I didn’t sleep.
I tried.
After Theo left—once he’d checked the breaker box, reset the generator, shown me where the fire extinguisher was and how to manually shut off the propane, all with the same patient efficiency he’d applied to flipping eggs—I stood in the doorway and watched the taillights of his truck disappear down the rutted drive.
The night settled around the cabin, thick and velvety. No streetlights. No highway hum. Just the rustle of trees, the distant rush of water, and the occasional low call of some night creature.
The conversation we’d just had replayed in my head, looped, rewound.
*We’re not monsters. We’re people. With teeth.*
*By the old deal…you’d be mine.*
*You’re not a broodmare.*
*You’re not mine. Not unless you choose to be.*
My body thrummed with too much adrenaline and not enough sleep.
Rufus followed me from room to room, his nails clicking on the old hardwood. Every time a branch tapped the window or the fridge hummed, he lifted his head and woofed softly, unsure.
I made a half-hearted attempt to unpack. A box of clothes shoved into the dresser. A stack of vet textbooks on the nightstand. My toothbrush in a chipped mug by the bathroom sink.
The normal, mundane act of arranging my things in this space grounded me more than anything Theo had said.
“See?” I told myself in the mirror, scrubbing off the day’s road grime. “You’re just a woman in a cabin with a dog and some questionable life choices. The rest is…local color.”
My reflection didn’t buy it.
The woman looking back at me had shadows under her eyes and a new tightness around her mouth that hadn’t been there last week.
I spit toothpaste into the sink. The drain gurgled.
“Maybe you’re sleep-deprived and hallucinating,” I suggested to my reflection. “Maybe the wolves are just…really big dogs and Theo’s in a LARP club with an excellent special effects budget.”
Rufus snorted from his post in the doorway.
“Traitor,” I muttered.
I climbed into the bed that had been my grandmother’s for longer than I’d been alive. The sheets smelled faintly of cedar. I lay there staring at the slanted ceiling, listening to the unfamiliar house noises.
Every creak I classified automatically—thermal expansion, breeze, settling. Brains liked categories. They calmed us.
The one noise I couldn’t neatly categorize was the occasional far-off howl.
Not TV. Not some neighbor’s dog. Wild.
Each one slid under my skin like a thin knife, scraping along my bones.
My grandmother’s letter lay on the nightstand. I picked it up and read it again in the dim light of the bedside lamp, tracing the loops of her handwriting with my fingertip.
*You are stronger than you know. Your father was stronger than he believed.*
My chest ached.
“Why didn’t you tell him?” I whispered to the paper. “Why didn’t you tell us any of this? We could have…decided together. Or at least…understood why you ran.”
The letter didn’t answer. Neither did the journal, closed now on the quilt beside me, its leather cover dull.
Sleep finally dragged me under sometime after midnight, more like blacking out than drifting off.
The dreams were…strange.
I ran through the forest, feet bare, leaves damp under my toes. The trees loomed too tall, their trunks impossibly thick. The moon hung low and honey-gold, too big for the sky.
Wolves paced me on either side. I didn’t see them so much as feel them. Warm bodies brushing my flanks, panting breath hot against my skin.
I should have been afraid.
Instead, I felt…exhilarated.
Free.
I laughed in the dream, and the sound that came out wasn’t human. It was a sharp, wild bark that echoed off the trees.
“You hear that?” someone said. A voice like rich earth. Theo, somewhere behind me.
“Of course she hears it,” another voice answered, sharper. Hayes. “She was born to it.”
I turned to look over my shoulder.
The ground vanished under my feet.
I fell.
I woke with a jolt, heart hammering, hand scrabbling for the nightstand lamp.
The room flared into existence, soft and familiar and not.
Rufus lifted his head, blinking sleepily at me. He’d taken the rug on the floor, despite my repeated attempts to coax him up on the bed. The scar on his shoulder stood out pale against his brindled fur.
My shirt clung to my skin, damp. I pushed hair off my face with shaky fingers.
“It’s okay,” I told my dog, as much for myself. “Just a dream.”
The clock on the nightstand read 4:12 a.m.
Of course.
I flopped back onto the pillow with a groan.
Outside, something howled.
My breath caught.
This one was…different.
