Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Weeks passed. The claw marks on the door went untouched, no new gouges, no fresh scratches, no territorial markings in the snow. The forest had gone quiet in a way that should have felt like relief but sat in my chest like a held breath.
“Maybe he knows,” I ventured one morning, watching Dietrich clean his knife by the fire. “About the claiming. The mating. Maybe he can smell the bond and decided it’s not worth the fight.”
Dietrich shook his head without looking up. “He knows. He can smell it from miles away, my scent on you, yours in me, the bond between us.” The blade stopped moving and he looked at me. “He’s known since the night I bit you.”
“Then why hasn’t he come?” I pressed.
“Because he’s cunning.” I felt something cold moving beneath his calm, the wolf’s unease, a predator’s instinct recognizing another predator’s patience.
“My father doesn’t charge into fights he hasn’t already won.
Twenty-two years feral didn’t burn the strategist out of him.
It sharpened it.” He tested the blade against his thumb.
“He’s planning something. I just can’t see what.
The fight nearly killed him too. He’s healing from what I did to him.
Watching. Learning our patterns. He won’t move until he’s certain. ”
He set the knife down. Crossed to where I sat and leaned down and kissed me, slow, thorough.
“I need to check the eastern traps,” he murmured against my mouth. “And the perimeter. I don’t want him circling close without me knowing.”
“Be careful,” I told him.
He pulled on his coat and crossed to the door. I felt his alertness sharpen the moment he stepped outside, the wolf rising, the senses expanding. He looked back at me once. The amber in his eyes catching the morning light.
Then he disappeared into the trees.
I watched the space where he’d been. His presence dimmed as he moved further, never gone, just distant, the difference between standing next to a fire and feeling its warmth from the next room.
I turned back to the cottage. Swept the floor. Built up the fire. Checked the food stores and made a mental note about the dried meat. My body still carried the deep, pleasant ache from the night before. The bond throbbed gently in my chest. Dietrich’s heartbeat beneath my own.
I hadn’t touched the grimoire in days. It was still under the bed where I’d left it before the claiming because after that night I stopped thinking about books and pages and creature entries and honestly I stopped thinking about most things that weren’t Dietrich and the bond and the way my body felt like it belonged to me for the first time in my life.
But he was out checking the traps and the perimeter and the cottage was quiet and warm and I felt good.
Not bracing. Not waiting for something terrible. Just good.
I pulled it out and sat at the table and opened it and turned past everything I already knew.
Grandmother’s entries, her mother’s, the creatures, the werewolves.
I got to Sophia’s section and expected the blur because that was what always happened, every single time, the ink swimming away from my eyes like the book was pulling it back.
The words were clear. All of them. I could read every line on the page and my hands started shaking so hard I had to flatten them on the table to hold the pages still.
The ice broke on the creek this morning.
I heard it through the walls, a sound like glass falling.
I closed my eyes and let myself pretend I was standing on the bank with Mama and Red, watching the water come back to life the way it does every spring.
Mama would have her sleeves rolled to the elbow.
Red would be barefoot already because she never could wait for the ground to warm.
I held the sound as long as I could. Pressed it against my chest and breathed it in.
He cannot take what I keep inside my own head.
The creek. Mama’s hands. The smell of her garden after rain.
Red pulling ribbons from my hair and stuffing them into her mouth because everything red belonged to her, even then.
These are mine. He can take my blood and my years and the strength in my bones but he cannot reach the places where I keep the people I love.
I shoved my knuckles against my teeth because my whole face was doing things I couldn’t control and I kept going.
I have been thinking about destiny. Mama told me once that our blood chose us before we were born.
That we didn’t become blood-keepers — we arrived as them, already marked, already carrying the thread that tied us back through the generations to the first woman who bled and the world bent around her.
I used to believe that meant we had no choice. That the blood decided and we simply followed.
I don’t believe that anymore.
