CHAPTER 4

Amara

We walked into the trees, and the world got bigger than I had words for.

I'd never been past the pack boundary in this life. Omegas don't get shown where their edges are... the edges are just there. You don't walk into a storm without a roof over you. I walked into this one anyway, and the forest closed over our heads, older and darker and taller than anything I had ever stood beneath.

The first one fell into step beside me.

"First time in ungoverned land?" he said.

"Yes."

"It gets easier. First night, every sound is something hunting you. Third night, you work out it's mostly just the forest being a forest. Fifth night, you start to miss having walls." He paused. "Second week, you can't imagine going back behind them."

I didn't answer that. I was busy counting... the gaps between the trees, the slope of the ground, the way out if I needed one. I'll do that in every life I'm given. You count the doors before you let yourself rest.

There were two more of them waiting where the trees grew thickest, in a hollow out of the wind.

I marked the shapes of them before they marked me. One was young... younger than the brothers, with a quick face and quicker eyes... and he looked me over and said, to nobody in particular, "She's smaller than I expected."

"Reed," the first one said, in the voice you use on a dog that won't stop barking.

"What? I'm only saying. I had a picture in my head."

"You're louder than I expected," I told him.

He blinked. Then he grinned like I'd handed him a gift. "Fair," he said. "Completely fair." He stuck out his hand. "Reed. Eight months with this lot. I've got stories. None of them make Zane look good."

So that was the joker's name. Zane.

"None of them are true," Zane said behind me.

"Some of them are partly true."

I took Reed's hand and learned three things in the time it took to shake it. His grip was trained, not natural... someone had taught him to grip like that. His eyes kept moving even while his face held still. And under all that noise of his there was something quieter the noise was built to cover. I knew that trick.

The older one didn't give me his name or his hand. He was broad and weathered, and he looked at me the way you look at weather... not unkindly, just working out whether I'd slow them down. Bram, the brothers called him. He chose the campsite without asking a soul, walked to the spot between three trees, studied it for one breath, and started clearing the ground. Nobody argued. That told me he was usually right.

The quiet one... the second brother, the one who had said we're not him in my kitchen... kept to the edges of things. He still hadn't offered me a name, and I still hadn't asked. He moved through the dark like he'd been poured into it. Twice I turned and caught him already looking, not quite quick enough to pretend otherwise, and twice I let it go.

I helped with the fire. Standing still while other people work is not a thing I know how to do... it was wrung out of me before I could walk. Reed dropped down beside me before I'd even picked a place to start.

"You know how to build a fire?" he said.

"I know how to build everything a house needs. The fire's the easy part."

"Very practical." He started sorting the wood by size, the way you do when your hands need something to hold. "Where are you from, then?"

"Nowhere worth the walk back."

"That's everyone out here." He said it lightly, but it wasn't a light thing, and we both knew it. "I was a junior warrior up north before this. Did all the jobs nobody senior wanted, got none of the thanks. Then Zane came through on a job, made a mess, I helped him out of it, and he offered me a place." He shrugged. "I took it. Best bad decision I ever made."

"What kind of mess?"

"The kind where three things are on fire and the man who lit them is standing in the middle going, this is fine."

From across the camp, without turning, Zane said, "It was fine."

"Three things were on fire, Zane."

I almost smiled. I caught it before it got out, but it had been there, and Reed saw it, and he had the grace not to say so.

"Can I ask you something?" he said.

"You're going to anyway."

"True." He glanced sideways at me. "Are you scared?"

"No."

"Really? I was terrified my first night out here. Every snapped twig was something with teeth coming for me."

"I've been scared before," I said. "This doesn't feel like that."

He thought about it, and he didn't fill the quiet while he did, which I hadn't expected from a mouth like his. "Then what does it feel like?"

I looked into the small fire catching between us. I thought about the cold kitchen and the word manageable and the back door swinging open on a lock I'd checked twice with my own hands.

"Motion," I said. "It just feels like motion."

He nodded slow, like it was an answer he could put to use. "I can work with motion."

The fire went up small and steady. Bram looked at it and said nothing, which I was already learning was the nearest thing Bram came to praise. And for a moment... just a moment... something in my chest came loose that had been clenched so long I'd stopped feeling it as clenched. Not trust. I'm not built for trust that fast, and three lives have handed me good reasons why. Something that lived next door to trust. The warmth that comes off people who are easy with one another.

I let myself have it. Just for that one moment.

That was my mistake.

I should have known better. Warmth, in my experience, is the thing that's there right before it's taken away.

I heard it before I understood it.

A sound I'd learned in a life that doesn't exist anymore, taught to me by a father who said you have to listen to what the forest says before it starts to shout. A wrongness laid over the quiet. A whisper that wasn't the wind.

I turned.

Reed was sitting at the edge of the firelight, his face tipped up toward the dark like a boy watching for the first star of the night.

And then he wasn't.