Higher, thinner. Mournful.
A coyote, my rational brain supplied automatically. Probably.
Rufus’s ears flicked. He huffed, then dropped his head back down with a canine sigh.
If he wasn’t alarmed, I wasn’t going to be.
I closed my eyes.
When dawn finally crept around the edges of the curtains, gray and pale, I felt wrung-out.
Coffee helped.
A shower helped more.
By the time I tugged on jeans and a clean t-shirt, I had almost convinced myself that last night had been…a stress-induced hallucination. Or, at the very least, an overreaction to a perfectly normal storm and a very weird small town.
Then I walked into the kitchen and saw the journal on the table again.
Wolves. Human eyes. Circles.
My grandmother’s cramped handwriting: *I wish I did not know what I know.*
Yeah.
Nope. Not a hallucination.
Rufus sat by the door, his whole body pointed at it like an arrow.
“You want out?” I asked.
He thumped his tail.
“Okay. Bathroom break, then coffee refill in town. Maybe I’ll ask around, see if there’s a ‘Welcome to the Werewolf Coven’ pamphlet I missed.”
He didn’t laugh. Rude.
The air outside was crisp, full of the clean, sharp smell that only came after rain. The ridge opposite glowed faintly as the early sun crept over its top.
Rufus bounded down the steps, nose already to the ground. I followed more sedately, mug in hand.
The clearing around the cabin was pocked with tracks in the damp earth. Deer. Squirrels. Something small with long toes—raccoon, probably. And prints too big to be a dog, claws sinking deep.
Wolf.
I crouched, fingers hovering over one of the broader prints.
A strange shiver ran up my spine.
I could almost see them in my mind’s eye—ghost wolves moving through the clearing under cover of rain and dark. Watching. Scenting.
Judging.
Judging what, exactly, I had no idea.
“Don’t pee on the mysterious magical tracks,” I called to Rufus as he lifted a leg on a pine. “Probably bad luck.”
He glanced at me over his shoulder, then peed harder.
“Cool. We’re starting a war.”
We walked the perimeter of the clearing. The forest pressed close, the trees dense, understory thick with ferns and low shrubs. It wasn’t the manicured, park-like woods I was used to hiking in on weekends back home. This was…messier. Wilder.
Alive, Theo’s voice said in my head again.
I stopped, mug halfway to my lips.
A faint scent teased my nose. Not coffee, not wet dog, not pine.
Something…musky and sharp. Animal.
My vet brain flipped through the internal Rolodex automatically.
Fox? No. Wrong. Bear? Too light. Cat? Possibly. Something in the felid family. Bobcat, maybe. Lynx.
Rufus’s head snapped up. He stared at the treeline, hackles rising.
“All right, come on,” I said, tugging gently on his leash. “We’re not going in there.”
The trees loomed silently back.
I’d told my clients for years to trust their animals’ instincts.
“Maybe let your dog sniff that guy before you date him,” I’d joked more than once. “If he growls, you save yourself three months of heartbreak.”
Now, with my own dog staring at the forest like it had insulted his mother, my advice seemed less funny.
“We’re going to the diner,” I told him firmly. “Where there are pancakes and people and *electricity* that someone else is responsible for.”
He sneezed, but he let himself be led back to the car.
I paused at the edge of the porch, looking back at the cabin.
“It’s just a house,” I told it. “You’re just wood and nails. You don’t get to decide my life.”
The cabin, predictably, said nothing.
***
The town looked different in the daylight.
Less…ominous. More postcard.
Kids biked lazy circles around the square, their laughter bouncing off the storefronts. A woman in yoga pants and a messy bun carried a tray of muffins from the bakery to the coffee shop next door. An old man in a plaid shirt sat on the bench outside the post office, sipping from a thermos and reading a battered paperback.
The diner’s neon OPEN sign glowed cheerfully.
As I parked, a couple of heads turned. Less intense than yesterday, more…curious. The new attraction had been cataloged, discussed, filed. Now it was time for second looks.
Rufus grumbled low in his chest.
“Stay,” I told him, clipping his leash to the metal ring in the back. “I’ll bring you bacon.”
His ears pricked. Food bribery: the great equalizer.
The bell over the diner door jingled as I stepped in.
