Luna Loretta's knock came before I'd finished folding my second shirt.
I didn't need to answer. She let herself in the way she always did—like every room in this pack house belonged to her, which, I supposed, it did.
"Camille." Her voice was soft. Almost warm. That alone made my stomach clench. "You don't have to leave, you know."
I kept folding. The shirt was threadbare at the elbows. I'd owned it since I was fifteen.
"There's a place for you here." She settled into the doorway, her silk robe perfectly pressed even at this hour. "You know this house better than anyone. The schedules, the staff, the pantry. Brendan and Shiloh will need someone reliable to manage things. Someone... discreet."
I finally looked up at her.
There it was—that particular smile. The one that looked like kindness from a distance and felt like a leash up close.
"You want me to stay and clean their rooms," I said. "Make their bed."
"I want you to have a home, dear."
"No." The word came out steadier than I expected. "You want a servant who's too broken to say no. Someone who'll smile at Shiloh across the breakfast table and pretend she didn't just watch the man she loved spit on her in front of the whole pack."
Loretta's smile didn't waver, but something behind her eyes went cold.
"You're being dramatic."
"Brendan told me to go find the border-worker." I pressed my mother's pendant between my fingers and held her gaze. "I'm going."
For a long moment, she just looked at me. Then she turned and walked away without another word, her slippers silent on the marble floor.
I zipped my bag shut.
---
The rain started before I reached the tree line.
By the time the border cabins came into view, I was soaked through to the skin, my bag hanging heavy on one shoulder, my hair plastered flat against my face. I'd cut my palm on a broken fence post somewhere in the dark. It wasn't deep, but it stung, and the rain kept washing it open.
The cabins were rougher than I'd imagined. Low-slung, wooden, the kind of structures that looked like they'd been repaired so many times the original walls were barely there anymore. Yellow light bled from one window.
I stood at the door for a second. Brendan's voice came back to me—*worthless breeding with worthless*—and I thought about turning around. Going where, I had no idea. Anywhere but back.
I knocked.
The door opened, and I braced myself.
The man who answered was tall. Broad-shouldered. He wore a plain gray shirt and work boots, and his dark eyes moved from my face to my dripping hair to the cut on my hand in one quiet sweep. He didn't leer. He didn't smirk. He just stepped back and held the door open wider.
"Come in," he said. "I'll get a towel."
His name was Colton Hunter. I knew that much. Brendan had thrown his name at me like an insult. But the man who pressed a clean, dry towel into my hands and turned to put a kettle on without asking whether I wanted tea—that man didn't match the insult at all.
I stood there dripping on his floor and didn't know what to say.
"Sit," he said, pulling out a chair. Not an order. Just an offering.
I sat.
---
The next morning, the rain had softened to a grey drizzle. Colton showed me the cabin that would be mine—small, with a crooked window latch and a draft that came through the south wall—and didn't apologize for how bare it was. I liked that. I'd had enough of people wrapping ugly things in pretty words.
He was fixing a loose board on the cabin step when he noticed my hand. The cut had scabbed overnight but was still raw at the edges.
"Let me look at that."
I almost said *it's fine*. Instead, I held it out.
His fingers closed gently around my wrist, tilting my palm toward the pale morning light. He was careful. Methodical. And then—
The spark hit like something electric and bone-deep at once, shooting up through my arm and straight into the hollow place in my chest where the mate bond had been ripped out. I gasped.
Colton went very still.
We looked at each other. His eyes were darker than I'd realized, and something in them had shifted—attentive, intent, the way a person looks when they suddenly recognize something they weren't expecting to find.
The ache in my chest—the one that had been screaming since last night—quieted.
Just slightly. Just enough.
"You should keep this clean," he said finally, his voice low and even. But his hand didn't move away.
Neither did mine.
