Chapter 1
Nyiana
The coffee has gone cold in five mismatched mugs, tea in the sixth. Not one of the women has done a thing about it.
The August light is long and gold across the porch boards, warm where it lands, cooler three steps back under the eaves.
Pine comes up off the trees at the edge of the compound as the afternoon cools.
A screen door bangs somewhere behind the lodge.
Somebody’s bare foot is hooked over the bottom rail.
This argument has been running for an hour without arriving anywhere, which is the entire point of it.
I read them. It isn’t a decision I make.
Harper has nothing left on her list until six and it shows in her shoulders.
Lyanna is amused and hiding it for reasons of her own.
Kari is enjoying herself, which she would deny under oath.
Scarlett is running this whole porch and has no idea she’s doing it.
Under what each of them chooses to show me, the truth sits right there, easy to reach.
I keep my own power folded down small. I’ve done it every day for as long as I’ve had it. Let it all the way out and I’d have every one of these women down to the parts they’d never hand me.
So, I sink into this instead. The voices overlap.
The pages rustle. I keep both hands around the mug.
The tea in it went cold an hour ago and I hold it anyway, because my hands run colder than the tea does, always will.
The sun has been on my arms all afternoon, it does nothing to me either.
Whatever the stories say, my kind walks in daylight.
I came to Ash Hollow to read signatures no one else could and advise Dane on what he couldn’t see coming.
I meant to leave when the work was done.
These people made room for me instead. I stayed.
I went most of eighty-nine years without anything like it.
Some part of me still expects someone to walk over and tell me the seat was never mine to keep.
The books are Skylar Cassidy’s. The Celestial Bonds set, four of them, dog-eared and worn, traveling down this rail since noon. These women have been arguing about them for months. Scarlett has book four open against her knee. Nobody has managed to interrupt her in ten minutes.
“I’m just saying, some of these men have their priorities in order.”
“Some of these men need a restraining order,” Kari says.
“That’s Christmas-morning behavior.”
“It’s August.”
“Christmas isn’t a month, Kari. It’s a personality.”
I let it run around me, not really listening. I’m near it, which is most of what I want out of today.
Kari lands a line I don’t catch. Harper laughs into her mug hard enough to spill.
I’m laughing too. Somewhere in the middle of it I sweep the edge of the compound, the small count of who’s where that I take every hour out of long habit.
He’s there. Just inside the trees, where the light stops.
He’s stood at the edge of our forest on and off for months now.
I know exactly what he is. That’s never been the problem.
The problem is the man. I read everyone else on this property, whether I mean to or not.
With him, I get his nature, plain and immediate. The man underneath it, I can’t reach.
I bring myself back. To the table, the book, Scarlett’s hands moving while she talks. The man at the treeline is not my problem this afternoon. I’ve decided that. I keep both hands wrapped around my mug. Harper and Lyanna are disagreeing about chapter nine. For a few breaths it holds.
“That’s supposed to be the good one?” Kari says. She hasn’t looked up. “I’ve had better on a Tuesday.”
“It’s romantic,” Scarlett says.
“It’s fiction.”
Harper loses it entirely. Lyanna puts a hand over her mouth, which is what she does instead of laughing where anyone can use it against her.
“Rafe carried me once,” Kari says, when she can. “Half a mile. I complained the whole way.”
“That is the most romantic thing anyone has ever said on this porch,” Scarlett says.
Kari turns the page. Her right hand opens and closes once at her side, small, then stills. She’s already reading ahead. I drink my tea.
He pulls at me again, worse for having been ignored.
I try to settle it down. It doesn’t go. Every other person on this property gives themselves up to me whether they intend to or not.
He stays shut. I keep coming back to it while I hold my face easy enough that none of it reaches this table.
So, I stop pretending and read him on purpose.
It’s a deep read. His nature arrives before I’ve finished aiming it, the same as the first day.
Ancient. Divine. Asleep. A thing that presents as a wolf who cannot shift and is nothing of the kind.
The man inside it stays closed. He’s the only person I have ever failed to see into.
So, I use my eyes instead. He stands just inside the treeline where the shadow starts.
His shoulders are square. He isn’t leaning on anything.
He hasn’t moved in the time it took me to look at him twice.
