Chapter 4

I don't remember deciding to run.

One second I'm down on the floor of that pack house. The next I'm through the back doors and gone into the trees, lungs on fire, that wrong howl still bouncing around the inside of my skull.

Bly runs with me. Under my skin, in my legs, shoving speed into me I never earned hauling plates at a diner.

Faster, she keeps saying. Faster, it heard us, it heard him say your name out loud—

My lungs are two coals. My apron's still on, the strings whipping out behind me. I run like the split cheek and the double shift and this whole rotten day never happened.

Branches tear at my arms. I don't slow down.

I hit the place where the woods give out onto the county road, and there's a truck already sitting there.

Engine running. Headlights off.

A tow rig, light bar dark on top, BOONE & SON stenciled on the door — with the SON half scratched off.

The driver's window is already rolled down. The guy behind the wheel leans across the seat like he's been parked here since sunup waiting on exactly one person, and that person is me.

"Frankie." Not a question. He says it like we sat next to each other in grade school. "Get in."

I do not get in. "Who the hell are you?"

"Wyatt." He looks past me, out at the treeline, and whatever he sees back there wipes every bit of easy off his face. "And we really don't have time for the part where you decide I'm a serial killer. Get in the truck."

"Everybody keeps saying my name today like they own it." I don't move an inch. "I've had a real bad day, Wyatt. Give me one good reason."

"Your dad."

That one lands.

"Cal paid my old man to keep a truck gassed up and pointed at these woods. Said one night his girl would come running out of them. Said when she did, there'd better be somebody sitting here who wasn't Coldwater."

His jaw goes tight.

"That was fifteen years ago. I've been the one in this seat the last four of them. Now get in — because whatever's back there in the dark is not a rogue, and it is not slowing down."

Fifteen years.

Same fifteen years as a crayon drawing I made when I was six.

I get in the truck.

He's got us rolling before my door's even shut. No headlights, taking the black road like he's run it a hundred nights.

My hands start shaking now that nobody's looking at them. I shove one down into my apron pocket to hide it — and my fingers close around the thing Dot gave me.

A box.

Small, black iron, way heavier than something that size has any business being. There's a mark burned into the lid, some shape I don't recognize.

No keyhole. Not on the lid, not on the sides. Nowhere to put a key.

And it's warm.

Not warm from my pocket. Warm like it's alive. Warm like it's got a pulse of its own — and the farther we get from that howling behind us, the harder it beats against my palm.

"Where'd you get that." Wyatt's voice has gone dead flat.

"Eyes on the road." I close my fist over it. "Dot gave it to me. Said my dad left it with her years back. Why?"

"Because your dad left one just like it with my old man, too."

He swallows.

"Day Cal died, ours went cold. Never warmed up again. Sat in a drawer in the garage going on fifteen years."

His eyes cut down to my fist. Then back up to my face. And there's something in his look now that I don't like one single bit.

"Yours is warm, Frankie."

"Give it here." He takes a hand off the wheel and reaches for it.

The second his fingers get close, the box goes cold and dead as a hung-up phone. He jerks his hand back like it burned him.

"Yeah." Real quiet now. "Figured. My old man spent years trying to crack his open. Never once budged." His eyes cut to me and hold. "It was only ever going to open for you."

So whatever this thing is, it's mine. The first thing in twenty-one years that belongs to nobody but me — and I don't have the first clue what it does.

The mark on the lid has started to glow. Dull red, like a stove burner coming up to heat.

The blood from my cheek's run all the way down to my jaw. One drop lets go and falls — lands dead center on that glowing mark.

The box goes hot as a struck match against my hand.

Then it clicks open.

By itself.

No lock, no key, and I never went near a catch. But the lid swings up on its own hinge, and there's a photograph inside.

Old. Curled up at all four corners. A woman in a hospital bed, holding a newborn wrapped in a gray blanket, looking down at that baby like the sun rises and sets out of it.

The baby is me.

I'd know that squashed little face anywhere. Marla's got the exact same photo stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a peach.

Except in her copy, she's the one holding me.

In this one, the woman holding me is not Marla. And I have never seen her before in my life.

I turn the photo over with a thumb that won't quit shaking.

There's writing on the back. My father's hard little print — the same hand that used to tuck notes into my school lunches.

Frankie — if this box is warm, then they've found you. Don't go back to the pack. Don't trust the Alpha, no matter what his face does when he looks at you.

Then one more line. Pressed down so hard the pen tore clean through the paper.

Don't trust your mother. She isn't yours.

And neither am I.