Chapter 25
Olivia
The assignment at Greyhollow arrived the way all new ones did: a phone call, a name, and the expectation it would change everything.
I was glad I was wrong.
The sky above the firs was a pale grey that came just before the light tried.
The fog greeted me that morning, the way it always did — never really leaving. Even on the clearest mornings there was always some of it clinging to the tree line — the kind that felt less like weather and more like the forest exhaling. I used to find it unsettling. Now I just found it quiet.
I was on the back porch with coffee, both hands around the mug, taking in the smell of the rain from last night.
I wasn't planning anything.
That was the thing I kept catching myself on. My brain, which spent years running contingencies — next city, next assignment, next exit — was now quiet in a way that felt unfamiliar.
I wasn't calculating how many weeks were left on the contract. I wasn't drafting the message to the agency. I wasn't checking the exits the way I checked every room in every building I'd ever occupied, quietly and without thinking, the way some people check their phone.
I was just standing here, holding coffee, watching the fog.
The day after I came back, Maureen walked me to my room herself. She pushed the door open ahead of me, swept her gaze over it, and then turned to me.
"It's exactly as you left it," she said, beaming. "Though I'll have fresh linens put on."
“Oh, that’s not necessary,” I said. “I know you have a lot to do. After everything that happened with Voss...”
Maureen laughed. “Nothing I’m not used to, I promise.”
She was already moving toward the window to crack it open, because she believed in fresh air the way other people believed in prayer. She straightened the curtain. She tested the latch.
She set my towels down and shrugged. “But if you insist, I can leave them on a little longer.”
As she moved back next to me, she gave me a small teasing nudge. "Of course, you may find you need it less than before. Given… certain things."
I stared at the back of her head.
"Certain things?" I repeated.
Maureen turned around. She tried to keep her expression neutral, but she was failing badly.
There was something at the corner of her mouth that she was working very hard to contain, and her eyes were warm in the particular way that meant she already knew exactly what she was doing.
"Caleb's room is larger," she said simply. "The view is better, too. I’m sure you’ll come to love it.”
The heat that climbed the back of my neck was immediate. I told her I would keep that in mind.
“Breakfast is at seven, by the way,” she said in a singsong voice.
Jake was well.
He had nearly recovered from the effects of the first shift. He conducted himself accordingly, too.
The tension that used to come from managing his pain and fever had been replaced by his constant presence. Usually making a joke, or excited to talk about something.
The mornings were the best part.
Jake decided, the week after his shift, that he was done eating breakfast alone in his room. He announced this to no one in particular and simply appeared in the kitchen one morning, sat down at the long table, and started talking.
He talked about anything under the sun that he took interest in. Especially that he could now go in and out of the manor without issue.
I came in five minutes after him.
“We’re going to need more bookshelves in the library,” he said one day, his mouth full of scrambled eggs. And then, looking at his plate. “Oh, and I need more bacon.”
Donovan was another new constant. He would come in from his patrols and, instead of taking his food upstairs, he would sometimes linger in the kitchen. I took it as him still being wary of Jake's recovery. But I knew he would never admit this.
On this fine day, he came across Jake and me mid-argument about something we read.
“I’m telling you,” Jake said, quickly swallowing his coffee. “The veracity of the origins of Greyhollow are quite accurate.”
“It's an oral tradition,” I said. “I don’t think someone ‘speaking to an eagle’ counts as accurate.”
“You’re telling this to a werewolf.”
“What’s this about this time?” Donovan asked.
“Donovan, you talk to eagles, don’t you?”
Donovan blinked. “I regret asking,” he said. He then grabbed a piece of toast and skulked into the hallway. His heavy footsteps easy to identify.
I knew all their footsteps now. I knew the particular weight of Tomas's boots on the back porch that meant he'd finished the perimeter and found it clean.
I knew that Maureen sang very quietly to herself when she thought no one was within earshot, and that the song changed depending on her mood, and that this morning she'd been humming something that meant she was content.
I was learning the language of this place, and I knew that the people inside were alright with that.
“Thursday,” Stella said through the phone.
I was in the middle of my afternoon job applications at my usual spot in the fireplace area.
Now that I wasn’t a travel nurse, I was trying to see what formal placement I could get in the Greyhollow area.
Jake joked that the Ashwoods could “keep me on payroll” so long as I stayed here, but I insisted I liked my job. I may have found a place to stay, but that didn’t mean the nurse within me was gone.
“What about Thursday?” I asked.
“Oh, don’t be mean!” Stella pressed. “You know we need to hang out again! Minus you getting attacked by wolves and everything.”
“I’m teasing,” I said with a smile. “So what’s the plan? The Tap? Burgers at the diner?”
“You bet,” she said. “I need to squeeze whatever time I can get before you find work again.”
I smiled as I adjusted my laptop. "We should get Jake and Donovan down there," I said.
A long silence.
"Olivia," Stella said.
"Yeah."
"Don't preemptively destroy a good time."
I snorted.
“Fine. Pure girls’ night.”
“Pure girls’ night! Woo!”
I found the go-bag in the back of my car.
I totally forgot it was there.
Sometime in the chaos of the past week — the drive back, the confrontation at the estate, the long hours after — it slid off the back seat and wedged itself behind the driver's side.
I opened and closed that door a half-dozen times without thinking about it. It wasn't until I went to move the car that I reached back and my hand caught the strap.
I sat in the driver's seat for a moment with it in my lap.
It was lighter than it used to feel. Not because I'd taken anything out — I hadn't touched it since the night I'd driven away from here. It felt lighter because what it meant had changed.
