Stolen Wolf

They stripped my wolf out of me on a Tuesday, in front of the whole pack, and it took less time than it takes to boil an egg.

I remember the cold most. Not the cold of the clearing, though frost had furred every blade of grass that morning—the other cold. The one that started behind my ribs and spread outward like ink dropped in water, filling the space where she used to curl up and sleep. One second I could feel her, warm and furious and utterly certain of my innocence. The next, there was nothing. A hollow with my name on it.

"Wren Calloway." Gideon Marrow didn't raise his voice. He never had to. The clearing went silent around the words the way a held breath goes silent before it breaks. "You stand accused of the murder of Alpha Corvin Marrow. The pack has spoken. The bond is severed."

I hadn't even been given a body to kneel over. Just an accusation, a trial that lasted the length of one moon, and the word of the second-in-command who'd found me standing over his father with blood on my hands that wasn't mine to explain.

"I didn't do this," I said, for the hundredth time, and for the hundredth time nobody looked at me like they believed it.

Gideon looked at me exactly once, right before the elders closed the circle. His eyes were the color of a winter lake—the kind of ice that looks solid until you're already through it. There was nothing in them. No grief for his father. No doubt about my guilt. Just the flat, finished look of a man reading the last line of a book he'd already decided he hated.

Three years I spent past the border, human and mateless and alone, learning to live without the second heartbeat that had lived in my chest since I was sixteen. Three years of flinching every time I passed water and didn't see amber eyes looking back at me from the reflection. Three years of silence where a growl used to be.

And then, nine days ago, a folded piece of paper had arrived at the diner where I washed dishes for cash, no return address, just four words in handwriting I didn't recognize:

She isn't gone. Come home.

I told myself it was cruelty. I told myself it was a trap. I came anyway, because hope is a disease and I have never once in my life been immune to it.

Which is how I ended up here, on my knees again—different circumstance, same posture—scrubbing three years of grime out of the grout in the kitchen of Marrow House while the man who destroyed my life stood in the doorway watching me do it.

"You're slower than the last one," Gideon said.

"The last one probably had two wolves' worth of energy to spare." I didn't look up. "I'm running on human."

"Careful." His voice hadn't changed in three years. Still that low, unhurried register that made every word sound like a verdict. "I let you back inside these walls as a favor to no one. You're a servant here, Wren. Not a guest. Not pack. The moment you forget that—"

"You'll do what? Banish me again?" I sat back on my heels and finally looked at him. Bigger than I remembered, or maybe I'd just forgotten how a room changed shape around an Alpha. Dark hair gone silver at one temple that hadn't been there three years ago. A new scar along his jaw, thin and pale, the kind that doesn't come from a blade. "You already took the only thing that mattered. There's nothing left to threaten me with."

Something moved behind his eyes. Small. Gone almost before I caught it. If I hadn't spent three years learning to read the absence of things—the absence of my wolf, the absence of a mate bond, the absence of anyone believing me—I might have missed it entirely.

But I didn't miss it, because in that half-second, low and impossible and unmistakable, I felt her.

A pulse. A single, distant pulse, like a heartbeat heard through a wall. Not mine—I had no bond left to carry it—but close. Closer than close. Coming, I realized with a lurch that nearly put me flat on the tile, from him.

"What," I said slowly, "was that."

Gideon's expression didn't so much as flicker. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"Don't lie to me. I felt something. Just now, I felt—" I stopped myself before I said her name out loud, some animal instinct older than the wolf I'd lost telling me to keep it close, to not hand him one more thing to take from me. "Something."

"You've been human three years, Wren. Humans imagine things." He turned to leave, and the movement was too smooth, too controlled, the kind of stillness a man builds on purpose when he doesn't trust his own face. "Finish the floor. The east hall needs it before the elders arrive tonight."

He was almost through the doorway when I said it anyway—quiet, more to myself than to him, testing the shape of a hope I'd buried three years deep.

"Briar."

He stopped.

He didn't turn around. He didn't say a word. But I watched his shoulders go rigid beneath his shirt and watched one hand curl into a fist at his side and hold there, and I understood, in the space of that single frozen second, two things with a certainty that settled into my bones like ice going solid.

My wolf was alive.

And Gideon Marrow had been keeping her caged inside himself for three years.