Warmth wrapped around me, smelling of coffee, frying oil, and syrup. The place was half full—locals clustered in familiar knots, a couple of tourists in hiking gear at a corner table, consulting a trail map.
Conversation dipped for a second. Eyes flicked my way.
Then Patty—name tag pinned to her shirt, blonde hair in a tight bun, formidable bosom encased in a floral apron—beamed at me from behind the counter.
“You must be Aurora,” she boomed, wiping her hands on a towel. “Coffee? We’ve got dark roast, darker roast, and ‘don’t talk to me till I’ve had two cups’ roast.”
“Uh.” My lips twitched. “The middle one. And…pancakes?”
“Coming right up, honey. Sit anywhere you like.”
I picked a table by the window, where I could see my car and, by extension, Rufus. He’d flopped down in the back, head on his paws, doing his best “woe is me, abandoned dog” impression.
Patty arrived three seconds later with a steaming mug.
“On the house, your first day,” she said, setting it down with a thump. “Heard you made it up to Maggie’s cabin in one piece.”
“Barely,” I muttered. Louder, I said, “Thank you. Um. I’m sorry, I didn’t catch—”
“Patty,” she supplied. “I’ve been feeding this town since before you were born. Your grandmother, too. Stubborn, that one.” She shook her head, fond exasperation in the motion. “Always thought she knew better than the menu.”
“That…sounds like her,” I said.
“You met her?” Patty’s brows shot up. “Before…?”
“No.” The familiar ache pricked. “Just, uh, from her letter. And the way everyone talks.”
“Well, you’ll get plenty of stories,” Patty said briskly. “Half this town owes her a scar or a saved limb. She brought half our babies into the world when the road was closed in winter and Doc couldn’t get up the mountain.”
“She…delivered babies?” I blinked.
“Human and otherwise.” Patty’s mouth curved. “Vet, midwife, medic, therapist. Maggie was…complicated.” She tilted her head, eyes narrowing in a way that felt oddly assessing. “You’ve got her eyes.”
“I…do?” The idea startled me.
“Same shape. Same way you squint when you’re trying to decide if someone’s bullshitting you.” Patty chuckled. “You’ll do fine. Now eat something before you fall over.”
My lips parted to ask about the “bullshitting” part, but she’d already bustled away, barking at a teenager to wipe down table three.
The pancakes were massive and fluffy and came with a side of bacon that I absolutely did not plan to share all of with Rufus. Half. Maybe.
As I ate, I listened.
People in small towns forgot how loud they were. Or they knew and didn’t care.
“—said the ridge feels…tighter today.”
“—Theo’s going to get himself gutted if he keeps mouthing off to Hayes like that.”
“—new girl’s got a dog the size of a bear. You see it? Sweet face, though.”
“—heard she’s a vet. Could use that, with Maggie gone. Lord knows, Jim’s goats are half-dead every other week.”
“—if she stays.”
That last one snagged my attention.
I glanced up. At the counter, two women in their fifties nursed coffee, their heads close. One wore a faded green sweatshirt that said CUTTER’S RIDGE RESCUE. The other had a silver streak in her dark hair that looked deliberate.
“She’ll stay,” the sweatshirt woman said. “They always do. The mountain sinks its hooks in.”
“Or the Pack does,” the silver-streaked one said slyly. “You saw the way Theo was looking at her last night, Viv.”
Viv rolled her eyes. “Theo looks at everyone like they’re a problem he has to fix.”
“Not like that, he doesn’t.” The other woman smirked. “He was standing on that porch like he’d chained himself to the posts. Hayes was fit to burst.”
“Hayes is always fit to burst,” Viv said. “One of these days he’s going to pop like a tick.”
I snorted into my coffee.
“Careful,” a voice drawled from the booth behind me. “Viv hears you laughing at her and she’s liable to adopt you into the mountain rescue team.”
I turned.
A man lounged in the corner booth, one arm stretched along the backrest. Late twenties, maybe early thirties, with warm brown skin, dark curls cut close on the sides, and a smile that looked like it got him out of a lot of trouble. His eyes were hazel, lighter than his complexion, and currently amused.
He wore a t-shirt that said I PAUSE MY GAME TO BE HERE above an image of a game controller.
