Chapter 2

ETHAN

She was staring at me like I'd dropped out of the sky, which wasn't that far from the truth.

I'd been running a patrol route through the back edge of the territory, nothing unusual, just burning off that restless energy that came with settling into a new place. I'd been in this city for less than three weeks, and my wolf was still pacing, still testing the borders, trying to figure out what was his and what wasn't.

Then the wind moved.

My wolf caught it before I did. Her scent hit him like a signal flare; warm and clean underneath the pine and night air, and he didn't wait for me to think about it. He was already running.

I caught up to the situation fast enough: three rogues, silver collar, a woman on the ground who was very clearly not panicking but was very clearly furious. I'd handled it without thinking too hard, which was how I preferred to handle most things.

Now I was standing two feet away from Freya Morgan, and my wolf was being absolutely insufferable about it.

Mate, he said, his voice clear as a bell. Loud as one, too.

I told him to be quiet. He didn’t stay quiet.

I stepped forward and reached out, two fingers under her chin, tilting her face up to check for damage. The collar was already off; the rogue who'd held the release had dropped it on his way to the ground. There was a red mark at the back of her neck from the silver, and her palms were scraped up from the fall, but there was nothing worse than that.

She looked okay, physically.

The rest of her was a different story.

Her jaw was tight. Her eyes were dry, but I could tell that was because she had decided she wasn’t going to waste her time crying. There was something underneath her expression, something she was pressing down very hard, and I couldn't quite name it.

Anger, maybe. Or something that had started as hurt and had been there for so long that it had turned colder.

She let me look for exactly three seconds before she pulled back.

"I'm fine," she said.

"You're not," I replied.

She didn't argue. She also didn't agree. She just looked at me with those dark unreadable eyes, saying nothing.

She was more beautiful than I remembered, and I remembered her very clearly. Most people from that school were a blur by now, just faces and names that blended together, but Freya Morgan had never blended into anything. She'd been impossible to miss even back then, back when we were teenagers and I was doing my best impression of someone who didn't care about anything.

I'd cared about her. I just hadn't known what to do about it. I was sixteen the first time I really noticed her.

Back then, I used to find reasons to get close to her. Nothing serious. A comment here, a shoulder brush there, watching her reactions, the flash of annoyance, the way her eyes would narrow. She had a look she gave people she found irritating, and I figured out early on that irritating her was the fastest way to get her full attention.

One day she’d been cornered outside the school building by a group of school thugs who thought that flexing their rank made them interesting.

She wasn't scared. She'd had one of them by the wrist and was saying something that made the others look like they wanted to leave. I'd walked into the middle of it without thinking, not to save her because she didn't need saving, but because I wanted to see how it ended.

She'd figured out almost immediately that I wasn't there to help. She'd looked at me, noticed exactly what I was doing, and then bitten me hard. Right below the thumb, through the skin, like I was the one being annoying, which, fair enough, I probably was.

I'd laughed the whole way home.

I'd wanted to tell her then. I'd had about a hundred half-formed plans, things I was going to say, moments I was going to create. But there was always Brian. Brian Norwood was one step behind her or one step ahead, always there, always in the frame, and Freya always looked at him like he was something steady she could hold onto.

So I'd swallowed it, said nothing, watched her choose him, and kept my mouth shut, because what was I going to do, make her feel guilty for not picking someone she didn't know?

I'd quietly given them my blessing, and then I'd moved north and built something of my own.

And now here she was, back in my orbit, with scraped hands and that look in her eyes that told me something had gone very wrong long before tonight.

I pressed my tongue to the old scar below my thumb. It was still there. Faint, but there.

"Who sent them?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"Guesses?"

She was quiet for a second. I saw something quickly move behind her eyes, but she shut it down before I could figure it out.

"I called my husband when they grabbed me," she said. Her voice sounded normal. Almost too normal. "He thought I was making it up."

I didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say to that which wouldn't make things worse, so I kept my mouth shut and let it sit between us.

She looked away first.

"Go home, Ethan." She said it quietly, not unkindly. "Thanks for saving me. I mean that."

