Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MILO
Only you.
The words had followed me back inside like something alive, making themselves home in a space where I couldn’t quite ignore them.
And this was the second time Calder had said them.
The first had been strange enough.
Do they all watch people from the trees?
No. Only you.
This time felt… different somehow.
Only you, Milo Hart.
My full name rolled off his tongue in an unfamiliar way. He’d said it carefully, like something worth holding onto.
I stood for a moment just inside the door, listening to the quiet creak of the cabin as the morning warmed the wood, half expecting to hear his footsteps outside again.
No such sound came.
The silence pressed in a little too hard, so I did what I always did when my brain started running in circles—I reached for routine.
My phone sat on the small kitchen counter where I’d left it earlier. One bar blinked stubbornly at the top of the screen, the signal barely holding on in this stretch of Wisconsin forest, but it was enough to try.
I tapped Elias’s name.
The call rang once, twice, and continued.
I leaned against the counter while the shrill sound echoed on, staring out the narrow window above the sink where the treeline cut across the morning light like a dark wall.
Elias was probably somewhere in Olympic National Park right now, miles from the nearest cell tower and hiking through terrain that made this place look like a city park.
If anyone would believe the words I think I just met the Beast of Bray Road, it would be him.
It would also be him to immediately start planning a trip for research instead of telling me I’d lost my mind.
The call rolled over to silence.
I lowered the phone slowly, staring at the blank screen for a second before slipping it back into my pocket. Trying to explain this over voicemail would be impossible anyway. Even hearing the words out loud would probably make the whole situation feel absurd.
Except it wasn’t.
There was a seven-foot predator somewhere outside my cabin who had just informed me, very calmly, that he guarded people.
Well, that he guarded me.
I pushed away from the counter and poured myself some coffee, the bitter smell filling the small kitchen as the machine sputtered through its last few drops. The familiar motions steadied me a little. Mug, sugar, a splash of milk from the tiny fridge.
I carried my coffee to the small table by the window and sat down, letting the heat seep through the ceramic and warm my palms. Silence surrounded me in that deep, wooden way old places had, every now and then giving a soft creak as the boards adjusted to the warmth outside.
The trees stood motionless for the moment, their bare branches letting the pale March light spill across the clearing.
My laptop sat exactly where I’d left it earlier, the lid closed beside my camera bag.
More routine.
I set the mug down, opened my laptop, and waited for the screen to brighten. The glow filled the small kitchen, near blinding against the muted browns of the wood walls, and the familiar folders from the morning’s shoot appeared almost instantly.
For a minute, I just stared at the thumbnails.
It struck me, suddenly, how different they looked from the work that had filled my hard drives for the last ten years.
Most of my career had been spent chasing controlled moments—wedding couples standing under archways of imported flowers, executives leaning casually against glass conference tables, polished “urban lifestyle” campaigns designed to make expensive watches and minimalist furniture look aspirational.
These images were nothing like that.
I clicked on the first one. Frost clung to the tips of last year’s grass, the rising sunlight reflecting along the edges. The next frame showed delicate deer tracks pressed into soft mud near the treeline, each hoofprint sharp enough that you could almost feel the weight behind it.
I moved to the next image, zooming in slightly.
Light spilled between the trunks of two maples, cutting through the thin morning mist in long, quiet beams that hadn’t existed five seconds before I pressed the shutter.
A chickadee sat on the branch in the foreground, feathers puffed against the cold, its black cap perfectly outlined against the brightness behind it.
I leaned back slightly, studying the screen.
There were no staged smiles to manage, no assistants hovering nearby asking about lighting setups or exposure levels.
I moved through the rest of the images slowly, zooming in here and there and adjusting exposure or cropping a frame that had caught the light just a second too late.
Outside the window the day continued to unfold in small, almost invisible increments.
The pale morning brightness softened into something warmer, the shadows shifting across the clearing as the sun climbed and then began its slow slide back toward the treeline.
Just a forest beginning its day.
And somehow that felt more honest than anything I’d photographed in years.
A sharp twinge in my back alerted me that I’d been sitting there a while.
My coffee had gone cold, and the small square of sunlight on the floor had traveled halfway across the room. When I raised my head again, I was met with that mellow, late-afternoon gold that only lasted for a brief window of time before the chill returned for the night.
And sometime during those hours, two things had become impossible to ignore: I was hungry, and Calder hadn’t appeared again.
The sheer curtain over the window blurred the treeline slightly, but I kept finding myself looking toward it anyway.
It wasn’t a conscious effort at first. My eyes just drifted that way every few minutes, the same way they had when I’d been working earlier. But the longer the afternoon stretched on, the more aware I became of his absence.
