The Ashfords Don't Mingle

Chapter Four

The town gathering — Priya had called it a "harvest social" with a straight face, despite it being early June, a discrepancy nobody in Thornwood Hollow seemed inclined to explain, as though the name had simply calcified into tradition long after anyone remembered why — took over the small green beside the church on Saturday evening. String lights strung between two ancient oaks, foldout tables heavy with casseroles under handwritten index cards naming their owners, a bluegrass trio playing with more enthusiasm than precision from a raised platform that might once have been a gazebo, before time and weather had worn away its more decorative ambitions.

"You're doing the thing," Priya said, appearing at her elbow with two plastic cups of something that smelled aggressively of cinnamon and, underneath that, something stronger. "The photographer thing. Cataloguing everyone with your eyes like you're going to write a caption for each of us later."

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Sure." Priya handed her a cup, unbothered by the obvious lie. "That's Hazel, runs the diner, gossip network unto herself, has opinions about everyone's cooking that she shares whether asked or not. That's Owen, runs the store with me, mostly by which I mean he restocks and I do the actual work while he takes credit for both. Sheriff Kim, over there by the punch bowl, doesn't love outsiders asking questions about the woods, fair warning, though she'll be polite about it, she's professional that way. And—" Priya's voice dropped a register, angled her chin toward the far side of the green, "—that's the Ashfords. All of them. Which is unusual. They don't usually turn out for these."

Elena followed her gaze. A cluster near the tree line at the edge of the green, apart from the rest of the gathering in the specific way that wasn't quite rudeness and wasn't quite accident either — a distance that felt maintained rather than incidental, the kind of space a family kept around itself out of long habit rather than active unfriendliness. An older man, silver-dark hair, standing with the kind of stillness that drew the eye precisely because it refused to perform for it, hands loose at his sides, watching the gathering with an attention that missed nothing. A younger woman beside him, dark-haired, quick-eyed, already looking back at Elena with open curiosity rather than the older man's careful neutrality — an older woman further back, gray-haired, seated in a folding chair someone had clearly brought out specifically for her.

No Rowan. She noted the absence before she noted she'd been looking for him at all, a small private admission she filed away with mild embarrassment.

"Alpha of the clan," Priya said, nodding at the older man, and something about the word choice — *alpha*, casual, unremarkable, the sort of thing a small town might say about any dominant family patriarch — landed strangely in Elena's ear, though she couldn't have said why. "Callum Ashford. And that's Mara — Rowan's sister. She's actually normal, comparatively, comes into town, has friends, does the whole human-interaction thing without apparent difficulty. You should say hi. I'll be over there, judging Hazel's potato salad, which is objectively the worst potato salad in this county and everyone's too polite to say so to her face."

Priya peeled off before Elena could object, which left her standing alone with a cup of bad cinnamon punch and a very clear sense that she'd just been maneuvered, gently and deliberately, into exactly the conversation Priya had wanted her to have.

Mara solved the problem before Elena had to decide whether to cross the green herself. She came over with the easy, undaunted stride of someone who'd never once worried about interrupting anything, and stuck out a hand. "You're the wolf photographer. Mara. I'd apologize for my brother's manners on the split rock road, except I heard he was actually almost polite, which for him is basically a marriage proposal."

Elena laughed, caught off guard by the warmth of it, the easy confidence that felt like a different animal entirely from her brother's guarded stillness. "He was informative."

"That's Rowan for 'friendly.'" Mara's eyes were the same pale gray-gold as her brother's, Elena noticed, though on Mara they looked mischievous rather than guarded, lit from within by something that hadn't yet learned to hide itself. "He's not here tonight, if you're wondering. Which you clearly are, no offense, everyone does the same thing when they meet him, gets curious about where he's gone off to. He's — busy. Ranger stuff. Always something out past the ridge that needs his attention."

Across the green, Callum Ashford had not moved, had not so much as glanced toward the cluster of tables where Elena stood, and yet she had the distinct, uncomfortable impression of being watched with the same total attention she'd felt in the forest three days before — the same quality of scrutiny, patient and thorough, that had raised the hair on her arms behind that fallen log. When she did finally look at him directly, he met her eyes without flinching — an assessment, brief and thorough, the kind you'd give a stranger walking into a room you were personally responsible for securing, weighing threat against curiosity and filing the result away for later use.

Then he turned and said something to the older woman beside him, and the moment passed, and Elena told herself it was nothing, the same way she'd told herself the shape behind the log was nothing.

"Your family doesn't come to many of these," Elena said, testing the ground the way she'd tested it with Priya, watching Mara's face for the same quick-shift tell.

Mara's smile didn't waver, but something behind it recalibrated, a small internal adjustment. "We keep to ourselves, mostly. Big property, lot of land to manage, more work than people realize goes into keeping that much acreage the way it needs to be kept. It's not personal." A beat, a fractional hesitation. "Dad's just careful. Especially about—" She stopped herself, visibly, the sentence redirecting mid-flight like a bird changing course. "About a lot of things. It's a small town. Everyone's careful about something, right? You've got your own careful thing, probably. Everyone does."

"What's your dad careful about?"

Mara's laugh was quick and a little too bright, pitched half a note higher than the rest of her easy warmth. "Everything. Ask him yourself sometime, if you're feeling brave. He loves a good interrogation, honestly, it's basically a hobby for him." She glanced past Elena's shoulder, toward her father, and something unreadable moved across her face — affection and worry both, tangled together in a way that suggested a history Elena had no access to yet. "I should go rescue him from Pastor Reyes, he's been cornered for ten minutes and Dad only tolerates about that much small talk before he starts looking for an exit. Nice meeting you, Elena Voss. I have a feeling it won't be the last time."

She was gone before Elena could ask what she meant by that either, leaving Elena alone again on the edge of the green, watching the Ashfords the way she'd watch any subject she hadn't yet figured out how to photograph — aware, suddenly and completely, that this assignment had stopped being about wolves several days ago, and she just hadn't caught up to it yet, the realization arriving the way realizations often did, quietly, and too late to do anything about it.

She stayed at the social another hour, ate a slice of pie that redeemed the potato salad's reputation for the whole event, exchanged pleasantries with Hazel and Owen and a handful of names she wouldn't remember by morning. But some part of her attention stayed fixed on the far side of the green, on the space beneath the trees where the Ashford family had stood.

She was still watching that spot when Callum Ashford appeared directly in front of her.

She hadn't seen him cross the green. One moment the distance between them had been forty feet of open grass and string lights; the next, he was simply there, close enough that she caught the faint woodsmoke smell of him, his pale eyes — Rowan's eyes, Mara's eyes — fixed on her with an intensity that made the noise of the social fall away to nothing.

"Ms. Voss." His voice was quiet, even, and somehow more unsettling for it. "A word of advice, since you're new to the Hollow. Some things in these woods aren't looking to be found. And some things that find you first won't ask your permission."

He was gone again before she could answer — not walking away, not exactly, just no longer there, the way Rowan had simply *not been* on the split rock road — and Elena stood alone on the green with her heart hammering, certain, suddenly, that every warning she'd been handed since arriving in Thornwood Hollow had just been said to her plainly, by the one person who could have simply told her the truth and hadn't.