Destiny is not a road. It is a river. It carries you, yes. But you can still choose which bank you swim toward. You can still choose what you hold onto and what you let the current take. I chose to write the note. I chose to walk out that door. I chose wrong. But I chose. And that matters.
Freedom is not the absence of cages. I know that now better than anyone. Freedom is knowing you would choose differently if you could. Freedom is the choosing itself.
The next entry looked different. The letters were pressed harder into the page and the handwriting was tighter like she’d been pushing the quill down too hard or writing without enough light to see.
We are not the last. I can feel them — not clearly, not the way I feel the village, but like a hum at the edge of hearing.
Other women. Other bloodlines. Scattered and hiding and surviving the way we have always survived.
Some of them carry gifts I cannot name. Some of them have forgotten what they are.
But they are out there. Beyond the forests and the mountains and the borders of every map Mama ever showed me. Others like us. Living. Enduring.
Mama spoke of the Sanguinarians once, late at night when she thought I was sleeping.
Old ones. Older than the wolves. They are the ones who made the first werewolves, and they did not stop wanting what they made.
She said they would come again. Not soon, they move in centuries the way we move in years, but they would come.
And when they did, it would not be for the wolves. It would be for us. For the blood.
If someone reads this and the old ones have not come yet, they will. Prepare. Find the others. You are stronger together than you will ever be alone.
I kept turning pages. Sophia had written for two years in this cottage and she’d filled more pages than I expected.
Birds she heard through the boards. The way the light through the cracks changed when the seasons turned.
Grandmother’s recipe for burn poultice because she was terrified the knowledge would die with her.
Wildflowers she couldn’t see but could smell through the gaps in the wood.
A dream about the village market where she had to lie still after waking because she couldn’t tell which was real.
I flipped through every page. Read some, skimmed others, but I checked every one.
Two years of my aunt in her leftward tilting handwriting and not a single mention of Erik in any of it. He got nothing from her.
I was crying. I hadn’t noticed when it started but my face was wet and my nose was running and I wiped it with the back of my hand and turned the next page.
Red.
My little Red who pulled the ribbons from my hair.
My heart slammed so hard I felt it in my fingers and my teeth and behind my eyes all at once.
She wrote to me. She sat in this room behind these boards and she wrote my name and I touched the ink where she’d written Red and goosebumps ran up both my arms and down my back and across my chest because she was right there on the page talking to me and I wanted to read every word so badly my whole body ached with it.
Then the hair on the back of my neck stood up and my stomach dropped and I didn’t know why.
The cottage was quiet. The fire was still popping.
Nothing had changed in the room but my body was telling me to move and I’d learned a long time ago not to argue with that feeling because every time I ignored it something terrible happened.
I went to the window and cracked a board enough to see out. The clearing was white. All white except for a trail of red cutting through the snow from the tree line to the cottage door. Blood. I could tell from the color even through the gap in the board.
The red cloak hung from the peg by the door. I grabbed it and pulled it around my shoulders before I even thought about why. Instinct.
I unbolted the door, shoved it open, stepped out.
My foot caught on something. I went down hard on my hands and knees on the doorstep. Cold hit my palms first, then the wet. I looked at my hands. Red. I was kneeling in blood.
My eyes went to the trees. The gray wolf stood at the edge of the clearing between two pines, lips pulled back from his teeth, muzzle dark and wet. Those yellow eyes locked on mine. He wasn’t hiding. He wanted me to see him. He wanted me to know.
He turned. Ran into the forest. The trees swallowed him.
My whole body was shaking. I looked down at what I’d tripped on and my brain wouldn’t let me understand what I was seeing. A body. Small enough to be a child. My heart was hammering so hard it hurt. My eyes filled up, everything went blurry. I wiped my face with bloody hands trying to see.
No. No no no no no.
I turned the body over.
Thomas. Emma’s Thomas. His cap was gone. His hair stuck to his forehead with blood. His neck bent wrong. His eyes closed. He looked like he was sleeping except for the red soaking through his wool shirt and the angle of his neck that no sleeping child would ever have.