3. Chapter 3
On the third morning, Nadia was already at the cave entrance when she saw him.
She’d been wearing Rhys’s coat for two days. The weight of it on her shoulders felt like something between armor and chain. The fabric still held traces of his scent, pine and something colder underneath. Something that drew her wolf into stillness instead of pace.
The coat had given her courage to stand outside. To look at the territory that had terrified her for months.
He came from the eastern slope, moving through the trees with that careful gait she’d learned to recognize. No pack following. No supply run obvious in his bearing. Just patrol.
Her gaze caught his before she could retreat.
Rhys stopped maybe thirty feet from the cave. He was reading her the way he’d read her that first night by the fire, not trying to hide it, not pretending to look away. Just looking.
Nadia’s wolf surged forward, demanding she close the distance. Her human mind clocked threats. His size. His scars. The way the morning light made him seem larger than anything safe.
Her hand stayed on the knife.
Rhys shifted his weight, and she saw the effort it cost him. His leg. His injuries. The damage that someone had done and healed wrong on purpose.
Then he did what he’d done that first day at the rock. He took a step backward.
Then another.
Creating distance. Creating choice.
“You’re alive,” he said. Just that. The words landed quiet enough that she had to strain to hear them. “That’s what matters.”
Her throat felt tight. She’d learned not to speak. Learned that her voice was a vulnerability.
The wind shifted through the trees. Nadia could see where he stood, the morning light catching the pale scars on his face. Someone had tried to kill him. Had failed. He was upright anyway.
Still offering.
“I need to get back to patrol,” Rhys said. “But the pack’s here. When you’re ready.”
He turned and limped back toward the tree line, pausing once to reset a marker stone she’d nudged out of place during the night.
Nadia’s wolf threw itself against her ribs with enough force to steal her breath. An invisible line aimed her west, toward him, toward the pack house she’d glimpsed from the ridge. Toward something that hadn’t tried to bite her yet.
She took two steps out of the cave before she could stop herself.
Rhys paused at the tree line. Looked back over his shoulder.
He found her gaze across the distance.
Nadia’s hand lifted, a small gesture, uncertain and incomplete. Not quite a wave. Not quite acknowledgment. Just her body acting before her mind could stop it.
Something flickered across his expression. Relief. Satisfaction. Something close to hope.
He nodded once, and then he was gone, disappearing back into the forest with that careful gait that had become familiar.
Nadia stood at the cave entrance long after, her borrowed coat heavy on her shoulders, the weight feeling less like chains.
She let herself consider something that had seemed impossible. Not all packs were the same.