I reach into my duffel and pull out the letter, the one promising seventy-five thousand dollars for two months of live-in care, confidentiality mandatory, danger unlikely but possible. It sounded insane when I first read it. Still does. But money’s money, and I need out. Out of the city. Out of Holden’s reach.
The kind of money that lets you disappear doesn’t come clean.
I lie back on the bed, staring at the carved ceiling. Something shifts outside, just enough to make the shadows jump.
In the distance, I swear I hear howling.
2
DARIUS
The wind changes the moment she arrives.
It doesn’t howl, not yet, but it carries a different kind of silence; a silence that presses against the windows and creeps beneath the stone walls, brushing over my skin like a whisper I’ve heard before but can’t quite place. The sound of the truck reaches me from a distance, a mechanical growl swallowed by snow and pine, but I don’t need sight or sound to know something foreign has crossed the threshold of this land. I canfeelit.
More precisely, I cansmellit.
She is here.
I take in a breath, slow and careful, already knowing what’s coming. The moment her scent threads through the cold air, it hits me with a force I haven’t felt in over a century. It crashes into me like a memory I never lived—sharp, sweet, laced with something untamed. It’s the warmth of bare skin under thick blankets, the faint trace of vanilla and salt lingering after sweat and sex. It’s the forest in spring after too long a winter. It is danger, disguised in something delicate and human.
And for one long, foolish second, I almost allow myself to inhale deeper.
I turn away from the window before I do something I’ll regret, before the wolf inside me gets ideas it shouldn’t. The tumbler in my hand trembles just enough to clink against the decanter beside it, and I set it down hard enough to make the crystal chatter. That scent shouldn’t reach this far. Not through stone and snow and steel-filtered air.
But it does.
I walk toward the fireplace, placing one hand against the cool stone of the mantel as though grounding myself in the material will tether me to what little humanity I still pretend to have left. The fire crackles low, sending lazy shadows across the walls, and I try not to let my thoughts spiral too far down paths I’ve boarded shut for decades.
It’s the Blood Moon. It’s always the Blood Moon.
Every year, I tell myself I’m stronger. That I’ve pushed the beast deeper. The rituals, the solitude, the silence—they’ve carved away the worst parts of me and buried them where no one can reach. But the moment that celestial tide begins to pull, I feel it waking. Every year it takes longer to calm. Every year I lose a little more of myself. And now, with her scent flooding my lungs, with her veryexistencesetting off something primal beneath my skin, I know this year will be different.
And not in the way I’ve prepared for.
I close my eyes and focus, trying to steady my breathing. The pulse at my throat is stronger than I want it to be, and the tension climbing the back of my neck feels like it has claws. The shift is too close. The beast paces just beneath my skin, testing the walls I’ve built to hold it back, scratching at them like it knows the mortar is beginning to crumble.
Where are they now?
Cassian, buried in ice and silence, hiding from the world he once protected. Rafe, still bathing in blood and fury, lost in the ring of his own choosing. And Malek… proud, cruel Malek, watching the world burn from his golden tower, too disciplined to look back, too wounded to forgive.
Would they understand what I feel now? Would they see what’s stirring inside me and offer counsel—or warning?
Cassian would go still and say nothing, but his silence would be heavy with judgment. Rafe would laugh like it's a fight worth picking. Malek would twist it into power and burn a city for the lesson.
And I’m here.
Alone.
As always.
It was always going to end like this. The Pact was never about peace. It was a prison sentence dressed as nobility, and we all knew it. We took the vow not because we were honorable, but because we were afraid. Afraid of what we’d become. What wehadbecome. And still, we made ourselves gods in the dark.
I walk back to the window, drawn despite myself, and this time I see her. Just a glimpse. A blur of movement on the front steps, her figure outlined in the weak porch light as the wind curls her coat around her legs. She moves differently than I expected—not with hesitation, but with a kind of exhausted determination. The kind that says she’s been through hell already, and she’s not about to turn back just because the air is colder than death and the house looks like something out of a nightmare.
She’s brave. Or stupid.
Or both.
