Five Years Later

I burned the eggs.

It was the third time this week, and Isla was kind enough not to mention it which meant she was either developing emotional intelligence at an alarming rate for a four-year-old, or she was too focused on the cartoon wolves chasing each other across the tablet screen to notice.

Probably the second one.

"Breakfast," I said, sliding a plate of toast in front of her. The eggs went quietly into the bin.

Isla looked at the toast. Looked at me. Looked back at the toast.

"Where's the eggs?"

"We're having toast today."

"We had toast yesterday."

"Toast is a complete meal."

She considered this with the gravity only a four-year-old can bring to breakfast negotiations, then picked up the toast and bit into it without further argument. I exhaled.

This was my life now, and I loved it. I loved it fiercely and deliberately, the way you love something you chose and fought for and built with your own two hands from nothing. A small apartment on the east side of Creston a human city, deliberately chosen, far enough from pack territory that the air didn't hum with anyone else's dominance. A job at a florist three blocks away. A daughter who had her father's eyes and absolutely none of his cruelty.

I had made something good here.

I pressed my coffee mug between both palms and stood at the kitchen window, watching the street below come slowly alive in the early morning. Delivery trucks. Dog walkers. A couple arguing quietly outside the cafe across the road. Human noise. Human problems. Nothing that required fangs or submission or the complicated architecture of pack politics.

My wolf was quiet these days. She had learned, the way I had, to keep her head down.

The rejection had done that to both of us.

I didn't think about Damon Wells. I had trained myself out of it the same way you train yourself out of any bad habit with repetition and stubbornness and the occasional slip that you forgave yourself for quickly and moved on from. Some mornings I went entire hours without the ghost of that severed bond making itself known. That felt like progress.

Isla finished her toast and held up the tablet. On the screen, a cartoon wolf was howling at a cartoon moon.

"Mama," she said, "why do wolves howl?"

My coffee mug stopped halfway to my mouth.

"Because they're talking to each other," I said carefully. "Calling their pack."

"Do we have a pack?"

The question landed quietly, the way her questions always did without warning, without malice, with the complete and devastating honesty of a child who didn't yet understand which topics had edges.

"We have each other," I said. "That's our pack."

She seemed satisfied with this. She turned back to her cartoon.

I turned back to the window.

The envelope arrived at noon.

I almost didn't open it. Official pack correspondence had a specific feel to it heavyweight paper, the faint mineral smell of formal wax seal, an authority baked into the texture itself that made your wolf instinctively straighten. I hadn't received one in five years. I had been careful so careful to make sure no one had reason to send one.

I stood at the kitchen counter and stared at it for a long time.

Then I opened it.

By order of the Ashlen Pack Council, all wolves bearing the Ashlen bloodline including those residing outside pack territory are hereby summoned to attend the Interpack Summit, to be held at Ashlen Ground on the fourteenth day of the coming month. Attendance is not optional. Failure to appear will be treated as a declaration of severance from pack bloodline, with all associated consequences.

I read it twice.

Then I set it down very carefully on the counter, the way you set down something fragile that you're considering throwing across the room.

Failure to appear will be treated as a declaration of severance.

Severance meant no pack protection. No bloodline rights. For me, that was inconvenient. For Isla whose blood ran with something rarer and stranger than anyone in the Ashlen Pack knew, something I had spent four years carefully concealing severance could be a death sentence. Rogue wolves with no pack protection were prey. Everyone knew it.

I picked up my phone and called Mira.

She answered on the second ring, which meant she had already received hers.

"I know," she said before I could speak.

"I can't go back there."

"I know."

"Mira —"

"Zara." Her voice was careful in a way that told me she was choosing words. "There are things happening. Things above the Ashlen Pack level. There's a reason this summit is mandatory for every bloodline, not just the ranked wolves."

"What kind of things?"

A pause. Long enough to make my wolf lift her head.

"The Lycan King is attending," Mira said quietly.

The silence that followed was the kind that has weight.

"Why?" I asked.

"Nobody knows. He's never attended an interpack summit before. Not once in eight years of his reign. Whatever his reason —" She stopped. Started again. "Zara, you need to come. Keep your head down, keep Isla close, and get in and out in two days. That's all."

I looked across the apartment at Isla, who had abandoned the tablet and was now carefully arranging her stuffed animals in a circle on the rug, conducting some kind of trial by the looks of it. She had my stubborn jaw and her father's grey eyes and something in her blood that lit up the instincts of every old wolf who got too close to her.

I had kept her safe for four years by being invisible.

One summit. Two days.

"Fine," I said. "I'll come."

I didn't know then that the Lycan King would walk into that summit room and stop moving the moment he saw me. I didn't know about the bond the real bond, the one the Moon Goddess had apparently been saving or what it would cost both of us to fight it.

I didn't know that invisible was no longer an option.

I hung up the phone and started packing.