It wandered back to the first time I’d met her.
At the time, I’d been bleeding.
Blood soaked through my jacket, warm and slick, sticking the fabric to my skin as I moved. I’d taken the long way into London, slipping through gaps in perimeter fencing where the metal had rusted thin, dropping down beneath the docks where the river stank of oil and rot, scaling the backs of half-collapsed buildings whose upper floors the city pretended no longer existed.
I knew London like the back of my hand. I’d grown up moving from place to place, never staying long enough to belong, never letting anyone look at me long enough to ask questions. My parents had been drifters before the Collapse, smugglers before the word became fashionable. When they died, I’d learned quickly that survival didn’t come from ideals.
It came from always being on the move.
I’d smuggled wolves just like me out of London more times than I could count. Smuggled them in too, when the price was right. Medicine. Food. Weapons. Information. Sometimes people. Sometimes children.
And I’d gotten cocky.
That was my first mistake.
I thought I had known every patrol pattern, every blind spot, every bored soldier who’d rather look the other way than chase shadows through sewer tunnels. I’d thought London’sunderbelly belonged to me, that I could slip through it like water through cracks in stone.
Then one British soldier—just one—had done his job properly.
The round hit my shoulder as I was dragging a half-starved shifter kid toward a sewer grate, the impact detonating white-hot pain down my arm. My breath went thin, the world narrowing to a constant ringing in my ears and the wet warmth spreading far too quickly beneath my jacket.
I shoved the kid into a drain and slammed the grate down just as voices rose and boots thundered behind me. Then a shout. Another shot split the air, close enough that I felt the pressure ripple across my ribs.
I ran.
By the time I stumbled into the alley, my vision was blurring at the edges. I leaned hard against a brick wall, breath rasping, hand clamped to my shoulder as if I could hold myself together by sheer force of will alone.
That was when I realized I wasn’t alone.
A woman was crouched near a broken crate, hood up, like she’d been searching for something among the rubbish, knife already in her hand before I’d even made a sound.
No panic flickered across her face while she assessed me, giving me the kind of look predators give when deciding whether someone is dangerous, useful, or already dead.
I’d been in front of guns and ferals and things far worse, and that look still made the hair on the back of my neck rise.
I tried to charm my way out of it. Old habits die hard.
“Evening,” I rasped, forcing a crooked grin through clenched teeth. “I’m not here to rob you, love.”
She didn’t smile.
Didn’t flinch either.
Just lifted her chin a fraction and replied, flat as stone, “You’re dripping on my boots.”
I blinked, surprised despite myself, and glanced down. Blood pooled at my feet, dark against the wet stone.
“So I am,” I said.
Her eyes never left mine.
“You’re a wolf,” she said.
It wasn’t a question.
I bared my teeth in what might have been a grin if I hadn’t been half-dead. “Depends on who’s asking.”
Her knife shifted, barely a movement, but enough to angle toward my throat.
