CHAPTER THREE
Everly
She didn't open the envelope that first night.
She told herself it was exhaustion — eleven hours on a bus, a stranger's house creaking around her in unfamiliar ways, every board and pipe announcing itself like it wanted her to know it was there — but the truth was simpler and less flattering.
She was scared of what was in it. Not scared the way she'd learned to be scared of Derek, sharp and immediate, but a slower, older kind of scared, the kind that came from being handed a door with her aunt's handwriting on it and understanding, on some level she didn't have words for yet, that walking through it would change something permanent.
So instead she'd made up the guest bed with sheets that smelled like cedar and dust, because she couldn't make herself sleep in what was so obviously Ruth's room — the closet still full of her aunt's clothes, a hairbrush still sitting on the dresser with strands of silver hair caught in the bristles, a stack of paperback mysteries on the nightstand with a bookmark frozen halfway through the last one Ruth would ever read.
It felt like walking into a museum exhibit of a person's unfinished life.
Everly had shut that door gently, the way you'd shut a door on someone sleeping, and gone to find somewhere else to be.
She woke at six, disoriented, to birdsong so loud and specific it took her a full minute to remember she wasn't in her apartment anymore, that there was no traffic to filter it out, no upstairs neighbor's music thumping through the ceiling, just an absurd amount of quiet dressed up in bird noise.
She lay in the unfamiliar bed for a while, staring at a water stain on the ceiling shaped vaguely like a rabbit, and made herself a list, because lists were the thing she did instead of panicking.
It had started as a coping mechanism in the last bad year with Derek — a habit her body had built without asking permission, the same way it had built the double-checked locks and the practiced blank face.
When the fear got too large to hold all at once, she broke it into small enough pieces that she could look directly at each one without flinching.
One task. Then the next. Don't look at the whole shape of it yet.
She'd carried the habit out of that apartment along with everything else, the useful parts and the useless parts tangled together so thoroughly she'd mostly stopped trying to separate them.
One. You have thirty days.
Two. You don't have to decide anything yet.
Three. Whatever happened yesterday with the man in the diner was probably nothing. Grief brain. Exhaustion. A stranger with intense eyes and bad manners.
Four. Open the envelope.
She got up before she could talk herself out of item four.
The cottage looked different in daylight — smaller, somehow, and more clearly loved.
Someone, presumably Ruth, had painted the kitchen a soft buttery yellow at some point in the last decade, and left a row of jars on the windowsill that had once held herbs, their labels handwritten in the same script that had addressed Everly's envelope.
A woodstove sat cold in the corner of the living room, and above the mantel hung a single framed photograph: a much younger Ruth standing in front of this exact house, one arm slung around the shoulders of a man Everly didn't recognize, both of them laughing at something outside the frame.
Everly made coffee in a percolator she had to figure out through trial and error, and sat at the kitchen table with the cream envelope in front of her for a full ten minutes before she opened it.
Inside was a letter, several pages, in the same careful, slanted handwriting.
My dear Everly,
If you're reading this, it means you agreed to the thirty days, which tells me you're either braver than I gave you credit for, or more desperate for a fresh start than I hoped you'd ever have to be.
I suspect, knowing what little I know of your life these last few years, that it might be some of both.
I am sorry I was not a better aunt to you.
I want you to know that the distance was never about you.
It was about this town, and what it would have meant to bring a child I loved into a place with dangers I couldn't fully explain to your mother, who never knew the truth of what Blackbriar is, and never would have believed me if I'd tried.
I need you to read the rest of this letter with an open mind, because I am about to tell you something that will sound, at first, like the ramblings of a lonely old woman.
It is not. Every word of what follows is true, and your safety over these next thirty days may depend on you believing it faster than I'd like to ask of you.
Blackbriar is not an ordinary town. The families who live in the hills around it — the Vosses, in particular, whose current alpha I suspect you have already met, because if he is anything like his father was, he would not have been able to stay away from you once you arrived — are not ordinary people.
They are shifters, Everly. Wolves, in the oldest and most literal sense of the word.
I have known this since I was younger than you are now, and I have kept the secret faithfully for fifty years, because it was never mine to tell.
I am telling you now because it is about to become impossible for you not to find out on your own, and I would rather you hear it from someone who loves you than stumble into it in a way that frightens you more than it needs to.
The land this cottage sits on is old, older than the town, older than either pack currently claiming territory around it.
It holds something the wolves call the Hearth — a source of power tied to the earth itself, the thing that has let the Voss line hold this valley safe for six generations.
My own grandmother was given stewardship of this land by the Voss pack, three generations back, in exchange for a debt I never learned the details of.
It has passed to a Shaw woman ever since. Now it passes to you.
There is another pack, Everly. Ashgrove.
Their alpha, Rourke, has wanted the Hearth for decades — not to protect it, as the Vosses do, but to use it, to bend its power toward ends that would hurt every living thing tied to this valley, human and wolf alike.
He has tried, more than once in my lifetime, to take this land by force or by trickery.
He will try again now that it has passed to someone he will see as new, untested, and alone.
You are not alone, though you may feel that way right now.
The Voss pack will protect you, whether or not you ask them to, because protecting the Hearth and its steward is written into what they are.
I believe — and forgive an old woman her sentimentality — that Caleb Voss will do more than merely protect you as a duty.
I believe, from things I observed in him as a boy and the little I've heard of him as a man, that he has been waiting his whole life for someone like you without knowing it.
Wolves recognize their mates by scent. If he looked at you the way I suspect he did, you already know more about this than I've managed to explain.
I am not asking you to trust him blindly.
I am asking you to give yourself the thirty days you've already agreed to, and to keep an open mind, and to remember that fear is not always a reliable narrator.
You have had good reason to distrust people who wanted something from you.
Caleb Voss is not one of them. What he wants from you, if I am right about him, is not something you can be tricked or coerced into giving. It only works if you choose it.
The rest of the estate — the money, and there is more of it than you'd expect from a small-town aunt, along with certain instructions for how the Hearth is to be maintained — is yours after the thirty days regardless of what you decide about Blackbriar itself.
I am not trying to trap you here. I am trying to give you time to see it clearly before you decide.
Whatever you choose, know that I loved you from every distance I was forced to keep, and that leaving you this house was the last and best thing I had left to give.
All my love,
Ruth
Everly read it twice. Then a third time, more slowly, the way you read something you're hoping will make more sense the second the shock wears off.
It didn't make more sense. If anything it made less, because the part of her brain that had spent eight months learning to distrust anything that sounded too neat, too convenient, too much like exactly what she needed to hear, was already assembling a case for grief-addled elderly woman with a flair for gothic fiction — except that didn't explain the man in the diner.
Didn't explain the pressure that had filled the room the second he walked in, the impossible gold of his eyes, the way Marisol's face had gone careful and evasive every single time his name came up.
Didn't explain the shape she'd seen — was almost sure she'd seen — at the edge of the tree line the evening before, gone the instant she blinked.
She set the letter down and pressed both hands flat against the kitchen table, grounding herself the way her one session of therapy had taught her, five things she could see, four she could hear, three she could touch.
Yellow walls. Cold woodstove. Framed photograph.
Birdsong outside. Coffee going cold in her hands.
The rough grain of an old wooden table under her palms.
Her heart was hammering anyway.
Wolves, she thought. My aunt just told me, from beyond the grave, that the entire town is populated by werewolves, and that the intense stranger from the diner might be — what, my destined soulmate? And that a rival pack of werewolves wants to kill me for a house.