“There's someone else.” The confession scraped out of me raw and bleeding. “Daniel. The Alpha. I told you about him before, but it's... it's different now. More. He looks at me like Imatter, Anna. Like I'm not just some broken thing trying to put himself back together.”
My throat tightened. My eyes burned.
“I don't know if I'm allowed to want that. Don't know if wanting him means losing you. And I can't...” I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, tried to push back the tears that wanted to fall. “I can't lose you again. Can't let go of what we had just because someone new makes me feel alive.”
Silence. Perfect, terrible silence. Just me and the moonlight and the ghost of a woman who'd been my whole world for longer than I'd been anyone else's.
“I miss you.” The words cracked. Shattered. Fell apart in my mouth and came out as something closer to a sob. “Every day. Every hour. I reach for you in the morning and you're not there. I make coffee for two and then remember. I hear something funny and turn to tell you before I remember there's no one to tell.”
I sank to my knees. The earth was cold through my jeans, packed hard from centuries of feet and magic and grief that had soaked too deep to wash away.
“I don't know how to do this without you. Don't know how to be a person without you to come home to.” I pressed my forehead to the ground, felt tears slip free, felt them soak into soil that had already tasted my loss. “Please. I need to know if it's okay. Need to know if wanting him is betrayal or just... being human.”
Nothing answered.
No voice from beyond. No sign from the universe. Just me, alone in sacred ground, crying into dirt that held all my grief and gave nothing back.
I stayed there until my knees ached. Until my hands went numb. Until the tears dried up because I'd run out. Then I sat back, wiped my face with hands that wouldn't stop shaking, and looked at the moon.
Full and silver and so bright it hurt.
And in that brightness, I felt something. Not words. Not sound. Just presence. Like Anna standing just beyond sight, watching with the kind of patient love that had defined our marriage.
Permission.
Not abandonment. Not forgetting. Just acknowledgment that moving forward didn't erase what had been. That loving again didn't diminish what we'd shared. That being alive meant allowing yourself to want things, even when grief made wanting feel like betrayal.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
The moonlight settled gentle on my skin.
I stayed there on my knees, letting the quiet soak in. Letting Anna's permission settle into the spaces grief had hollowed out. The night air was cool against my tear-stained face, carrying the scent of pine and earth and?—
Wrong.
The shift happened so fast I almost missed it. One breath the forest hummed with nocturnal life, crickets and distant owls and wind through branches. The next, silence fell like a blade.
Not quiet. Silent. The difference was predators.
Cold crawled across my skin. Not the natural cold of autumn nights, but something deeper. Something that crept under skin and settled into bone with intention. My breath came out in visible puffs, crystallizing in air that had been comfortable moments ago.
I moved without thinking. Training taking over, muscle memory born of weeks spent learning to survive in a world where monsters wore fur and teeth and hunger. My hand found the silver dagger at my hip, drew it smooth and fast, settling into a defensive stance that Gideon had drilled into me until it felt natural.
The first rogue came out of the trees like smoke given form.
Massive. Wrong. Moving with the jerky, too-fast momentum of something that had forgotten how bodies were supposed to work. Its eyes reflected moonlight in shades of nothing, empty pits where intelligence should live.
I didn't hesitate.
The dagger came up, caught the rogue across the muzzle as it lunged. Silver bit deep. The creature screamed, high and awful, recoiling from metal that burned worse than fire. But it didn't go down. Didn't stop. Just circled, bleeding shadows instead of blood, waiting for another opening.
Two more emerged from the darkness. Then two more. Five of them total, spreading out in a pattern that spoke of coordination, of someone directing them from the shadows.
Five to one. Bad odds for anyone. Worse for a human who'd only been training for months against creatures who'd been killing for centuries.
But I'd survived rogues before. Survived when the world tried to take everything from me. And I wasn't dying in the same clearing where I'd said goodbye to my wife.
The second rogue lunged. I pivoted, let its momentum carry it past me, drove the dagger into its flank as it went by. Silver sizzled against corrupted flesh. The creature howled, twisted, tried to catch me with claws that would open me hip to shoulder if they connected.
