Buff.
My stomach drops so violently I swear I feel the mattress tilt. I grab blindly at the nightstand, fingers shaking, fumbling until they hit my phone.
4:07 a.m.
Too early for anything but nightmares. Too late for this to be nothing.
“Jason?” Violet’s sleepy voice brushes my shoulder, soft and confused.
Another howl rips through the quiet, closer this time, frayed at the edges. It’s full of a terror I haven’t heard from Buff since we were kids and the world was much, much crueler. Every instinct I have lights up at once.
Go.
I swing my legs off the bed, already grabbing my jeans, my pulse roaring in my ears like a storm breaking loose. “Something’s wrong,” I rasp, not trusting my voice to be steady. “Stay here. Please.” Whatever’s out there made Buff howl like that, and anything that can scare him, could sure as hell come for us next.
Violet stirs lightly behind me, murmuring something as she curls deeper into the blankets. I guess she didn’t hear me, or any of this. Good. I’d rather her be asleep than afraid.
The air outside is cold enough to sting my skin, biting at the sweat still drying on my chest. My breath is visible in the pre-dawn dark as I sprint toward the tree line, bare feet pounding against the ground, muscles already burning with the shift trying to claw its way up my spine.
I let my wolf surge just close enough to sharpen my hearing, the world snapping into brutal clarity. Every twig. Every rustle. Every panicked echo of Buff’s voice in the distance. The forest feels wrong, too still, like it’s bracing with me. Waiting.
Buff barrels into me before I reach the clearing, slamming into my chest hard enough to knock the air from my lungs. He’s in human form now. Barefoot, scraped, wild-eyed, shaking in a way I’ve only seen once before.
The night we were cast out.
The night everything we knew burned.
“Jason.” He grabs my shoulders, fingers digging in like he’s trying to anchor himself. “You gotta run. You gotta run now.”
My stomach drops. “What happened?”
Buff’s mouth opens, but nothing coherent comes out—just fragments caught on his breath. His fear spills into the air, sharp and metallic, stinging my tongue. My wolf recoils.
“I—I did it,” he chokes finally, voice cracking. “I sold it.”
My blood runs cold.
“Sold what?”
Buff’s eyes, always quick to spark with trouble or mischief or unhinged excitement, are empty now, hollowed out by something bigger than panic.
He swallows hard, shoulders shaking. “The necklace. My mother’s necklace.”
My heart caves in. “No.”
It’s like he slammed his fist right into my sternum. That necklace was everything to him. The last tie to his mother. The last proof she ever existed. He never took it off. He slept with it as a kid, clutching it in his palm, convinced if he let go, the nightmares would swallow him the same way they swallowed her.
“You didn’t,” I whisper, because anything louder might break us both.
His eyes shine, but he keeps talking like if he stops, he’ll fall apart. “I did. I had to.” His voice cracks on the last word, splintering like old wood. “I got enough for one fake ID. One ticket north.” He shoves the envelope at my chest with a shaking hand. “You can get out. You can go.”
For a heartbeat, the world blurs.
Not from fear.
Not from anger.
From the sheer, brutal weight of what he just sacrificed for me.