It shouldn’t have mattered. If anything, I should have been relieved. That would have been the sensible reaction. A seven-foot carnivore deciding to give you space for a few hours was objectively a good thing.
Except the empty tree line left a strange kind of restlessness humming under my ribs.
Eventually, I pushed the laptop aside and stood, stretching out my stiff muscles. The cabin kitchen was barely more than a counter, a two-burner stove, and a fridge that hummed louder than it probably should have, but it had everything I needed to throw something together.
Eggs, bread, and a can of beans.
I cracked some eggs into a small pan and watched them spread across the hot surface, the smell of heated butter filling the narrow space. Toast popped up from the toaster a minute later, and I opened the beans mostly out of habit, spooning them into a second pan to warm.
It wasn’t anything fancy, simply the kind of meal you made when you were alone in a cabin in the middle of the woods and didn’t feel like putting much thought into things.
I set a plate on the counter and started loading it up, then stopped halfway through the motion.
For a second, I just stood there, looking down at the food. Then I reached for another plate, my hand freezing halfway to the cupboard while my brain caught up with what I was about to do.
“That’s… optimistic,” I muttered.
The second plate still ended up on the counter, filled with half of my dinner. I paused again and stared down at the arrangement. The food suddenly looked a little ridiculous sitting there—two neat portions on ceramic plates in a cabin kitchen that smelled faintly of butter and aged wood.
I pictured Calder—fur, claws, and teeth.
I glanced down at the fork and knife lying beside the plate and let out a quiet breath that might have been a laugh.
Oh, for God’s sake, Milo.
“Because that’s definitely how that works,” I murmured into the empty room.
For a moment, I considered scraping the second serving back into the pan and pretending the whole idea had never occurred to me.
Instead, I picked up the plate again and studied it, suddenly aware of the details I’d ignored a moment ago. The fork looked absurdly delicate next to the image I had of Calder’s hands, and the knife wasn’t much better.
Did he even eat cooked food?
Did he eat with his hands?
Did he eat human food at all?
I rubbed the back of my neck, feeling faintly ridiculous for reasons I couldn’t quite explain. Somewhere between frying the eggs and setting the table for a mythical carnivore, my decision-making process had clearly taken a left turn.
Still, curiosity had gotten me this far.
I carried the plate to the door and stepped outside.
The air had cooled while I was cooking, the late-afternoon light turning deeper and more amber as it filtered through the bare branches. I set the second plate on the porch railing, then leaned back against the doorframe and looked toward the trees.
The forest watched in silence.
Calling out into it felt… stupid.
“Hey, giant wolf man, dinner’s ready!” didn’t exactly strike me as a winning strategy.
I simply stood there for a moment longer, listening to the quiet rustle of the woods, before an old habit slipped out without much thought.
I whistled. The sound was sharp and soft, just a small trill I’d picked up years ago in photography school while spending entirely too much time trying to photograph birds that refused to stay still long enough for decent focus—something that usually got a curious chickadee to answer back.
The sound drifted out across the clearing and disappeared into the trees.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then something moved, a brief rustle to the left of the clearing.
The thin lattice of branches shifted where something large adjusted its weight, the kind of movement you would miss completely if you weren’t looking for it.
My whistle died somewhere in the back of my throat.
I straightened slightly, my hand still resting against the porch railing.
The shadows moved again, and Calder stepped into the open.
He approached on two legs, slow and deliberate, like he knew exactly how much space his body occupied and had no reason to hurry. Even in the fading light, it was impossible not to notice the sheer scale of him.
Even now it was difficult to fully process his size.
The narrow path between the trees seemed smaller around him, muscle rippling beneath dark fur with each measured step.
My gaze slipped lower.
The strength in his torso was just as obvious as his arms, the line of his abdomen tight and defined beneath the dark coat.
The masculine shape beneath the fur was unmistakably male, even if the details were half-hidden by fur and shadow.
Heat prickled up my neck as my brain tried to decide whether I was studying him the way a photographer studied a subject… or the way a man admired another man.
Which, under the circumstances, felt like a very inconvenient distinction to be making.
I dragged my attention lower again, noticing the long stride of his legs, the power in his thighs, the quiet balance of someone who moved through the forest like gravity worked slightly differently for him.
It hit me suddenly that this was the first time I’d seen him without the restraints of fear.
He wasn’t a blur in the trees or a predator lunging through the dark.
He was simply Calder, and he was walking toward me.
He stopped a few yards away, those amber eyes settling on me with that same steady focus that made it impossible to pretend I hadn’t been staring.
For a moment, neither of us moved.
Then his gaze dropped slowly, deliberately, to the place my own had lingered moments earlier.
And when he looked back at me again, something in his expression had changed.