“You must be new,” he said. “I don’t recognize you, and I recognize everyone in this town, even the ones I wish I didn’t.”
“Aurora,” I said. “Maggie’s…uh. Granddaughter.”
“Ah.” His smile softened. “Right. I’m Jordan. I run the internet.”
I blinked. “You…what?”
He gestured vaguely toward the street. “Coffee shop-slash-co-working space. We have the only halfway-decent WiFi in ten miles. The teens worship me. The elders hate me. It balances out.”
“You…have a co-working space,” I repeated slowly, glancing at his shirt. “In a town where the diner serves three kinds of coffee and the eggs have biographies.”
“Hey, some of us like to pretend we’re civilized.” He took a sip of his drink—something iced and milky. “You made quite the entrance yesterday. You know you almost took out Thom’s flowerboxes with your back tire?”
“I did not,” I protested. “I…clipped the curb.”
He arched a brow. “We don’t have a curb.”
Heat crept up my neck. “It’s been a long week.”
“Yeah, I can imagine.” He sobered slightly. “Theo told me you were up at the cabin. That…he’d, uh, filled you in on some of the…local peculiarities.”
“Is that what we’re calling ‘hey, your neighbors are werewolves’ now?” I said, unable to keep the edge out of my voice.
Jordan winced. “He went straight there, huh? No soft open.”
“He also made me eggs and picked a fight with your Council on my porch,” I added. “So, you know. Mixed messages.”
Jordan let out a low whistle. “Yeah, that sounds like Theo. Subtle as a sledgehammer when it comes to the important stuff.”
I hesitated. “You…believe all this. Obviously.”
“If you mean, do I believe half the town gets extra hairy once a month and can smell when someone’s lying from fifty feet? Yeah.” He smiled crookedly. “It grows on you. No pun intended.”
“You’re very calm about that,” I said.
“Occupational hazard.” He tapped his temple. “I grew up on the Ridge. My mom’s human, my dad’s not. I got the short end of the stick. No shifting, but I get all the fun senses and none of the cool party tricks.”
“Must be rough,” I said dryly. “Stuck smelling everyone’s emotions with no fur to show for it.”
“You joke,” he said. “But you should try sitting in a room full of horny teens during the first warm day of spring. It’s a nightmare.”
I stared, then choked on my coffee.
He grinned, unabashed.
“Anyway,” he said. “Theo asked me to check on you if you came into town. Make sure you had…resources. Someone to explain things to you without all the Council’s…mythology layered on top.”
“Why?” I asked, suspicion prickling. “So you can…sell me on the benefits package? Magical health insurance, sense of community, occasional moonlit runs?”
He sobered. “Because he doesn’t want you to feel…railroaded,” he said. “He’s…not great with words when his hackles are up. I am. He thought you might need…a translator.”
I glanced out the window.
Theo’s truck wasn’t in its spot near the hardware store. The shop’s front lights were on, though. Elias—at least, I guessed it was Elias—stood behind the counter, talking to an older woman gesturing animatedly with a bag of nails.
“I appreciate the thought,” I said slowly. “But I’m not really in the market for…whatever this is. I have a life. Friends. A…job.”
“A job you can do here,” Jordan said mildly. “Maggie did. Hell, she did more than most licensed physicians in a fifty-mile radius.”
“I’m not…her,” I said, sharper than I intended. “I didn’t choose this. I didn’t sign anything. My father didn’t, either.”
“I know.” His gaze was steady. “And you’re right. It’s not fair. You’ve got every right to be pissed. I’d be setting things on fire.”
“That’s…comforting,” I said weakly.
He shrugged. “Look. I’m not here to sell you wolf church. I just…wanted you to know you have allies. Not everyone on the Council is an unbending fossil. Some of us think the old deals are bullshit.”
“Like Theo,” I said.
“Like Theo,” he agreed. “He’s been butting heads with Hayes since he was nineteen. He was the first Alpha in three generations to refuse a Council-arranged match.” Jordan smirked faintly. “Drove the old man nuts.”
“So I’ve heard.” I toyed with my fork. “He said…your grandfathers made this deal. Not you. Not the Pack as a whole.”
