LOGINI should’ve felt better after Friday, after cupcakes and laughter and the strange relief of someone filling my quiet with noise. Instead, I woke with my nerves already awake, as if my body had spent the night listening for the moment trust turned its face away.
The thrush pecked at her food with more confidence this morning. When I lifted the towel covering her box, she fixed me with one bright, unimpressed eye, like she’d decided survival was her new hobby.“That’s my girl,Outside, the howl faded into the trees. Avery listened until it was gone. Her eyes were blue again, though a thin ring of amber still burned around the edges. It made her look haunted from the inside.“They’re not using words,” she said slowly, as if speaking to herself. “But I know what it means.”Colton stood across from her, one hand braced on the exam bed. Blood had spread through the fresh bandage on his arm, but he seemed unaware of it now. His gaze stayed on Avery.“What does it mean?” he asked.Avery’s mouth tightened. “Found.”The word slid coldly beneath my ribs. Avery looked toward the dark window. “Found. Wounded. Blood returned. Protected.” Her expression twisted. “Mine.”Gideon, still near the doorway, closed his eyes. Colton’s face changed. Something more painful.“The pack isn’t calling you Wren,” he said quietly. “They don’t know enough to call you that. Not most of them.”Avery laughed once, br
“The wolf would wake.” Avery said it like a curse. With such raw, disbelieving terror that the whole infirmary seemed to pull inward around her. Colton had gone utterly still beside the exam bed, silver blood seeping through his bandage again, because apparently his body had chosen the worst possible moment to remind everyone it existed.Avery stared down at her hands. Her fingers were changing. Slowly and wrongly. Not in the clean, impossible way Colton had shifted in my memory from man to wolf, not even like Evan’s fevered claws under silver pain. This looked like her body did not know the path and was trying to carve one through itself.Her nails darkened at the roots. The bones under her skin shifted once, a subtle, sickening movement that made her gasp and stagger backward into the cabinet. Bottles rattled behind her.Moss barked, frantic. Mara moved. Avery’s head snapped up. Her eyes were not blue anymore. Amber burned through them, wi
Avery had crossed. Moss pressed against her leg, hackles still raised, blood darkening the fur around one paw. Avery’s hand rested on his head, the syringe still trapped between two fingers. She looked back only once, toward the road behind us, toward the mud, the broken truck, the bound hunter groaning under Mara’s boot and Bailey’s horrified stare. Then she looked at Colton. “If this is a mistake,” she said, “I will make it everyone’s problem.” Colton’s mouth twitched. It was gone almost immediately, swallowed by fever and grief and the strain of standing upright while silver still burned through him, but I saw it. “I believe you,” he said. Avery stared at him for a second, as if she had expected an argument. Her gaze narrowed. “Good.” Behind us, the hunter spat mud and blood. “Doesn’t matter where you run, little thief.” Moss lunged. Avery caught his collar with
“She’s coming home,” Colton said. Avery Hart had spent thirty one years being warned away from Moonbrook, away from the woods, away from names like Holloway and Blake. She was driving west with a dog in her passenger seat and a wounded hunter in the back of her clinic truck. That was not a woman coming home. That was a woman running toward the thing she had been taught to fear because every other road had become worse. Colton stood over the map, fever pale and still bleeding beneath his bandage. Gideon remained across from him, rigid with a grief so old it looked like anger because maybe that was the only shape it remembered how to hold. Mara broke the silence first. “If either of you starts behaving like a dramatic wolf monument, I will sedate you both.” Gideon’s eyes cut to her. She lifted one syringe from the tray without blinking. He looked away first. Bailey whispered, “I have never loved
For one breath, every wolf in Mara’s office seemed to lock onto Colton’s voice like a compass finding north. The panic did not vanish, I could still smell it beneath antiseptic and old wood and the bitter tinctures Mara kept uncorked on her shelves. James moved first. “Ben, Emily, Sophia,” he said into the radio, already striding toward the hall. “Ravensmere extraction." My stomach tightened. Avery’s scream still rang inside my skull. Glass breaking and an animal crying out. Her voice, sharp and furious, saying Moss, stay. Then nothing. The dead phone sat on Mara’s desk like a small black coffin. Colton stood in the middle of the room, one hand still curled around mine, his skin fever hot. He was too still, too quiet. The wolf behind his eyes had not retreated, it had only gone silent. Waiting. Gideon was worse. He looked carved out of old grief and violence, one hand white around the head of his ca
For a moment, the hallway seemed to narrow around the word. Veterinarian. She was not a hunter, an elder or hidden wolf in some fortified compound. She was a vet.My hand tightened around the folder until the papers bent. I looked down at the scan again. Avery Hart a veterinary surgeon at Ravensmere Wildlife and Domestic Care.My eyes snagged on the license number, the clinic address, the date of registration. The details were painfully ordinary. The kind of thing I would have glanced over without interest in another life.“She’s alive,” I said.My voice sounded too small. James’s jaw flexed. “We don’t know that.”Bailey flinched. Mara glanced at him sharply. James did not soften the words, but his eyes moved to mine with something like apology. “We know someone with the right trail existed recently. We know she used Evelyn Hart’s surname. We know she’s the right age range and profession. That’s all.”The right age range. I looke
The wolf sat on my porch steps with an unnatural patience. I stood on the other side of the door with my forehead resting against the wood, one hand still wrapped around the knob, and tried to make my breathing sound less like fear.Outside, the porch light cast him in soft gold and shad
Colton held the second snare up in the porch light to show proof.The wire glinted pale, moonlight’s cruel twin, looped and ready to cinch around anything warm blooded and unlucky. My stomach rolled as if I could already feel it tightening.I opened the door only after I’d checked the lock twice, b
The next morning tasted like normality, trying too hard. Sunlight slid across my lilac wall as if it had every right to be cheerful, as if I hadn’t spent the night with my nerves stretched thin as thread. Listening for the slightest sound from the garage, replaying a pair of deep blue eyes that did
He was gone by morning. Of course he was. I woke sprawled awkwardly on the garage floor, my cheek pressed to my own folded arms, the concrete cold enough to make my bones complain. The lamp still glowed on the workbench. The thrush rustled once in her dim corner, alive and offended at the world.







