Chapter Four: The Town

I reached the town by midmorning.

It was a small place, the kind that existed quietly at the edge of wolf territory without fully belonging to either world. Half the people who lived there were human and the other half were wolves or something close to it, and nobody asked too many questions about which side you came from. I had heard about towns like this but never been to one.

I liked it immediately.

It was not pretty exactly. The buildings were old and the main street was narrow and the whole place smelled like woodsmoke and something frying somewhere nearby. But it felt anonymous in a way that Mooncrest never had. Nobody looked up when I walked in. Nobody knew my name or my face or what had happened two nights ago.

I was just a girl with a bag walking down a street.

That felt like the most beautiful thing in the world right now.

I found a small inn near the center of town. The woman behind the counter was middle aged with sharp eyes and grey streaks in her dark hair and she looked me over once when I walked in with the particular expression of someone who had seen a lot of young women arrive alone with one bag and tired eyes.

She did not ask questions.

"Room is twelve a night," she said. "Includes breakfast. Bathroom is at the end of the hall. No guests after ten."

"That is fine," I said.

I paid for three nights, which was all I could comfortably afford while still keeping enough back for food and whatever came next. She handed me a key attached to a small wooden tag with the number four burned into it and pointed me toward the stairs.

The room was small and plain. A narrow bed, a window that looked out onto the back alley, a small table with a candle on it. The walls were bare. The floorboards creaked.

It was the best room I had ever been in.

I sat on the edge of the bed and let out a long slow breath and for a moment I just sat there in the quiet and let myself feel something close to relief. I was out. I was away. Nobody here knew who I was or what had been done to me and for right now that was enough.

I washed my face in the bathroom down the hall and changed my clothes and went back out to find food and look for work.

The woman at the inn, whose name turned out to be Marta, told me there was a tavern two streets over that was always looking for help in the evenings. She said it like she was doing me a favour, matter of fact, no softness in it, and I appreciated that more than I would have appreciated kindness.

The tavern was called the Grey Oak and it was exactly what the name suggested. Dark wood, low ceiling, long tables, the kind of place that filled up at night and emptied out by morning. The man who ran it was broad and bearded and looked at me with the same assessing eyes that Marta had used.

His name was Donal.

"Can you carry plates without dropping them?" he asked.

"Yes," I said.

"Can you handle drunk men without making a scene?"

"Yes," I said again.

He studied me for another moment. "You are a wolf."

It was not a question. He was one too, I could tell. Older, probably retired from whatever pack he had come from, settled here in this in between place where nobody had to be anything in particular.

"I am," I said. "Does that matter?"

"Not to me," he said. "Matters to some of the customers. You will figure out fast which ones." He named a wage that was fair and told me to come back at six. That was the whole interview.

I spent the rest of the afternoon walking the town slowly, learning the layout, finding the market and the well and the places where people gathered. My wolf was calm for the first time since the ceremony. She liked the open air and the anonymity and the simple forward motion of having something to do.

I bought bread and cheese from a stall near the market and sat on a low wall by the road and ate and watched people pass.

Nobody looked at me.

It was extraordinary.

That evening I worked my first shift at the Grey Oak and it was hard in the straightforward physical way that I did not mind at all. Carrying plates and cups, navigating the crowded tables, keeping track of orders and making change and learning fast which customers needed a firm look and which ones just needed to be ignored. Donal watched me for the first hour and then stopped watching, which I took as approval.

I worked until the last customer left and then helped wipe down the tables and went back to the inn and fell into bed and slept without dreaming.

The next morning was the first morning in three days that I woke up and did not immediately feel the rejection bond like a hand around my throat.

It was still there. I want to be honest about that. It did not go away. But it was quieter here, in this small plain room with the creaking floorboards, far from the pack lands and the people who had watched it happen. Distance helped. Not because the wound was smaller but because there was less around me to keep pressing on it.

I got up and went down for the breakfast that came with the room and Marta set a plate in front of me without being asked and sat down across the table with her own cup of something hot.

"Running from a pack?" she asked.

I looked up.

She shrugged. "Most girls who come through here alone with one bag are. I am not asking for details."

"Yes," I said.

She nodded like that confirmed something she had already known. "You planning to stay?"

I had not thought that far ahead. Staying had not been part of any plan because I had not had a plan, just the need to leave. But now that she was asking I turned the word over in my mind.

Stay.

The town was quiet and anonymous and nobody cared who I was. I had a job and a room and a woman who brought me breakfast without making me feel like a burden. There were worse places to land.

"Maybe for a while," I said.

Marta nodded again and stood up and took her cup back to the counter and that was the end of the conversation.

I ate my breakfast slowly.

Outside the window the town was waking up, people moving along the street, carts and voices and the ordinary sounds of an ordinary morning. My wolf was watching it all through my eyes with something quiet and considering.

Not healed. I was nowhere near healed.

But steadier.

And for right now, steadier was enough.