With Damien it had been immediate and consuming, the kind of thing that swallowed you whole before you had time to think. This was different. This was quieter and deeper, like the difference between a flash flood and a river that had been running for a thousand years.

I did not trust it.

"I was rejected last night," I said. I do not know why I told him that. Maybe because I wanted to watch him flinch.

He did not flinch. "I know."

I looked up sharply. "How?"

"Broken bonds leave a mark. Your wolf is carrying it." He paused. "I am sorry that happened to you."

"I do not need your sympathy."

"I know that too."

I studied him. Up close in the morning light he was even more striking than the first impression had suggested, and I resented that slightly. He had a scar that ran from his left jaw down to his collar, old and silvery, and his hands were the hands of someone who worked hard and often.

"How old is your pack?" I asked.

"Ashford Pack has held this mountain for ninety years. My grandfather established the territory."

"And you have been Alpha for how long?"

"Six years."

He was older than Damien. Maybe thirty, thirty-one. He had a stillness about him that Damien had never had, a self-possession that did not need to announce itself.

I hated that I was noticing any of this.

"I need time," I said. "I cannot process a new bond the morning after a rejection. That is not something I am capable of right now."

"I am not asking you to process anything."

"You are standing in my yard."

"I came to inform you about the territory boundary. That is all." He held my gaze. "What happens next is entirely your decision, Selene."

I stiffened. "I did not tell you my name."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. "Your grandmother spoke about you often. She and my mother were friends. Helena Voss talked about her granddaughter Selene every time she came to the packhouse for tea."

I felt something loosen in my chest at my grandmother's name. "She never mentioned you."

"She mentioned me. You were probably not listening for it."

I opened my mouth to argue and then closed it because he was probably right. My grandmother had talked about the mountain people constantly and I had spent most of those conversations half-listening while I managed whatever crisis Damien had created that week.

I stood up and held the document out to him. "I want to stay in the cabin. At least for the month. After that I will decide what to do about the territory issue."

He took the document. His fingers did not touch mine but the bond pulled anyway, a warm insistent tide. "I will need you to come to the packhouse and sign a temporary residency agreement."

"Fine."

"Tomorrow morning works, if you need today."

I looked at him for a moment. "Why are you being reasonable?"

He tilted his head slightly. "Would you prefer I was not?"

"Most Alphas I have met use a situation like this as leverage."

"I am aware of how most Alphas behave," he said, and there was something quiet and hard underneath those words that made me think he had spent a good portion of his life watching that kind of behavior from close range. "I am not interested in leverage, Selene. I am interested in doing this right."

He said this right the way someone says something they have thought about carefully.

I nodded once. "Tomorrow morning."

"I will send someone to walk you up. The path to the packhouse is not obvious if you do not know the mountain."

"I will find it."

He almost smiled again. "I believe you." He turned to go and then stopped. "There is a wood store on the east side of the cabin. Fully stocked. The nights get cold fast up here." He glanced back once. "Welcome to Ashford territory, Selene."

Then he walked back down the path and disappeared around the bend and I stood on the porch and pressed my hand flat against my sternum where the new bond sat quietly alongside the ache of the broken one.

Two bonds. One gone and one just beginning.

I went inside and poured the rest of my coffee down the sink because it had gone cold and I stood at the kitchen window and stared at nothing for a long time.

My phone showed three missed calls from Maya and one from a number I did not recognize. I put it face down on the counter.

I spent the rest of the day cleaning the cabin, stacking wood, walking the perimeter of the small property and learning the shape of the land. The mountain was beautiful in a way that felt almost aggressive, too vivid, too clean, the kind of beauty that makes city people feel slightly underdressed.

I found the creek. It ran cold and fast over smooth grey stones and I crouched beside it for a while and watched the water move.

I shifted for the first time in three weeks.

It was slow, the way it always was for me, my wolf emerging gradually rather than in the sharp clean snap that most wolves managed. Damien had always hated watching me shift. He said it was embarrassing.

But out here alone beside the creek with no one watching and no one judging, I let it take its time. And when my wolf finally stood on four legs in the cold mountain air, she lifted her head and she breathed deep and something in her unwound like a knot releasing.

We ran until the sun got low.

When I shifted back and dressed and walked back to the cabin in the early dark, I felt better than I had felt in a very long time.

I was building a fire in the wood stove when someone knocked on the cabin door.

Not Colt. The knock was lighter, faster.

I opened the door.

A young woman stood on the porch. She was maybe twenty-three, with copper-red hair and sharp green eyes and a smile that arrived before everything else.

"Hi," she said. "I am Petra. I am one of Colt's pack members and also his cousin and I brought you food because he told me you just arrived and he was worried you did not have fresh supplies." She held up a basket covered with a cloth. "He said to tell you it was from the pack. He did not want to say it was from him because he thought that would make you uncomfortable."

I stared at her.

She grinned. "He told me not to say that last part either."

Despite everything, despite all of it, I laughed.

And somewhere on the mountain above the cabin, I was almost certain I heard a wolf howl once, low and brief, and then the night went quiet again.