Stolen Wolf

The study hadn't changed. That was the first thing I noticed, and it undid me more than I expected it to on the same wall of ledgers, the same dark green curtains, and the same fireplace that had never once, in all the years I'd known this house, been allowed to go cold. Corvin used to keep peppermint in a dish on the desk. Someone still did. The dish just belonged to a different man now.

Gideon didn't sit. He stood with his back to the fire, arms crossed, watching me the way you'd watch a door you weren't sure was locked.

"Say it again," he said.

"Say what?"

"Her name. Say it again, and tell me how you knew it."

So he hadn't brought me here to threaten me. He'd brought me here because he needed to know how much I already understood, and that told me something almost as useful as a confession—Gideon Marrow was afraid. Not of me. Of what I might do with what I knew.

"I felt her," I said. "This morning, in the kitchen, when you looked at me like that. A pulse. Like a second heartbeat that wasn't mine. "I made myself hold his gaze, even though every instinct I had left wanted to look at the floor the way I'd trained myself to for three years. "I heard you and Rhys in the east hall an hour ago. I know she's inside you. I know you didn't take her to punish me."

Something in his jaw went tight. "You were eavesdropping."

"I was polishing a sconce eight feet from where you were having a conversation about my own life. Forgive me for listening."

For a long moment he said nothing, and the fire popped once in the grate, and I watched him decide—visibly, like watching a man cross a bridge he'd built specifically so he'd never have to use it.

"Sit down," he said finally.

"I'd rather stand."

"Wren." My name, from him, still did something complicated to the space under my ribs, and I hated that it did. "Sit down. This will take longer if you don't."

I sat. He didn't.

"The night my father died," Gideon said, "I got to the clearing before anyone else. Before the elders. Before you were found standing over him. I got there in time to see him already gone, and I got there in time to see something no one else saw, because everyone who came after me was looking at you."

My pulse climbed into my throat. "What did you see?"

"Briar," he said, "tearing herself out of your body to get to him. Not fighting you for control. Fighting past you—through you—like something was pulling her toward my father so hard it didn't matter that it was killing the two of you to do it."

The room tilted very slightly, or maybe that was just me.

"That's not possible," I said. "A wolf doesn't leave her human. Not unless the human's dead. Not unless—"

"Unless the bond is being severed from the outside by something with more power than a mate bond has any right to fight." Gideon finally moved, crossing to the desk, opening a drawer I remembered being locked in even when we were children. He set something on the blotter between us—a strip of dark leather, old, etched with a spiral that made my eyes want to slide away from it the longer I looked. "My father was investigating something before he died. Something that had been quietly killing bonded wolves along the northern border for two years and covering the deaths as accidents. He never got to tell me what he found. But whatever it was, it came for him that night, and it used Briar — used you — to get close enough to do it."

"So I really was standing over him."

"You were standing over him because whatever ripped your wolf half out of your body dropped you both the second the job was done. You didn't kill my father, Wren. Something used you to reach him, and then it let the whole pack believe you'd done it, because a grieving Alpha's son needing someone to blame is the easiest cover a monster could ask for."

I didn't realize I was crying until the words in front of me went blurry. Three years. Three years of a diner apron and a cold bond and a town where nobody knew my name, and the entire time, the truth had been sitting in a locked drawer eight feet from where I used to sleep as a child.

"Then why," I said, my voice cracking down the middle of the word, "did you let them banish me? You were there. You saw it. You knew—"

"I knew that whatever took Briar from you wasn't finished," Gideon said, and for the first time since I'd come back through the gates of Marrow House, something raw showed all the way through the ice in his voice. "I knew that if it realized you were still alive, still bonded, still a target, it would come back and finish what it started. Banishing you was the only way I could think of, in the middle of the worst night of my life, to make the whole pack believe you were nothing. Unbonded. Powerless. Not worth a second look."

"You could have told me."

"I couldn't tell anyone. Not you, not Rhys, not the elders. If the word got back to whatever's out there that I knew what it was—"

"So instead you let me believe, for three years, that the man who was supposed to protect this pack thought I was a murderer." My hands were shaking again, worse than they had over the grout that morning. "You let me hate you."

"Yes." No hesitation. No apology in the word, just the flat weight of a decision he'd clearly made peace with long before tonight. "Because you hating me kept you alive. And I would make that same choice again in a heartbeat, Wren, because the alternative was you dead in that clearing next to my father, and I have had exactly one nightmare, every night, for three years, and it is that version of that night instead of this one."

The fire cracked again. Neither of us moved.

"Then why bring me back now?" I said. "Why the letter. Why any of this."

Gideon's eyes went to the leather strip on the desk, to the spiral pattern that still made something in the back of my skull itch when I looked at it too long.

"Because two nights ago," he said quietly, "it killed again. Same signature. Same border. And this time it left something behind at the scene that it's never left before."

He reached into the drawer a second time and set down a folded scrap of fabric—torn, singed at one edge, but unmistakable even three years had faded.

It was mine. A scrap of the dress I'd been wearing the night his father died.

"It's telling us it knows you're back," Gideon said. "Which means we have days, maybe less, before it comes to finish what it started in that clearing. And the only chance either of you has of surviving that—you or Briar—is if I give her back to you before it gets here."

"Then give her back."

"It isn't that simple." For the first time all night, he looked less like an Alpha and more like a man standing at the edge of something he didn't know how to survive either. "A wolf that's spent three years learning to live inside someone else's body doesn't just slide back into her own like nothing happened. The transfer has to be done slowly, deliberately, skin to skin, night after night, until her instincts trust yours again instead of mine."

The word "skin" sat in the air between us like a struck match.

"How slowly," I said, very carefully.

Gideon looked at me for a long moment, and something in his expression—not ice now, not flat at all—made the hollow behind my ribs pulse once, hard, like it recognized something before I let myself.

"However long it takes," he said. "Starting tonight."