She turned and walked back toward the lights of the town, spine straight, shoulders back, chin level. She didn’t look back. Instead, she moved like someone who had decided something and wasn't going to reconsider it.

My wolf watched her go and had a great deal to say about it.

I let him say it. It didn't mean I was going to act on it, not yet. She was still someone else's wife. She'd told me to go home. And I was technically going home.

But she was back in town. And those rogues had come with silver restraints and a specific target in mind, which meant someone had planned this, and the planning had happened before tonight.

Someone had wanted Freya Morgan taken, and they'd wanted it done quietly.

That wasn't something I was going to walk away from. Not when it was her.

My wolf settled, getting calm and quiet the way he always did right before a hunt.

I already knew who my prey was. Now I just had to be patient.

FREYA

The house was dark when I got back.

This was Brian's house, Brian's pack, and Brian's territory that I'd folded myself into over the years until I'd almost forgotten it used to feel foreign. I stood in the doorway for a second, looking at the dark hallway, trying to remember the last time coming home had felt like coming home.

I couldn't.

I sat on the edge of the bed without turning on the lights. The sheets smelled like his cologne, something I used to like and now just irritated me. I didn't know where he was tonight. I had a guess, and the guess had a name, and I was done pretending I didn't know it.

Twenty years. That's how long we’d been together. 17 years of being childhood sweethearts, 3 years of dating and being together properly, then this, whatever this marriage was.

I was sixteen when my father and my brother died. The crash had come out of nowhere, the way those things usually did. It had been so sudden and completely indifferent to what it left behind.

My pack had started to fall apart almost immediately. Packs always never survived that kind of loss, and mine wasn't the exception.

Brian's family had stepped in. They’d been generous, warm, and very good at making sure I understood, in subtle ways, how much I owed them for it.

They'd taken over what was left of my family's land and company, and they'd done it efficiently. Brian had been kind through all of it. Genuinely kind, at first. He'd held my hand at the funeral and told me it was going to be okay, and I'd believed him because I was sixteen and I'd just lost everything and he was there.

I'd loved him the way you could only love someone who had always been part of your life. Not because you'd chosen it exactly, but because it had been there for so long that you'd stopped asking if it was supposed to be.

I looked down at my scraped palms and the gravel still caught in the edges. He'd called me dramatic. I'd been on the ground with a silver collar on and he'd told me to stop being dramatic and hung up on me.

Lena's face moved through my mind, uninvited. I saw the way she laughed at his jokes, the way she always found reasons to touch his arm, the way she'd been in our house more in the last six months than most of our actual friends.

I'd introduced her to everyone. I'd given her a job. I'd pulled her in like she was someone worth protecting, and she'd taken everything I'd given her and handed herself to him like a gift.

And he'd taken it.

I sat with that for a moment, in the dark, in the quiet, and let myself feel it fully. The weight of it. The hurt and sadness that came from being betrayed by two people you'd been good to.

Then I picked up my phone.

The number had been in my contacts for three years without being used. It rang four times, and I was already thinking about what to say to voicemail when she picked up.

"Freya?" My mother's voice was thick with sleep, groggy and confused, and underneath it, careful. We hadn't spoken much since she'd moved on and built a new life while I was still standing in the rubble of the old one.

"Hi, Mom."

There was a pause. I heard her sit up. "It's past midnight. What's wrong?"

I thought about saying nothing was wrong. I was good at that. I'd been doing it for years, smoothing things over, keeping my voice even, making it easy for everyone else not to notice how much I was holding in.

"I want a divorce," I said.

The words came out steady. My voice didn’t wobble, and there were no tears either. Just the truth, finally out loud, where it couldn't be taken back.

My mother didn't say anything for a long moment. I heard her breathing.

"Okay," she finally said. Her voice was soft.

Just that single word like she'd been waiting for it.

Something in my chest—that had been wound so tight for so long I'd stopped noticing the tension—loosened. Not all the way. Not even close. But enough to breathe.

I sat in the dark in Brian Norwood's house, in Brian Norwood's bed, and for the first time in longer than I could pinpoint, I felt like I was about to do something that was entirely my own idea.

Tomorrow, everything was going to change. I just had to survive the night first.