Jordan nodded. “It was…complicated. Back then, we were…struggling. Hunt was bad. Pups were dying before their first shift. Humans were…moving in. Cutting roads through places that had been wild for centuries. Hayes’s grandfather went to Margaret’s grandfather with a…proposal.”
“A proposal that apparently boiled down to ‘you give us your daughter, we get superpowers,’” I said flatly.
“Like I said. Complicated.” Jordan grimaced. “It wasn’t framed that crudely. There was talk of…alliances. Protection. Binding bloodlines. The usual patriarchal bullshit.”
“And Margaret didn’t get a say,” I said.
“No.” He looked pained. “She was…eighteen. Stubborn as hell. She fought it harder than anyone expected. She ran. Twice. Theo’s grandfather dragged her back. Twice.”
My stomach turned.
“He…hurt her?” I asked quietly.
Jordan hesitated. “He never raised a hand to her,” he said finally. “He wouldn’t have dared. But there are…other ways to break someone. Especially when you control what they care about. Their family. Their…Pack.”
He nodded toward the hardware store.
“That’s Theo’s line to walk,” he said. “How much of that story he wants to share. But the short version is: he’s been trying to undo the damage our elders did longer than you’ve known this place existed.”
I swallowed hard.
“My grandmother loved this town,” I said. “That’s what her letter…felt like. In between the warnings and the melodrama. She called it…home.”
“It was,” Jordan said. “For better and worse. She swore like a sailor about the Council until the day she died. She also would have torn the throat out of anyone who tried to hurt one of us.”
“She delivered your babies,” I said.
“She saved my sister’s life when the ambulance got stuck in a snowdrift,” he said. “Two a.m., middle of January, power out, water pipes frozen. She boiled snow on the woodstove and yelled at my father until he stopped panicking.” He smiled, small and fond. “Then she smacked Hayes with a dishtowel when he showed up and tried to tell her she’d done it all wrong.”
A laugh escaped me.
“That sounds…like someone I would have liked to meet,” I said softly.
“Yeah,” Jordan said. “She would have liked you. You’ve got that same…‘don’t tell me how to live my life’ energy.”
“Is that what you smell?” I asked dryly. “My ‘screw you, I do what I want’ scent profile?”
“Among other things,” he said innocently.
Heat crept up my neck.
“Like what?” I asked before I could stop myself.
He grinned. “Fear. Curiosity. Anger. A tiny bit of arousal when Theo said ‘mine’ last night.”
I choked on my pancake.
“You—what—how—”
“Kidding!” He held up both hands quickly, eyes crinkling. “Kidding. That last one was a joke. I can’t smell…that. That’d be creepy. And invasive. And I would never.”
I stared at him, trying to decide whether to throw my coffee at his head.
He sobered, laying his palms flat on the table.
“I *do* smell that you’re…pulled,” he said quietly. “And that scares you.”
“Pulled?” I repeated warily.
“To the Ridge. To…him.” He lifted a shoulder. “To the whole…mess. That’s normal. The land…likes you. It hums different when you’re here. We all feel it. Doesn’t mean you owe it your body. Or your soul. Or anything, really. But it’s…there.”
I gripped my mug tighter.
“I hate this,” I said. “I hate that you…people…have had decades to wrap your heads around this magic-loops-blood-deals thing. I’ve had less than twenty-four hours. I hate that you all keep talking like the mountain is…sentient, and I’m just supposed to…go with that.”
“You’re allowed to hate it,” he said. “You’re allowed to tell us to fuck off. You’re allowed to leave. Theo may growl and Hayes may bluster, but nobody’s putting you in chains.”
“What happens if I do?” I asked. “Drive away. Sell the cabin. Renounce whatever claim this place thinks it has on my…DNA.”
“That’s where it gets…messy,” he said. “On a practical level, nothing immediate. No lightning bolt. No earthquake. The Ridge doesn’t throw toddler tantrums. But over time…we’ve seen what happens when deals like this get…ignored.”
“Sickness,” I said, remembering Theo’s words. “Drought. Fires. Dying animals.”
“Patterns,” Jordan said. “Correlation isn’t always causation. But when the same sequence repeats enough times, people start connecting dots. Hayes sees everything as…punishment. I see it as the land…recalibrating. Trying to find balance elsewhere. Sometimes that means…pressure falls on the least stable fault line.”
