PROLOGUE #2
Marcus had followed Luca in and was standing in the doorway to the hall, one shoulder against the frame.
Luca saw him glance between the two of them.
Sebastian at the window, unmoving; Luca standing in the center of the room with his jaw set.
And then Marcus’s gaze dropped. He pushed off the frame and walked back toward the kitchen without a word.
Luca heard his boots stop at the hole in the floor, a pause.
A man looking at something he’d already catalogued and was now reconsidering.
“You know,” Luca said. Not a question.
Sebastian didn’t answer. His reflection showed nothing. The same gray eyes, the same set of the mouth, the silver at his temples catching what little light came through the window. He had been standing there long enough that the dust on the sill had settled into the creases of his fingerprints.
“Why are we here, Sebastian?”
The question hung. Sebastian’s hand moved then, just once, a single finger tapping the sill, not the impatient tap of a man waiting, deliberate, evenly spaced, the rhythm of someone counting something.
“That isn’t what you asked,” he said.
It wasn’t. Luca had asked about the pack. Sebastian had answered about the pack. The rest (why this town, why a town with wolves, why now, why the secrecy) was underneath, and Sebastian had heard it. Had chosen not to.
Luca stood there. His maker stood at the window.
The silence between them had pressed close, two centuries of it, compounded by withholding, by questions Sebastian had never answered and Luca had stopped asking.
Not out of resignation. Out of the understanding that some men built their power by never showing their hand, and Sebastian had been building his for four hundred years.
After a while, Luca turned and walked out of the room. Sebastian didn’t call after him. The dust on the sill didn’t move.
Sebastian called them down twenty minutes before first light.
He was standing in the front room when they came in, not sitting, his weight settled evenly across both feet, the stance he’d held for four centuries.
A man who had learned to stand without leaning four centuries ago and hadn’t seen a reason to change.
“Three things,” he said. No preamble. No good morning. “No feeding in town. No fighting anyone who doesn’t start it. If something starts, walk away.”
He delivered each rule the same way. Flat, declarative, the cadence of a man reading from a contract he’d written himself. His gray eyes moved from Marcus to Luca and back, resting on each of them just long enough to ensure the words had taken hold.
Marcus nodded. Once, sharp, the same nod he gave treatment plans. “Understood.”
Luca nodded. “Yes.”
Neither of them asked why. Neither of them said, Why are we in a town with a pack if we can’t feed here?
or What are we doing here at all? or Why this town, Sebastian, when there are a hundred others without wolves?
They didn’t ask because they both knew what would happen if they did: Sebastian would answer with a smaller question.
Is there a problem with the rules? Or worse, he’d say nothing at all, and they’d stand in that front room until the sky lightened and they had to go upstairs.
The question would remain exactly where Sebastian had put it.
Unanswered, deliberate, a stone in the path they were expected to walk around.
So, they didn’t ask. Marcus turned and went down the hall toward the room he’d taken off the kitchen, where the door opened onto the side yard and the dry well.
Practical. Marcus was nothing if not practical.
Luca went upstairs to his room at the back, with the warped window and the view of the ridge, and lay on the floorboards with his arm over his eyes and listened to the house settle.
He didn’t sleep. He never did. But after an hour. Maybe two, time moved differently in the still hours before dawn. He got up and went downstairs for water he didn’t need.
Sebastian was still at the front window.
He hadn’t moved. Luca could see that from the hallway.
The same stance, shoulders square, hands at his sides, his reflection a pale smudge in the glass where the darkness outside met the darker darkness of the room.
The dust on the windowsill was undisturbed.
Sebastian had been standing there long enough that the fine layer of plaster grit and dead insects had settled around the edges of his boots on the floorboards, and he hadn’t shifted his weight once.
Luca stopped in the doorway. He didn’t speak.
Speaking to Sebastian in this mood got him nothing, the words hit a wall and nothing came back.
He’d learned that in Naples, in the early years, when Sebastian would stand at the window of whatever room they were in and look out at whatever city lay beyond it with the same still intensity, and Luca would ask what he was looking for.
Sebastian would say, Nothing, and mean it.
He was looking at the gravel road now. At the tree line beyond it.
At the dark between the trees where the ridge began its climb.
Luca followed his gaze and saw nothing. No movement, no light, just the impenetrable black of predawn forest. But Sebastian was seeing something.
Or looking for it. Or waiting for it to look back.
Four hundred years. Luca tried, sometimes, to imagine what that meant.
Four centuries of nights, of standing at windows, of carrying whatever Sebastian carried without setting it down.
He couldn’t. Two hundred was enough. Two hundred had given him a bone-deep weariness.
A man who had been young too long, his youth worn thin, years out of fit, and sometimes he caught Sebastian looking at him with something that wasn’t quite pity and wasn’t quite envy.
He understood that Sebastian had stopped being young so long ago that he’d forgotten what it cost.
The dust didn’t move. Sebastian didn’t turn. His reflection showed nothing. The silver at his temples, the line of his jaw, the absolute stillness of a man who had learned to become part of the architecture.
Luca turned and went back upstairs. The treads creaked under him. The banister wobbled. He didn’t look back to see if Sebastian had heard him go.
In his room, the warped window let in a thin stream of cold air. The ridge was a black line against a sky that was starting to gray at the edges. Luca sat beneath the window with his back against the wall, his rifle beside him and waited for the day to come.
Downstairs, Sebastian stayed at the window. The gravel road lay empty. The trees held their silence. And whatever he was watching for, whatever had brought them to this rotting house at the end of a dead-end road in a town with wolves, stayed where he had put it, unspoken, carried, his alone.