The Lake

Trishelle's POV

The kitchen garden existed somewhere between maintained and abandoned.

It stretched along the eastern wall of the pack house, a long strip that caught morning sun and afternoon shade. The herbs thrived, but the vegetable beds at the far end had gone to hell where bindweed crept in from the tree line. Trishelle had been fighting that bindweed for two years now. A slow, quiet war nobody noticed and nobody gave a shit about. She pulled the pale wiry stems out of the dirt whenever she found ten spare minutes, because if she didn't, the stuff would choke out the tomatoes and runner beans. Then she'd have a whole new problem.

She was on her knees between the bean rows on a Tuesday afternoon when she realized something strange.

She had the grounds to herself.

That was rare enough to register. She ran through what it might mean before she trusted it. Training had ended for the day. The afternoon duties had scattered the pack across the buildings and outbuildings that made up Bloodmoon territory. For once the timing had lined up into something she almost never got outside the hour before dawn.

Quiet. Actual, unwatched quiet.

She sat back on her heels and looked at the garden. Then at the sky, high and blue and doing absolutely nothing to earn that color. She made a decision fast enough that she didn't have time to talk herself out of it.

The lake sat at the back of the property, a ten-minute walk through the eastern edge of the forest, down a path she knew from the handful of times she'd been sent to gather wild garlic in season. Pack land, technically open to anyone in the pack. In practice, ranked wolves used it for themselves. The lower omegas knew better than to show up when someone else might want it. On a Tuesday afternoon, training done and dinner still three hours out, nobody was going to be there.

She left the bindweed where it was and went.

The water was cold, even in June, fed by some spring deeper in the woods that kept its own temperature no matter what the air above was doing. Trishelle stood at the bank, pulled off her boots and socks, and looked once over each shoulder. The way you look when you're doing something that isn't exactly forbidden but would become forbidden the second someone decided it should be.

Nothing. Birds. A woodpecker somewhere off to the north. The low steady sound of the water itself.

She undressed fast, no ceremony, and waded in.

The cold hit like a slap, immediate and total, punching the breath out of her chest in one sharp gasp she muffled against the back of her hand. She pushed through it the way she pushed through most things, by refusing to stop. She went under to her shoulders and let the cold settle in until it turned into its own strange kind of warm.

She'd been carrying the smell of the kitchen for four days straight. Grease and smoke and cooked-in scent she could never quite scrub out with what little soap she was given. It lived in her skin the way smells do when you spend sixteen hours a day in a room full of industrial heat. She worked her fingers through her hair, section by section, tipping her head back so the water could carry off the oil she loosened.

She wasn't thinking about anything in particular. This was the rarest thing she got, this flat, simple nothing. A body just existing in water with no task waiting on the other side of it. She let herself have it and didn't examine it.

She floated on her back for a while, watching blue sky through a lattice of branches. For about seven minutes she felt like a person instead of a function.

Then something moved in the tree line.

She righted herself fast, water surging around her shoulders as she spun toward the sound, one arm crossing over her chest on pure instinct. Her heart slammed loud in her own ears. She scanned the bank, the shadows between the trunks, the path she'd come in on.

Nothing she could see. A bird settling somewhere. A branch shifting.

She waited another minute, the cold turning back into just cold instead of relief. Then she moved for the bank and dressed fast, wet skin making the fabric stick in ways she didn't let herself think about. She gathered her things and walked back through the trees toward the garden.

She did not look behind her.

She told herself it was nothing. She'd been alone in these woods a hundred times on one errand or another and never once had a reason to be scared of a sound she couldn't place. The forest was full of things moving around that weren't what you feared.

She went back to the kitchen and started evening prep. By the time the first warriors came through the door for dinner, she'd filed the whole thing away in the drawer where she kept the things she couldn't change and had no use picking back up.

She didn't notice James Black was already seated at the head of the table when she came through the pass-through with the first dishes.

She didn't notice the way his eyes came up the second she appeared, or the way that look held a beat longer than anything in the room called for.

She didn't notice any of it.