“Me,” I said.
“And Theo,” he said. “And the Pack. It’s not…you versus the mountain. It’s you as one part of a very…complex ecosystem.”
“I didn’t sign up to be an ecosystem,” I muttered.
He smiled sadly. “No. You didn’t.”
We sat in silence for a moment.
“Do you…ever wish you’d been born somewhere else?” I asked quietly. “Somewhere…normal. Without…this.”
He considered.
“Sometimes,” he said. “When I was a kid and I wanted to go to sleepovers in Denver instead of full-moon runs. When I realized my crush on a human boy meant explaining that my cousins might occasionally show up to Thanksgiving dinner with blood on their shirts.” He shrugged. “But then I go down the mountain for a week and the noise and smell and…emptiness of it all makes me itch. The Ridge is…home. For better or worse.”
“And if home…hurts you?” I asked.
He looked at me sharply.
“That’s the question, isn’t it,” he said. “How much you tolerate from the thing that made you.”
The bell above the door jingled. A hush rippled through the diner.
Theo stepped in.
He looked…tired.
His flannel from last night had been traded for a clean dark t-shirt that stretched over his shoulders in ways I stubbornly tried not to appreciate. His jaw was dark with stubble, like he hadn’t bothered to shave. His eyes swept the room automatically, cataloging.
When they landed on me, something in his face changed.
It wasn’t dramatic. Just a slight softening around his eyes, the tension in his shoulders easing a fraction.
My annoying traitorous stomach fluttered.
Jordan noticed. Of course he did. He smirked.
“Speak of the devil,” he murmured. “And he shall appear.”
“Devil implies fun,” I muttered back. “He’s more…brooding mountain dad.”
Jordan snorted into his drink.
Theo crossed to the counter, ordered coffee from Patty with a nod, then headed our way.
“Morning,” he said, voice rough. “You find the diner okay without hitting any flowerboxes?”
“Barely,” I said. “Your town has too many…eyes.”
“We like to keep tabs on our strays,” he said. Then, to Jordan, “You harassing our guest?”
“Me?” Jordan blinked innocently. “I’m being a delightful cultural ambassador. Unlike some people, I don’t open with ‘hey, nice to meet you, we’re werewolves, want eggs?’”
Theo’s ears went faintly pink.
“I didn’t say it like *that,*” he muttered.
“You kinda did,” I said.
He slanted me a look, something quick and almost playful flickering.
“Trainee cultural ambassador,” Jordan declared. “We’ll work on it.”
Theo ignored him.
“You doing okay?” he asked me. There was no casual to it. He genuinely wanted to know.
I could have lied. Said I was fine. That I’d slept like a baby and barely thought about last night.
Instead, I surprised myself.
“I’m…not,” I said honestly. “But I’m…upright. Functional. Semi-caffeinated.”
He nodded, accepting that. “Storm didn’t spook you too bad?”
“Only enough to give me stress dreams and make me question my life choices.”
His mouth crooked. “Welcome to Cutter’s Ridge.”
I hesitated. “About…last night,” I began.
His jaw tightened. “I’ll deal with Hayes,” he said immediately. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
“That’s not what I—” I stopped, frowned. “Okay, that *is* one of the things, but. I was going to say…thank you. For…standing up for me. On a porch I didn’t know I owned two days ago.”
He held my gaze. “You’re welcome,” he said simply.
Jordan made a quiet gagging noise and pretended to stab himself with a fork.
Theo didn’t even look at him. Impressive.
“Also,” I said, “I’m still mad. At…all of this. At you, a little, by association.”
“I know,” he said. “I’d be more worried if you weren’t.”
“And I’m…going to keep being mad,” I warned. “And asking questions. And probably…poking at all your sacred cows.”
“We have goats, mostly,” he said. “But yeah. Poke away.”
Jordan coughed. “Phrasing.”
Heat shot up my neck. “That’s not— I didn’t—”
Theo’s lips did something I hadn’t seen them do before. They…smiled. Not the brief twitches I’d gotten when I snarked at him last night. A real, if small, smile.
It made my stupid heart do another inconvenient little thing in my chest.
“I should get to the store,” he said. “People need their screws.”