The go-bag used to feel like insurance. A hand already on the door handle before I needed it. The specific comfort of a bag packed light enough to carry with one hand down a flight of stairs at two in the morning without waking anyone.
Now it just felt like luggage.
I took it upstairs.
My room was warm. Maureen put fresh flowers in the small vase on the windowsill — which I'd told her wasn't necessary and which she'd done anyway, because Maureen's version of listening was to hear you out and then do what she'd already decided.
The afternoon light came through the gap in the curtains and put a stripe of gold across the floorboards.
I opened the go-bag and pulled everything out.
The other bag was in the closet, the one that held the rest of my life.
I unpacked the essentials when I first arrived, the work things, the toiletries, the clothes I needed every day, but the rest had stayed packed. The habit of moving. The subconscious message to a room: I'm not staying.
I pulled that one out, too.
I spread everything on the bed and assessed the contents.
It had things in it I'd carried from city to city for years without really thinking about it: A paperback with the spine cracked in three places — the one I'd bought from a street vendor in Portland and read on a park bench in a single afternoon.
A small ceramic bowl I found at a market in Austin, glazed blue-green, barely the size of my palm…
My hands came across a photo. A Polaroid, not one on my phone.
I had it printed so that I always had something to remember the moment by.
It was a picture of my parents on a beach one summer, years before Northern California.
My mother squinted into the sun. My father laughed at something outside the frame.
I wasn't in the picture. I had taken it.
I held it for a long moment.
Then I found a place for it on the windowsill, beside the flowers.
I unpacked everything else. The book went on the nightstand. The bowl went on the dresser and immediately caught a coin I'd been leaving on surfaces around the room since I arrived.
I found a hook behind the door for the small canvas tote I always carried and never fully emptied. I found a corner of the closet shelf for the things I'd been keeping in the bag because keeping them in the bag meant they were ready to go.
It took maybe twenty minutes.
When I was done I stood in the middle of the room and looked at it.
The same four walls. The same window with its view of the firs. The same Maureen-approved linens and the same heavy stone walls that had made me feel, on my first night, like the estate had grown out of the mountain rather than been placed on it.
It looked different now. It looked like mine.
My past and I could finally, properly, be at home.
I was back on the porch by the time the light had changed.
The fog had burned off more than it usually did — a real effort from the sun today, cutting through in actual gold strips across the cleared ground.
I had a second cup of coffee. I wasn't thinking about anything in particular — just watching the light move.
I felt him before I heard him.
I felt the warmth in my chest that had been there since the night of the bond: a steady presence not asking anything of me, deepening slightly as he came closer.
Like a second heartbeat finding its rhythm.
Like something that had always been looking for its exact right place and had finally found it.
Caleb’s arms came around me from behind.
No greeting. No preamble. Just the weight of him.
I leaned back into him.
We stood there without speaking for a long time. The frost on the grass caught the light. The firs stood silver and still. The fog moved at the tree line in slow drifts, unhurried, going nowhere.
"You were up early," Caleb said. Low, close to my ear.
"I like this time of day," I said.
His arms shifted, not loosening, just settling more fully.
"Since when?"
I thought about it. "Since here, I think."
He didn't answer that. He pressed his jaw more firmly against my hair, the way he did instead of speaking when words were either not enough or not necessary. I felt his exhale. I watched the light on the frost and felt the warmth in my chest and let the silence be exactly what it was.
"I unpacked," I said, after a while, looking up at him.
He went still for a beat.
"The bag?"
"Both of them,” I replied. “It was high time. I don’t have anywhere I’ll be going anytime soon.”
Caleb’s lips curved into a smile. When I looked into his eyes, I noticed something that was no longer there. That quiet sense of urgency and hesitation that used to plague him during our early months.
After a long pause, he kissed me on the cheek.
“I’m glad,” he said.
A longer pause. Then, quietly: "Good."
I tightened my hands around the mug. He tightened his arms around me. We looked at the forest together.
The fog quietly changed shape in the distance.
I almost missed it. The way the mist moved across the cleared ground, it could have been wind.
It could have been a deer at the edge of the firs thinking better of crossing.
It could have been the morning playing tricks the way mornings sometimes did in Greyhollow, where the grey had a tendency to make shapes out of nothing.
It wasn't any of those things.
Caleb's arms tightened.
Just once. Just slightly. Not anxiety — just acknowledgement of what we both understood.
The Voss pack was still out there. Their plan had failed and we knew Maykhel wouldn’t be the kind to accept defeat.
The part of me that used to feel that knowledge as a reason to run — to put distance between myself and the thing coming, to get ahead of the loss before it could find me — was quiet.
The light was fully through now.
The pale gold of a Greyhollow morning doing what it could against the grey, catching the frost on the railing and the mist at the edges and turning everything briefly brighter than it had any right to be.
Inside, Jake said something and laughed at himself. Donovan said his name in the tone that meant stop, but quietly, the way that wasn't quite as convincing as it used to be.
Caleb's arms didn't loosen.
I thought about Thursday. Stella at the bar, warm light and music, a night that ended the way nights out were supposed to end.
I thought about the photograph on the windowsill upstairs — my mother squinting into the sun, my father laughing at something I couldn't see.
I thought about the ceramic bowl on the dresser and the book on the nightstand and all the small things I'd carried from city to city for seven years and finally put down in a room that was mine.
I didn't check the exits. I didn't run calculations. I didn't plan my next move. It took me a long time to learn that some things were worth staying for. If anything, it made them all the more worth it.
Whatever was coming next, we would face it together. Our bond wouldn't break that easily. Not anymore.
That was a choice I wasn’t going to regret.
The story isnt over…
Contine reading in Before the Bite