Chapter Four: The Road Away

I walked until my legs forgot how to do anything else.

The moon was high by the time I reached the edge of pack territory, the place where our land gave way to the tangled forest that belonged to no one. I had never gone this far alone before. Wolves did not travel these woods at night without a reason, and I had never had one.

Now I had every reason in the world.

My bag was light on my shoulder. A change of clothes, my mother's dress folded carefully at the bottom, my notebook, and what little money I had saved from small chores over the years. It was not much. It would have to be enough.

Behind me was a house full of people who had just watched me lose everything and felt nothing about it. Ahead of me was nothing I could name.

I kept walking anyway.

The forest at night sounded different than it did in daylight. Every snap of a branch made my heart jump. Every shift in the wind carried a hundred unfamiliar scents, and without a working sense of smell to tell me what was safe and what was not, I had only my ears and my eyes, which felt like walking with half my senses missing.

I told myself I was being foolish. Rogue wolves rarely came this close to a settled pack's border. I told myself this more than once, the way you tell yourself a lie you want very badly to be true.

I heard the growl before I saw anything.

It came from low in the brush to my left, a sound with no warmth in it at all. I froze, every muscle in my body going tight.

"Wrong place to be walking alone, little wolf."

Three of them stepped out from the trees. Rogues, unclaimed by any pack, their eyes catching the moonlight in a way that made my stomach drop. Rogue wolves survived by taking what settled packs would not miss. A girl walking alone in the dark, with no pack scent strong enough to warn them off, was exactly what they were looking for.

"I do not want trouble," I said, my voice steadier than I felt.

The tallest one laughed, low and unkind. "Then you should not be out here."

I ran.

I do not remember deciding to run. My body simply did it, legs moving before my mind caught up, bag banging against my back, branches tearing at my dress as I pushed through them. Behind me I heard them shift, heard the sound of paws hitting the ground instead of boots, and I understood with a cold rush of fear that they had already shifted to their wolf forms.

I could not outrun a wolf. Not on two legs. Not without a working bond to my own wolf, who stayed curled and silent inside me no matter how hard I begged her to rise.

Please, I thought, stumbling over a root, catching myself on a tree. Please, I need you now.

She did not answer. She had not answered in three days, not since the bond tore.

Claws caught my arm from behind, tearing through the sleeve of my mother's old dress and into skin. I cried out and fell, hitting the ground hard enough to knock the breath from my chest. Pain bloomed white and sharp along my arm, and above me I saw the shape of a wolf, teeth bared, closing in.

I threw my arm up, useless, bracing for what was coming.

It did not come.

I do not fully understand what happened next. There was a sound, a roar that did not belong to any of the three wolves circling me, and then a fourth shape crashed into the clearing, all fury and teeth and speed. I only caught pieces of it through the pain and the dark. Fur the color of a storm. A snarl that made the ground seem to shake.

The rogues scattered fast, the way animals scatter from something bigger and angrier than themselves. Within moments the clearing was empty except for me, bleeding into the dirt, and the wolf that had come from nowhere to save me.

He shifted back. A man knelt beside me in the dark, and even through the pain and the blur of my vision, I recognized the shape of him.

It was not Adrian. I want to be clear about that, because for one wild, foolish second, my heart leapt with the thought that it might be. It was not him.

It was an older man, grey at the temples, with kind, worried eyes and the bearing of someone used to protecting people. A stranger. A wolf from some pack I did not know, out here for reasons I never learned.

"You are hurt badly," he said, already pulling cloth from his own shirt to press against my arm. "Do not move."

"Thank you," I managed.

"What is a girl like you doing out here alone?"

I did not have an answer that made sense, not one I could form through the pain, so I said nothing at all. He half carried me the rest of the way through the forest, to a small human town on the other side, and left me at the door of a healer's house before disappearing back into the trees without ever telling me his name.

I never saw him again. I have wondered about him many times since.

I do not know exactly what happened back at Silver Moon Pack that night. I was not there. But I learned later, much later, that at nearly the same hour I was bleeding into the dirt of that forest, Alpha Adrian Black woke suddenly from a sleep he had not meant to fall into, his heart pounding for no reason he could explain, a feeling of wrongness sitting cold in his chest like something had reached into him and pulled.

He told no one about it. He did not yet understand it himself.

But somewhere in the space where a bond he had refused to believe in still quietly existed, whether he wanted it to or not, something in him had felt me break.