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“What if you’re wrong?”

“About which part?”

She opens her mouth. Closes it. Looks into the dark. “I don’t know,” she admits. But the silence that follows makes it clear she’s not going to risk any of it tonight.

So, I watch the trees.

I watch her.

And I think: three days.

I have three days in this hollow with this woman, and the supply route below is quiet and the night is long, and I have been patient—genuinely, deliberately, at considerable personal cost—for long enough.

11

MIA

Iwake to the soft light of dawn with pine needles in my fur. Echo, who spent the night snuggled against my back, has already slunk off in search of his own shenanigans. Despite the light layer of frost on the ground, I’m perfectly warm. It’s partly the reason I opted to sleep in wolf form. The other part is that I’m not sure I trusted myself around Nash as a human.

Nash is still sleeping under the oak twenty feet away. His wolf is large and dark, barely visible against the shadows and the tree roots, breathing slow and even. I know the exact moment I became aware of him during the night—sometime around two a.m. when his wolf shifted in his sleep and mine lifted her head and tracked him automatically before I could stop her.

Don’t, I’d told her.

She’d put her head back down. But she’d kept her ears angled toward him for the rest of the night.

Traitor.

I shift back to human, pull on my clothes, and take stock. The hollow is undisturbed. The supply route is silent. I check my phone and find a text from my dad, asking when I was planning to tell him I’d gotten him a babysitter. Whoops. I fire off a reply with apologies and exclamation points, but I also know he won’t hold it against me in the end. He understands the risk of collateral damage more than anyone. My heart aches, and I put the phone away.

Nash’s wolf stirs. Not awake yet but close.

I move quickly.

My pack is at the base of the pine I slept under. I find the Null vial in the inner pocket where I always keep it when traveling—small, dark glass, the hex magic inside it faintly warm against my fingertips. I uncork it. Tip it toward my mouth.

And stop.

I’m not sure how long I hesitate. Long enough for the pre-dawn grey to shift almost imperceptibly toward something lighter. Long enough for my wolf to notice what I’m holding and go stiff with an opinion she’s not keeping to herself.

It’s just that out here, it feels different. In my apartment, in the city, with the pack and the meetings and the constant noise of everything that needs doing, taking the Null is maintenance. Practical. Like vitamins.

Out here, it feels like a choice I’m making against something specific.

Against him.

I take it anyway.

Cork the vial. Tuck it back into its hiding place. Tell my wolf to mind her business.

She doesn’t, but that’s nothing new.

By the time Nash shifts and gets dressed, I have a fire built and a reason to be looking at something that isn’t him. The morning light is coming through the canopy in long gold shafts, and the woods smell like cold earth and woodsmoke, and I am completely, professionally fine.

I hear him moving behind me.

Then nothing for a few minutes. He’s gone into the trees, I realize, and comes back carrying something that turns out to be a rabbit he’s apparently already cleaned and dressed, because of course he has. Nash Cross woke up in the woods, and his first instinct was to provide.

My wolf notices this with entirely too much enthusiasm.