Two Years Ago

ELOWEN

The night my mother died I made her a promise.

I was fourteen years old, sitting on the edge of her bed with her hand going cold in mine, and I promised her that I would be okay. That I would survive whatever came after. That I would not let grief make me stupid or soft or easy to destroy.

I kept that promise for six years.

I was keeping it right now, sprinting through a forest I had no business being in at eleven o’clock at night, my stepmother Cordelia’s errand completed, forty minutes behind schedule and acutely aware that the sounds behind me were not merely wildlife.

They were rogues.

Three of them. I had counted.

The forest between Mosswood territory and the Greyvale border was dead land — no pack claimed it, no pack patrolled it, which made it the preferred operating ground of wolves who had been expelled from their packs for reasons that were never flattering. Cordelia had sent me to collect a delivery from a supplier at a neutral waypoint three miles east. A two hour errand that had become four when I took a wrong turn in the dark.

Now I was running and doing rapid, unpleasant calculations.

No wolf — mine had been gone since I was sixteen, taken in an “accident” during a training exercise that had left me diminished and silent in a way the pack had written off as weakness. No backup — I was alone and nobody was expecting me back for another hour. No good options.

The first rogue hit me from the left.

I went down hard, rolled, came up with my elbow connecting with something that crunched satisfyingly. Bought myself three seconds and used them to get back on my feet and assess. Three of them were circling me now. Methodical. They had done this before.

Think! I told myself. Stop panicking and think.

Then the air changed.

It was subtle enough that I almost missed it underneath the sound of my own heartbeat — a shift in pressure, a quality of darkness moving through the trees that was different from the darkness that had been there a moment before. The rogues felt it first. I watched their attention fracture, eyes cutting to the treeline with the instinctive wariness of predators who had just registered something that significantly outclassed them.

The first one barely had time to turn before he went down.

I didn’t see it happen so much as registered the result — one moment three rogues, the next moment one, and then none, and then silence dropping over the forest like something heavy and final.

He stepped into the narrow shaft of moonlight filtering through the canopy.

Tall. Dark. Moving with the particular economy of someone for whom violence was a language they were entirely fluent in. His face was half shadow — a sharp jaw, a heavy brow, eyes that caught the light and held it in a way that made the breath stall in my chest for reasons that had nothing to do with the rogues.

He looked at me.

And my whole body did something I had no proper explanation for.

A pull, specific and directional and completely without my permission — originating somewhere in the hollow place where my wolf used to live. That silent, empty space that hadn’t produced so much as a flicker in five years suddenly strained toward him like a compass needle finding north.

I pressed my hand flat against my sternum.

No! I told it firmly. Absolutely not.

“Are you hurt?” Low voice. Controlled.

“No.” Mine was steadier than I deserved.

He took one step toward me and the pull intensified so sharply I stepped back before deciding to.

“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” he said.

“Noted.” I was already orienting myself, already calculating the fastest route back to Mosswood territory. “I have to go. I’m late. Thank you, truly — for the....” I gestured at the general area of recent violence and started moving.

“Wait—”

I didn’t wait. I was very good at not waiting.

I made it to the waypoint, collected the delivery and had been walking for fifteen minutes before I noticed my wrist.

Light. Empty. Wrong.

I stopped walking.

My mother’s bracelet — the thin silver chain with the small amber stone she had worn every day of her life, that I had taken from her wrist the morning after she died before Cordelia could make it disappear along with everything else — was gone.

The last piece of her I had.

Gone.

I stood at the edge of Mosswood territory with my hand pressed to my mouth and breathed through the specific quality of grief that comes from losing something you didn’t know you were still capable of losing.

Then I kept walking.

There was nothing else to do.

I never found out who saved me that night.

I told myself I wasn’t looking.

But here is the thing I didn’t know until six days ago, when I found the document hidden in Cordelia’s lockbox:

My mother didn’t die of an illness.

She was murdered. Deliberately. Systematically. By the woman who had spent the last six years sleeping in her bed, wearing her title and raising her daughter as a servant in her own home.

And the bracelet I lost in that forest?

It was the only proof that my mother ever existed.

Which means whoever has it — that stranger in the dark — is holding the one thing Cordelia would burn the world to get back.

And I have no idea who he is.