Canon tried one last time. “Shivs. Don’t do anything stupid. We got enough heat from the Kings, and Hart’s people are already poking around. If you go after her—”
But I was already moving. I tore off my cut, letting it drop to the floor. The T-shirt underneath was glued to my chest, but I ripped it off, then kicked free of my jeans. The shift hit harder this time, like being sucker punched by a freight train. My bones shattered, reformed, muscles twisting, skin splitting, everything in me stretching, changing, until I was nothing but fur and fang and need.
The wolf howled—loud, ragged, echoing off the cinderblock walls. Then I bolted, claws skittering on linoleum, out the side door and into the night.
I didn’t look back. Didn’t need to. Behind me, I heard Moab’s laugh, saw Canon’s face, a mix of fear and pride and maybe a little grief. But ahead, all I saw was the hunt.
Her scent was out there, mingling with the rain and the rot and the whiskey-sweet air. I didn’t know what I would do when I found her, didn’t care. The wolf knew, and that was enough.
I ran, every muscle firing, lungs full of mud and wind and wildness. The world blurred around me. The only thing that mattered was the trail ahead, and the impossible, inescapable need to follow it.
Carrie
The day after Daddy’s funeral, I made my first drive as CEO in the kind of Kentucky fog they write country songs about—thick as old milk, swallowing up even the memory of sunlight, the world outside my Escalade rendered in shifting shades of gray. The highway bled into a two-lane, then a one-lane, then finally the narrow vein of cracked asphalt that threaded the backwoods between town and Stillwater Mansion. On either side, the trees crowded in, limbs slick with rain, forming a cathedral arch.
Every other second, I checked the rearview, then the side mirror, then the rearview again, as if expecting someone to materialize from the haze and ride my bumper all the way home. I gripped the steering wheel so tight the leather squeaked, my knuckles the color of Bone China.
I could still taste the boardroom in my mouth: the coffee gone cold, the metallic edge of fear, and the bitter aftershock of Marcus Ellery’s smile. He’d opened the meeting with acondolence so artful you almost believed he meant it, then spent the next hour gutting my authority with surgical precision. At one point, he’d pushed a document across the table with two fingers, like he was sliding an ace up his sleeve. “For your signature, Ms. Stillwater,” he’d said, voice low enough that I’d had to lean in. The paper was hostile, legalese so dense it had to be weaponized.
I’d let him see my hand shake, just for a second. Enough to give him what he wanted. Enough to make him underestimate me.
Afterwards, I’d ducked into the powder room and locked the door, but even in there, with the scented candles and the piped-in bluegrass, I felt the eyes on me. Felt them between my shoulder blades, in the curve of my neck, in the meat of my back where the knife would go.
Now, hours later, I was still riding the panic, the sense of being stalked. The fog did nothing to help; if anything, it made the world seem thinner, more porous, like anything could step out of the gloom and force me off the road.
I rolled down the window, just a crack, letting in a ribbon of cold air wet enough to sting. The smell was pure Kentucky—earth, rain, and the distant tang of something animal, something wild. I inhaled, hoping it would steady me. It didn’t. My hands still trembled, the bourbon I’d poured in Daddy’s office sloshing somewhere in my gut, equal parts courage and regret.
The woods pressed closer. The last turnoff to Stillwater was marked only by a battered green sign pitted with buckshot. I slowed, eased the Escalade left, and crawled the last mile, headlights carving tunnels through the white. Somewhere behind me, the memory of Marcus Ellery was still pacing, still smiling that knowing, shit-eating grin.
A branch scraped the roof, sudden and sharp, like a fingernail on skin. I flinched, almost swerving into the ditch, and cursedout loud. “Get it together, Carrie,” I muttered, voice hoarse. The sound of my own name helped, somehow. I gripped the wheel tighter, forced my breathing to even out.
The world outside was nothing but moving shadow, but I kept seeing things at the edge of the beams—a shape darting between trees, the flash of an eye, the lunge of something lean and hungry. I told myself it was just the fog, just my nerves, but the feeling crawled deeper. I was not alone.
I rounded the last curve, the road leveling out for a stretch bordered on one side by the drop-off to Mill Creek and on the other by a wall of limestone and bramble. That’s when I heard it—a rifle shot, flat and distant, echoing off the rock face. I instinctively ducked, even though I was shielded by two tons of Detroit engineering. The shot was followed by a sound I’ll never forget: a howl that turned to a yelp, then a wet, strangled whimper.
It was close. Too close.
Something hit the road in front of me—a blur of motion, gray and white and massive. I slammed both feet on the brakes, felt the anti-lock kick in, and for a heartbeat, the world stopped. Then the Escalade lurched, tires shrieking, and I spun the wheel hard enough to wrench my shoulder. The headlights carved wild shapes in the mist before the car screeched to a stop, nose just shy of the ditch.
In the twin beams, sprawled across the blacktop, was the biggest goddamn wolf I’d ever seen. Even lying on its side, it was longer than a grown man, with shoulders like a linebacker and a coat of silver so dense it shimmered. Blood spattered the asphalt, pooling from a wound in its flank. The animal thrashed once, back legs digging at the road, then stilled.
My hands hovered over the wheel, frozen. My breath sawed in and out, fogging the inside of the windshield. The engine idled, throwing off heat, but I was cold to the marrow. My brainraced through every story I’d ever heard—rabies, predators, that old urban legend about wolves in Kentucky being extinct since the sixties. I remembered Daddy showing me a picture of the last one, stuffed and mounted at the state museum, faded eyes staring through time.
But this thing was real. Bleeding. Dying.
For a long moment, I just sat there, waiting for it to get up and finish the job. But it didn’t move. The only motion was the slow spread of blood, inching toward the front tire. In the quiet, I heard the echo of the gunshot again, replaying in my head.
I fumbled for my phone, fingers clumsy, and dialed 911, but the signal out here was garbage. Two bars, maybe one, and then nothing. I tried anyway, listening for a ring that never came.
I stared at the wolf, waiting for it to blink, to breathe, to vanish. The fog thickened, muting the world, and it felt like I was suspended between seconds. In the distance, another shot rang out—closer this time, somewhere in the trees behind me. I looked up in time to catch movement at the tree line: two human shapes, dark against the pale mist, one carrying something that glinted.
Hunters. Or worse.
Adrenaline took over. I threw the Escalade in reverse, tires squealing, and backed up until the wolf’s body was framed dead center in the headlights. I shoved the gear into park, popped the glove box, and pulled out the only weapon I had—Daddy’s old Smith & Wesson .38. My hands shook so bad I almost dropped it.
I scanned the woods, heart knocking. The men had vanished. For all I knew, they were gone, or waiting, or circling around. Maybe they were after the wolf, maybe after something else. Maybe after me.
I looked back at the animal. Its eyes were open, twin coins of green catching the light, watching me with something thatlooked a lot like accusation. Or maybe a plea. The blood kept coming, slower now, but enough to stain the road and the grass at the shoulder.