He isn’t relaxed. He’s holding himself still on purpose.
It takes effort, and he’s doing it out there in the shade while everyone else drinks cold coffee and argues about a book.
I’m staring. I know I’m staring. I keep doing it, because watching him is the only read he gives me. I’ve told no one what he is. Not Dane. Not my brother. If I say it out loud, it stops being mine to watch. It becomes the pack’s problem to act on and I’m not ready for that.
“Right.” Harper puts her mug down. “We’re picking a favorite. Best of the four. Scarlett.”
“One.”
“Kari.”
“Two.”
“Lyanna.”
“Three.”
Harper sets her own mug down. “Four. One vote each. We’ve achieved nothing.”
She turns to me. I’ve been quiet most of the hour, and Harper never misses that kind of thing. “Nyxiana. You’re the tiebreaker.”
And I’m in it. All the way in, warm, present and ready to ruin Scarlett’s afternoon on principle.
Then Scarlett makes her case, with all four books.
She goes down the set in order, holding each one up, naming the man it belongs to.
Gavin, book one. Rainer, book two. Bowen, book three.
Bancroft, book four. My stomach drops. These are my great-uncles.
This book is five flames. Inside my head I have my hands over my ears.
No. Not this. La la la. I caught none of it. I’m taking none of it with me.
Outside, I lift my tea. “I couldn’t say.”
“You’ve read them,” Harper says.
“I’ve held them.”
“Nyxiana.”
“They’re very well written,” I say, and drink.
“Ha!” Scarlett points her mug at me. “That’s not a no.”
“Look at her,” Kari says. “Little Miss Prim.”
“Next stop, a nunnery.”
Lyanna watches me over the rim of her mug for exactly as long as it takes me to decide I don’t care what she’s putting together. They keep at it. I give them nothing.
Across the lodge, at the men’s end of all this, my brother catches my eye.
Kaspian’s up visiting with Scarlett for a few days.
He doesn’t live at Ash Hollow. Someone’s pulled him into a bet he has no stake in.
He’s the one person here I don’t have to read.
He’s simply there. Has been since before I had words for it.
Known. Easy. Requiring nothing of me at all.
The look lasts a breath. Then someone at that end says his name.
He’s back in the bet. I’m back at the table.
I let a hundred small unknowns go every day without a second thought. This one won’t go. One person I can’t see into, in a world I can otherwise read down to the bone. An enemy with a face is a problem I can plan against, count. I can put myself between it and the people I love.
The not-knowing is the part I can’t stand.
The argument eases off into lighter talk. Someone refills the pot, the smell of it comes down the rail, better than the coffee is going to be. Scarlett has moved on to defending a scene nobody asked her about.
I’m half in, half out at the edge of the trees. I sit, smile, say the right small things and then set my mug on the rail.
“I need air.”
Scarlett waves me off mid-sentence. To them it’s a woman stretching her legs.
It isn’t. I walk to the end of the porch, put my hands on the rail, turn my attention to the treeline, as hard as I’d turn it on anything coming up the road at us.
I let them watch me leave the warmth to do it.
So, I admit, at least to myself, that he’s already got under my guard.
That I’ve circled him like a problem I can’t put down.
I don’t go back to the table. I stay at the rail, the women laugh behind me, the trees are in front of me and my hands stay where they are on the wood. I reach for the man inside the nature one more time, with nothing held back at all. Nothing gives.
Fine. I’m going to read him. If it takes me the rest of the summer, I am going to read him.
“Chapter eleven should come with a warning label,” Kari says behind me.
Harper shrieks. Lyanna’s laugh comes up underneath it, low and delighted.
The lodge windows have gone gold. Every person standing in that light is someone I would burn realms for.
I’ve never said it. I don’t intend to. None of them know what’s standing at the treeline.
I do. They get to relax on the porch because I haven’t said anything.
They’re braced for another build. Another thing to find and tear down, the same as the last four times. An enemy that comes up the road where we can watch it coming. I put that against the man in the shade. He trips no alarm, makes no move. What’s in him is older than anything we’re arming against.
They don’t match. So, I stay at the edge of the porch. For them, the afternoon is still easy. For me, it’s over. I ended it myself knowing every one of us, until I walked to this rail, is braced for the wrong thing.