Chapter 1

Bly wakes up screaming, and I almost walk face-first into a pine.

Seven years I've carried this wolf around like a second heartbeat. Quiet, patient, never once made a fuss.

Now she's throwing herself against the inside of my skull like she wants out through my teeth.

He's here, she keeps saying. He's here, he's here, he's here.

"Who's here?" One hand's on a tree. The other still smells like the fry line at the Blue Spoon.

I worked a double. My feet are done. Whatever this is, I don't have it in me tonight.

"Bly. Use your words."

She gives me one.

Mate.

Then the woods go quiet in that wrong way — the way they do right before a storm makes up its mind about you.

A man steps out from between the boundary stones.

I smell him before I get a good look. Woodsmoke, and something colder under it, like snow off a mountain.

It hits the back of my throat and my knees actually stop to think about it. Whatever's in me leans toward whatever's in him, hard, and for one stupid second I understand every dumb thing my mother has ever done for a man.

Then he sees my face. And he stops dead.

I know what a man looks like when I've disappointed him. I've been collecting that look my whole life.

This isn't that.

This one's looking at me the way you'd look at a snake curled up in your kid's crib.

He takes a step back. Away from me. From his own mate.

"Say your name." Low voice. The kind used to being listened to the first time.

"You knock a girl's wolf loose in the middle of the woods and the first thing out of you is give me your name?"

I straighten up. My dad taught me never to let anybody watch my hands shake, so they don't.

"You go first, hotshot."

His jaw works. "Silas Vane. Alpha of Coldwater."

He pulls a breath in through his nose, slow, like he's hunting for a smell that ought to be there and isn't.

"And you," he says, "shouldn't exist."

"Real warm welcome. Runs in the pack?"

"You've got no scent." He says it quiet, which is somehow worse than if he'd yelled it. "I'm standing downwind of you close enough to touch, and there's nothing. Not the diner. Not your wolf. Not one thread of you."

His eyes go over me slow, like he's looking for the seam. "You know what somebody has to do to a she-wolf to make her smell like empty air? To bury her that deep?"

I don't. And Bly's gone still as a held breath, which she never does.

"Neither do I," he says. "And that's why I'm backing away from my own mate in the dark like she's live wire."

"Frankie Mercer." I make myself say it steady. "Cal Mercer's kid. The Warden."

Something crosses his face at my father's name — there and gone.

"You've probably got his picture up on a wall somewhere," I say. "Right next to all the ways this pack forgot he died for it."

For half a second he doesn't look like an Alpha at all. He looks like a man doing math and hating the answer.

"Go home, Frankie Mercer." Every word set down careful, like he's scared of dropping one. "Lock your door. Don't come near the pack house."

"You're my—"

"I know what I am." It comes out of him like it draws blood. "That's the whole problem."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you get." He's already turning. "Whatever happened out here tonight, you bury it. You tell nobody. You especially don't tell your mother."

That stops me. "What's my mother got to do with any—"

But he's gone.

Not walked-off gone. Gone like the dark just folded him up and swallowed him, faster than anything that size has a right to move.

Bly paces under my skin, whining, wanting to chase. I stand there in my apron, smelling like other people's dinners, and I don't let her.

He was scared of us, she says. Small and confused. Frankie. Why is an Alpha scared of us?

"I don't know," I tell her.

And that's the thing that keeps my feet moving the whole way home. I really, truly don't.

The kitchen light's on when I get back. That means Marla's still up, which is never good news.

She's at the table with a bottle in one hand and a cigarette she's let burn down to the filter in the other.

The screen door slaps shut behind me. She looks up.

And every drop of color drains out of her face.

"Ma. It's just me."

"You've got her eyes." It comes out flat. Dead sober. That scares me more than the drinking ever has. "Right now. In this light. You've got her eyes."

"Whose eyes, Ma?"

The bottle slips in her grip. She catches it, and just like that the drunk slides back down over her like a shade pulled shut.

"Nobody's. Forget it." She squints at me. "You reek of some man."

"I reek of the fryer. I pulled a double so you'd have—"

"You reek of him."

She's up too fast. The room shoves her a step sideways, but her hand still finds my face clean.

The stone in her ring opens my cheek. Warm runs down to my jaw.

"You stay away from that pack house." Her fingers dig into my chin. "You keep your head down, you keep your mouth shut, and you stay nobody. You hear me?"

That last word doesn't come out mean.

It comes out like a prayer.

I press my sleeve to my cheek and just look at her. Because in seven years of this — seven years of getting hit and blamed and stepped over — I have never once heard my mother sound like she was trying to keep me alive.

I go up to my room before she can turn it into a fight.

There's a piece of paper taped to my door.

I didn't put it there. Marla can't manage the stairs after her third drink, so it wasn't her either.

It's a kid's drawing. Crayon, pressed thick and waxy — a little girl with yellow hair, standing under a big black tree.

Somebody wrote three words along the bottom in fat, careful letters.

I FOUND YOU.

I stand there a long time.

Because I know that drawing.

I drew it. I was maybe six years old. I remember that black crayon, how I bore down too hard and tore the paper right at the base of the tree.

The tear's still there. Same spot. My little rip, fifteen years old.

I made this picture once, when I was six. I never saw it again after that.

So somebody's had it all this time. Fifteen years.

And tonight they walked up to my house in the dark and nailed it to my door.