The Wolves at the Border

I was not fast enough.

I had always known this about myself, in the abstract way you know things you'd rather not examine. My wolf had never fully woken. She was there, somewhere under my skin, trying, scratching for purchase every time my foot hit uneven ground, every time a branch whipped across my face and I stumbled instead of clearing it.

She couldn't surface. She never could.

So I ran on human legs through a forest I didn't know, and the Silvercrest warriors behind me ran on something older and stronger, and the gap was closing and I knew it and I ran anyway.

Because what else do you do? You run. You keep running until you can't.

The trees here were different from Silvercrest's managed forest. Older. The roots rose out of the ground in thick, uneven ridges and the undergrowth was dense and I had already gone down once, torn my palm open on a root, pushed myself up without stopping. My lungs burned. My legs had passed pain and arrived somewhere duller, a grinding exhaustion that said: you are almost done.

I thought about the banishment order sitting on that cot.

I thought about Ginni folding my shirts with those careful hands.

I thought: I am not going to die in a forest for Cole Shade's convenience.

It didn't make me faster. But it kept me moving.

Then one of them shouted.

"The Luna wants proof."

I missed a step. Caught myself.

Proof.

Tara-Lee. This was Tara-Lee's order, not Cole's.

I had expected Cole's cruelty. I had braced for it, learned it, survived it. Cole's cruelty at least had the decency to look at me when it struck. This was something else. This was a woman who had won everything, from the Alpha and the crown to the pack's adoration, and had still sent four men into the dark to make sure I couldn't come back.

What did I have that frightened her that much?

I didn't know. I ran anyway.

It didn't matter. Thirty seconds later, the forest ran out.

A shallow ravine, steep-sided, the drop too far. They came through the trees on both sides and closed behind me, and I turned with my back to the edge and faced them.

Four warriors. Weapons drawn. Croft in front, his expression flat and professional. The others fanned out wide.

I had no wolf. No rank. No allies within five miles.

I thought about kneeling on that stone floor. I thought about Cole's hand on my arm, walking me out of that hall, and how he'd almost… and then stepped away and left me in the dark.

I was so tired of being left in the dark.

"Haydee Raine," Croft said. "By order of—"

They came from everywhere at once.

Black wolves, enormous, exploding out of the mist to the north with a speed that made Croft's sentence stop halfway through his mouth. No warning. No sound before impact. They hit the warrior formation from the flank like a wall and the sound of it was sharp and immediate: bodies, collision, the crack of something giving way.

I pressed myself to the ravine edge and watched.

It was over in less than a minute. Croft's unit were trained fighters. They were on the ground before I'd processed what was happening, disarmed, pinned, hurt but alive. The black wolves held their positions over them. Alert, still, watching the tree line.

Then one of them shifted.

He rose mid-stride, the shift seamless and unhurried, and stood at the edge of the treeline in the grey pre-dawn light. Tall. Dark-eyed. Butt naked. A long scar ran from his left collarbone toward his shoulder. I focused on the scar and refused to lower my eyes.

He scanned the ravine once. Assessed the downed warriors. Then his gaze moved to me.

He was not winded.

I was covered in border mud. My palm was bleeding. I had twigs in my hair and tears drying on my face that I hadn't noticed crying and I was standing with my heels six inches from a ravine drop, held upright by something that might have been adrenaline or might have been sheer refusal to fall in front of anyone else tonight.

He absorbed all of this.

The amusement in his expression was not mockery. There was a difference, and I was tired enough and raw enough that the difference mattered to me immediately. He He regarded me with the interest.

"Well, little moon," he said. His voice was low and unhurried, carrying easily across the ravine. "Your mate threw away something priceless."

I stared at him.

A man appeared at his shoulder. Shorter, leaner, with the expression of someone mentally composing a report he'd been asked to file too many times.

"Four Silvercrest warriors," the man said, with the tone of professional accounting. "On Nightfall territory. With drawn weapons." He paused. "Alpha, I want it noted that I suggested we stay home tonight."

The tall man didn't look at him. He kept his eyes on me.

I knew who he was. Everyone in Silvercrest knew who he was. We had been told from childhood what Nightfall's Alpha was: savage, lawless, the enemy, a wolf you did not approach and did not trust and did not survive.

Hunter Grear.

I was alive because of him. I did not know what that cost yet. I did not know what he wanted or why he'd been at this border at this hour or what it meant that he was looking at me like I was something worth looking at.

I knew I was alive.

I knew he was why.

I did not know which one of those facts should frighten me more.