Jordan snorted. “I’m not touching that.”
Theo ignored him again.
He looked at me.
“I’ll swing by the cabin later this week,” he said. “Show you the trails. If you want. Margaret had…favorite spots. You might…like to see where she spent her time.”
Emotion stung the back of my eyes unexpectedly.
“I’d…like that,” I said quietly. “Thank you.”
He gave a short nod. Then he turned and walked out, coffee in hand.
My eyes…might have followed the way his t-shirt stretched across his back.
Jordan made a soft tsk sound.
“Don’t,” I warned, without looking at him.
“Didn’t say a word,” he sang.
“You were *thinking* loudly.”
“My thoughts are my own.”
“Uh-huh.”
I shoved the last bite of pancake into my mouth to shut myself up.
Outside, Theo paused on the sidewalk, said something to an older man in a cap. They both glanced up at the ridge, their expressions serious. Then Theo headed down the street toward the hardware store.
Jordan tapped his fingers on the table.
“So,” he said casually. “On a scale of ‘burn it all down’ to ‘I could make this work,’ where are you?”
“Firmly at ‘I want to punch a mountain,’” I said.
He grinned. “Progress.”
***
The rest of the day passed in a blur of small-town bureaucracy and unexpected kindness.
I met Doc Hargrove, the town’s human physician, who shook my hand with nicotine-stained fingers and immediately tried to recruit me to take over his clinic *and* start a dedicated animal practice. (“People are overrated. Dogs don’t argue as much when I tell them to rest.”)
I filled out change-of-address forms at the post office, under the scrutiny of a clerk who clearly knew more about my grandmother’s tax history than the IRS.
I bought groceries at the tiny market, where the owner insisted on giving me a discount “in honor of Maggie, God rest her soul,” and tried to slip an extra carton of eggs into my basket. (“You’ll need protein, up there.”)
I stood in line at the little bank to set up an account for the utilities, feeling like a kid playing house.
At each stop, people offered stories. Half of them about my grandmother’s legendary temper. Half about the times she’d patched them up, pulled them out of a ditch, or smacked them upside the head for doing something stupid on the mountain.
None of them mentioned werewolves.
The only hints of the other layer came in glances, tone shifts.
When I stepped out of the bank, the teenage girl from yesterday—the one in ripped jeans and flannel—was perched on the low wall again, earbuds dangling around her neck, a chipped black-painted thumbnail flicking rhythmically against a lighter.
Her dark eyes snagged on me.
“You’re her,” she said. Not asked. Stated.
“Depends who ‘her’ is,” I said.
“Margaret’s blood.” Her gaze dipped to my wrist, where the vein pulsed under my skin. “Aurora.”
My shoulders tightened. “Eavesdropping?”
“Small town,” she said. “Walls are thin.”
“You always stare at strangers this much?”
“Only the important ones.”
Her tone grated and intrigued at once.
“I’m Ivy,” she added, almost as an afterthought. “Sam and Nora’s cousin.”
“Those are…wolves,” I said before I could stop myself. “Right? Last night? The ones out in the trees?”
She smirked. “I’m not supposed to answer that until the Alpha says you’re ready.”
“Of course you’re not,” I muttered.
She hopped off the wall in one fluid movement and sauntered closer, stopping a careful distance away. Close enough to scent me, probably. Far enough that I wouldn’t feel crowded.
“You smell like her,” she said bluntly. “Not exactly. But…close.”
“You say that like it’s a…good or bad thing?” I said.
“Good,” she said. “Mostly. Bad for Hayes. Good for us.”
“Why’s that?” I asked warily.
“Because she never did what they wanted,” Ivy said. “She yelled at the Alpha in front of the whole Pack. Twice. She punched a Council member once. Broke his nose.”
I blinked. “She…what?”
“Hayes’s uncle,” Ivy said, clearly savoring the memory. “Told her she needed to ‘remember her place.’ She reminded him.”
A laugh burst out of me. “I…kind of love her.”
Ivy’s mouth curled. “You should. She was a badass.”
A shadow crossed her face then.
“She died too damn early,” Ivy said quietly. “Old, sure. But…too early.”
“That’s…sort of how time works,” I said, thrown.
“Not for us,” she said.
The reminder hit like a splash of cold water.
