Chapter 2

I walk until the trees stop telling me where I am and start telling me where I'm not, and somewhere in that stretch of not, I stop crying and start counting miles instead. Miles are useful.

Miles are something I can do something about.

By the time I hit the county road my feet have gone from cold to numb to something past both, and I sit on the guardrail long enough to put my shoes back on — I did grab them, eventually, some scrap of sense winning out over the part of me that wanted to walk out of that cabin barefoot and never look like I'd needed anything from it — and I take out the phone I haven't used to call anyone in longer than I want to admit.

There's exactly one number in it that isn't Marcus's pack.

Renata picks up on the second ring, which tells me she's been half-waiting for this call for three years the same way I've been half-dreading having to make it.

"You're alive," she says, instead of hello.

"Define alive."

"There it is." I hear something metal clatter in the background — a wrench, maybe, dropped or set down hard. "Where are you?"

"Cold. On a road. I don't actually know the name of it."

"Marcus's territory?"

"The edge of it."

A pause, the kind Renata doesn't usually give anyone, and I know without seeing her that she's doing the math I've been avoiding doing out loud. Three years of no contact except the occasional message just to say I'm fine, don't worry, and now a call from a cold road with no explanation.

"What happened," she says. Not a question, same as everything out of Marcus's mouth this morning, except when Renata says it, it doesn't feel like a decision already made. It feels like a door being held open.

"I'm pregnant."

"Okay." Steadier than I expected. "And?"

"And he wants to bond. Tonight. Like it's already decided."

"Of course he does. He's an Alpha." She says it the way you'd note the weather, unimpressed, unsurprised, and something in my chest loosens half an inch just hearing someone say the obvious thing out loud instead of tiptoeing around it like it's a diagnosis. "And you said no."

"I said no."

"Then you're not calling me because you're lost on a road, Ava. You know exactly where you are. You're calling because you don't know what to do with the no once you've said it."

She's always been able to do that — cut past what I'm saying to the shape underneath it, the way she used to do back when we were both learning to fold ourselves smaller so nobody would look twice. It used to feel like exposure. Today it feels like the first honest conversation I've had in three years.

"I don't want to go back to hiding," I say. "But I don't know how to do anything else."

"Then don't hide. Come here."

"Renata—"

"I run a garage two states over and I've had four different rogues sleep on my office floor this year because nobody else would take them in without asking questions they weren't ready to answer.

You know what I don't do? I don't ask the questions. Come here, have the baby somewhere nobody's deciding things for you, and figure the rest out after."

It's not a plan. It's barely a direction. But it's the first thing anyone's offered me since this morning that isn't a demand dressed up as care, and I find myself standing up off the guardrail before I've consciously decided to.

"Two states."

"Two states, one bus, and a walk if you don't want anyone tracking a car. I'll leave the bay door unlocked."

It takes me the better part of two days to get there, most of it spent staring out bus windows at towns I don't know the names of, my hand finding my stomach at every stop like I'm checking it's still there, still mine, still a secret. I don't sleep so much as I go somewhere adjacent to sleep, half-alert the whole way, old habits refusing to clock out just because the danger's supposedly behind me now.

Renata's garage sits at the end of a gravel road outside a town too small to have a real name on the map I'm using, a squat building with two bay doors and a hand-painted sign that just says PARTS, no name, nothing that would tell a stranger driving past that this is also, some nights, a shelter for wolves who ran out of other places to be small in.

She's waiting in the doorway when I come up the drive, arms crossed, looking exactly like she did the last time I saw her — leather jacket, motorcycle boots, a scar along her jaw she's never once explained to me — except three years older, and something in her eyes that reads like relief dressed up as irritation.

"You look like hell," she says.

"Thank you."

"Come inside before you look like more hell."

Inside smells like engine oil and the particular kind of cold that comes from concrete floors, and it's the least like Marcus's cabin any space has ever smelled, which I decide immediately is a point in its favor. Renata doesn't hug me. We've never been huggers. She just puts a hand briefly on my shoulder, hard enough to mean something, then pulls two stools out from under a workbench and gestures for me to sit like she gestured for a mug an hour and two states ago in a different life.

"First things first," she says, and disappears into the back office before I can ask what first things are.

She comes back with a scuffed pair of steel-toed boots two sizes too big for me, a flashlight with dead batteries rattling inside it, and a folding knife she sets down like it's nothing, like handing a pregnant rogue a knife is the most ordinary thing in the world.

"Every wolf who walks in here gets the same three things their first night," she says, before I can ask. "Boots, because you never know when you'll need to run somewhere the ground isn't kind. Flashlight, because it's the cheapest way to remind yourself the dark isn't permanent. Knife, because you should never again be in a room where the only weapon is whatever you can turn yourself into, understand?"

I don't fully understand. But I nod anyway, and I mean the nod, because something about the ritual of it — the plainness, the lack of ceremony — undoes something in me that three years of careful smallness never touched.

Last, she unclips a length of braided leather cord from her own wrist and holds it out.

"Scent mask," she says. "Not perfect. Nothing's perfect. But it'll blur you enough that anyone passing through who isn't looking hard won't clock what you are before you decide to let them."

I tie it on myself. It sits strange against my skin, foreign the way every choice I've made since this morning feels foreign, but I don't take it off.

"I don't know what I'm building here," I tell her, and it's the truest thing I've said out loud since the kitchen. "I don't know if 'pack' is even the right word for whatever this ends up being."

"It's the right word." Renata leans back against the workbench, arms crossed again, looking at me the way she used to look at engines before she took them apart — assessing, unbothered, already three steps ahead in her head. "You've spent three years learning exactly how to make yourself small enough that nobody asks what you really are. That skill doesn't disappear just because you've decided to stop using it on yourself. Point it somewhere useful instead."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning there are other wolves like you out there right now, doing exactly what you did — flinching a half-second slow, rounding their shoulders, making themselves invisible because somebody taught them that being seen gets you claimed, or hunted, or worse.

You know how to find people like that. You know how to talk to them without spooking them, because you were them an hour ago."

I look down at the cord on my wrist, then at the knife still sitting on the workbench where she set it, plain and unglamorous and exactly what it is.

"You're saying build a pack out of people who've spent their whole lives learning to disappear."

"I'm saying you're already the only person qualified to lead one."

Outside, the light's starting to go gray at the edges of the bay door, evening coming on fast the way it does out here with nothing tall enough to slow it down, and for the first time since I stood in Marcus's kitchen and said the sentence that ended everything, I don't feel like I'm still falling.

I feel like I've landed somewhere, even if I don't yet know what the ground is going to ask of me.

"Okay," I say, and it comes out steadier than anything I said this morning. "Show me where I'm sleeping."