Mavis showed up on a Thursday with a canvas bag full of things I hadn't asked for.
Dried chamomile. A jar of local honey. Two paperbacks with cracked spines. A bag of the specific coffee beans she knew I liked, the ones you couldn't get in Silverpeak without driving two hours to the nearest city. She set the bag on my kitchen counter, kicked off her boots at the door, and said, "You look like garbage. I'm making dinner."
"I ate," I said.
"Toast doesn't count."
"How did you know I had toast."
"Because you always have toast when you're pretending to have eaten."
She pulled a pan down from my cabinet without asking permission. Barnaby watched her from the corner of the living room, his head low, his eyes tracking her every movement. She didn't look at him directly. She never did. That was one of the reasons he tolerated her.
Mavis had been driving up from wherever she lived — she never gave a straight answer about the address — every ten days or so since I'd arrived at Silverpeak. She never came empty-handed. She never stayed long enough to be a burden. She never asked questions I couldn't answer.
She was the only person in my life who had never once made me feel like I owed her an explanation.
I sat at the kitchen table while she cooked. The window over the sink framed the woods in gray-and-black. It was almost dusk. Barnaby crept forward inch by inch until he was lying under my chair, his weight pressed lightly against my ankle.
"He's better," Mavis said, without turning around.
"He's braver."
"Same thing sometimes."
I ran my thumb along the edge of the table. "He ate from my hand yesterday. First time."
She didn't make a big deal of it. She just nodded once, stirred whatever was in the pan, and said, "Good."
That was another one of the reasons I let her in.
She left after dinner. At the door she paused, one hand on the frame, and looked at me for a second longer than usual. Something moved behind her eyes — something considered, then set aside.
"Theron's hosting a banquet next Saturday," she said. "Regional alliance thing. Rogue activity's been picking up."
"I don't do banquets."
"You should come."
"Mavis."
"Eloise." She smiled, small and stubborn. "You've been in this cabin for months. Come stand in a room with people for two hours. Wear something that isn't gray. I'll pick you up."
I opened my mouth to argue.
She was already stepping onto the porch. "Saturday. Seven."
The door clicked shut behind her.
I didn't know then that somewhere in the same territory, on the same day, a man I did not remember had already arrived.
---
He came in quietly. That was what I would learn later.
No announcement. No pack escort. A single duffel bag, an enforcer's alias on the visitor logs at Silverpeak's border station, and the deliberate, careful suppression of an aura most wolves in this territory couldn't have named if they'd felt it. He took the small guest cabin on the eastern ridge and spent his first three days walking rogue tracks through the pines, reading disturbance patterns in soil and snapped undergrowth.
He did not come near my end of the territory.
He did not have to.
He knew I was there. He had known for months.
And he did nothing.
I would not understand any of this until much later. On the day he arrived, I was scrubbing a tonic pot in my sink, teaching Barnaby that a dropped spoon was not the same as an incoming blow, and thinking absently that Mavis had brought too much honey and I would never use it all.
---
On Saturday, I let her put me in a dark green dress.
It was the softest thing I owned — one of the few things I'd bought since Silverpeak, a small quiet indulgence I'd never told anyone about. The neckline hid the scar on my neck. That was the only reason I said yes.
Mavis drove. She talked the whole way about nothing important — a book she was reading, a neighbor's ridiculous dog, the price of gas — and I let the words wash over me like weather. I was already calculating exits. Two hours. I'd stay two hours. I'd stand at the edge of the room, smile politely if someone spoke to me, and be back in the cabin before Barnaby had time to worry.
Silverpeak's banquet hall was a great timbered lodge on the north side of the territory, warm with firelight and full of noise. Wolves I didn't know clustered in groups, drinking, laughing, sizing each other up in that particular way packs did when alliances were being renegotiated. I took a glass of something from a passing tray and did not drink it.
Mavis vanished almost immediately. That was strange. I noted it and set it aside.
I moved toward the far wall. Kept my back to the wood. Watched the room the way I'd learned to watch Shadowmere — as a system of signals, distances, warnings.
The crowd shifted.
Someone opened a side door and a draft moved through the hall, cool and pine-scented, ruffling the edges of tablecloths and lifting the hair at my temples. I turned my face into it instinctively, grateful for the cold.
Across the room, a man went still.
I didn't see him yet. I only felt, in some strange animal part of me that had been silent for months, the smallest twitch. Like a door in a locked room shifting on its hinges.
My wolf, wherever she was hiding, lifted her head.