“Right,” I said. “Because of the…magic. Bond. Whatever.”
“All that.” She rocked back on her heels. “Theo’s going to try and play the noble martyr. He’s good at that. Don’t let him decide your life for you because he feels guilty.”
The bluntness of it made me blink.
“You talk like you’re…on my side,” I said slowly. “But you barely know me.”
“I know the deal,” she said simply. “And I know what it looks like when girls don’t get to choose. I’m not watching another one get shoved into a bond because a bunch of dead men thought it was a good idea. You want to run? I’ll help you hotwire your car.”
An odd thickness filled my throat.
“Thanks,” I said, my voice shaky. “That’s…good to know.”
She shrugged it off like it was nothing.
“Anyway,” she said. “You ever want to get out of the cabin and not be stared at by olds all day, swing by the rescue station. We do training runs on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You look like you could keep up.”
“I…do?” I asked, weirdly flattered.
“Legs,” she said, flicking her lighter toward my jeans-clad thighs. “Good calves. Trail runner?”
“Used to be,” I said. “Back before…life.”
“Come back,” she said. “We could use someone who knows how to splint more than a paper cut.”
She turned, flinging a hand in an offhand wave, and strolled down the street, earbuds popping back in.
I watched her go, feeling a strange mix of hopeful and overwhelmed.
This place…
It was too much. Too alive. Too complicated.
And somehow, despite myself, threads were already wrapping around me.
Patty’s stories. Jordan’s wry kindness. Ivy’s fierce pragmatism.
Theo.
Always, inadvertently, circling back to Theo.
I cursed quietly under my breath.
“Stop thinking about his shoulders,” I muttered to myself as I headed back to my car. “Stop thinking about how he stood on your porch and told an ancient werewolf elder to fuck off. Stop thinking about how your stomach flipped when he said ‘mine,’ even if you wanted to punch him.”
Rufus watched me approach, ears pricked, tail thumping once.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I told him, sliding into the driver’s seat. “I have terrible taste in men. You know this.”
He snorted. Fair.
We drove back up the mountain.
The road twisted, narrow and familiar already. The town fell away, replaced by trees and rock and sky.
The cabin sat where I’d left it, solid and waiting. The storm had washed yesterday’s tension from the air, but something lingered, like a faint charge.
On the porch, a small object sat on the low table by the chairs.
I frowned.
I hadn’t left anything there.
I climbed the steps cautiously, Rufus pressed close.
It was a jar. Mason, wide-mouthed, with a strip of paper taped to the side.
Inside, dark amber liquid gleamed.
Honey.
The paper read, in neat, slightly shaky script: FOR SWEETENING BITTER DAYS. – M.
My breath caught.
I picked it up, fingers trembling.
The lid was sealed, the ring screwed tight. Beeswax and flowers and something wild scented the air.
“How—” I began.
The answer hit me a second later.
This had been sitting somewhere in the cabin. A cupboard, maybe. A pantry. Forgotten.
Someone had found it. Brought it out. Set it here, where I’d see it.
Theo? Jordan? Patty?
I looked around. No one. Just the trees, their leaves whispering.
The journal waited on the table inside.
The mountains ringed the clearing, patient.
I stood on the threshold between two worlds, a jar of honey in one hand and a dog at my side, and realized with a heady mix of fear and reluctant exhilaration:
I was in it now.
Not just visiting. Not just inheriting a piece of property.
In the ridge. In the Pack’s awareness. In the tangled web of promises and rebellions my grandmother had left behind.
And somewhere down the slope, an Alpha who didn’t want to claim me and couldn’t quite let go of the idea that I might be his stood in a hardware store, already bracing for a fight that hadn’t fully begun.
I set the honey on the table next to the journal.
“Okay, Margaret,” I said softly, to the photo on the mantel, to the woman whose shadow stretched long over this place. “You wanted me to be careful. I will be. But I’m not going to hide. And I’m not going to let them decide for me.”
Rufus leaned against my leg, warm and solid.
“Let’s see what kind of trouble we can get into,” I told him.
Outside, on the ridge, a single clear howl rose.
It didn’t sound angry.
It sounded like an answer.
And deep in my bones, something I hadn’t known was waiting…stirred.
***