Chapter 5 The Wolf Beneath the Skin

Kaelon did not sleep.

He lay on the narrow cot in Vee's storeroom with one arm behind his head and stared at the ceiling while the shop settled into the deep quiet of late night, listening to the sounds of Ashveil winding down outside. Doors closing. Voices fading. The occasional horse on the main road, then nothing but wind and the distant conversation of tree branches.

He should have been exhausted. Seven years of imprisonment did something to a body that a few nights of rough mountain travel did not simply undo. His bones still remembered the weight of the curse, the way it had pressed him down into himself like a stone laid across a chest, heavy and permanent and entirely without mercy. He had spent the first weeks after breaking free relearning how to exist in his own skin without that pressure. He was still relearning.

But sleep was not coming, and the reason was directly above him.

He could hear her moving around upstairs long after she should have gone to bed. The soft fall of her feet across the floorboards. The sound of a chair pulling back. The occasional quiet that suggested she was sitting still, thinking, which was somehow louder than the movement.

His wolf was awake in a way it had not been in seven years.

Not agitated. Not aggressive. Simply present, close to the surface, attending to every sound from above with an intensity that Kaelon could feel in his own chest as a kind of sustained, aching alertness. The wolf knew. It had known the moment he found her in the clearing, standing beside the creek with her basket over her arm and her wrist beginning to bleed without her touching it. It had nearly come through his skin entirely in that moment, and controlling it had taken more effort than he intended anyone to see.

She smelled wrong. That was the first thing he had registered, the thing that had hit him like a fist when he stepped into the clearing and the wind shifted. She smelled human. Entirely, completely human, with none of the deep current of wolf that should have run underneath everything she was. Seven years ago she had smelled like moonlight and pine resin and power, a scent so distinctly hers that he had been able to find her in a crowd of a hundred wolves without looking.

Now she smelled like the herbs she worked with and the mountain air and nothing else.

The curse had taken more than her memories. It had taken her wolf so completely that even his own animal, which had recognized her instantly and without question, could not pull her scent back to what it used to be. She was Vee and she was not Vee. She was standing right above him, padding across her own floorboards in the dark, and she was further away than she had been during all seven years of his imprisonment because at least then he had known where she was and why.

He pressed the back of his wrist against his eyes and breathed.

She had stitched him up and offered him soup and given him a place to sleep, and she had done all of it with the brisk, unsentimental efficiency of someone who had decided a thing was reasonable and saw no point in making more of it than that. That was Vee. That had always been Vee. He had known her for three years before the curse and he could count on one hand the number of times she had done something tender without immediately covering it with practicality, as though kindness needed to justify itself through usefulness to be acceptable.

He had loved that about her. He had found it maddening and then loved it and then found it maddening again in a cycle that had never fully resolved itself before everything fell apart.

The floorboards went quiet above him.

He waited. After a few minutes the particular quality of the silence shifted and he understood she had finally gone to sleep. He let out a slow breath and turned onto his side, facing the shelving stacked with her supplies. Rows of jars and folded linen and small wooden boxes labeled in handwriting he recognized even though she did not know he recognized it.

She had kept the same handwriting. Precise and slightly slanted, the letters close together like she was conserving space out of habit. He had read her writing many times before, notes she left for the pack healers, records she kept in her role as Luna, the letters she wrote him when he was away dealing with border disputes and she was managing the pack in his absence. Letters he still had, folded into the lining of his pack outside in the forest where he had stashed most of his belongings before following her into town.

He had not been able to make himself leave those letters behind.

He thought about the moment in the workroom when she had asked if he had found who he was looking for and he had told her he was not sure yet. It was the most honest thing he had said to her and also the most incomplete. He had found her. She was here and breathing and sharp and alive and she had pressed a clean linen cloth against his knuckles with careful hands and told him there was soup on the stove.

He had not found her. The woman he had known was buried somewhere beneath six years of a life built without him, without her wolf, without any thread connecting her to who she had been. Pulling her back meant pulling those memories back, and the memories were wrapped around the truth of what she had done and why, and he did not know yet how she would receive that truth or what it would do to her when it arrived.

He knew one thing with absolute certainty. He was not leaving Ashveil without her.

His wolf agreed on this point without reservation, which was the first time in seven years the two of them had been in complete agreement about anything.

Above him, the shop was silent. Outside, the wind moved through Ashveil in long, slow currents, carrying the smell of coming rain and pine and the cold breath of the mountain pressing down toward winter.

Kaelon closed his eyes.

He did not sleep but he rested, and for the first time in seven years resting felt like something more than simply waiting.

He thought about her face in the clearing when she looked at the tracks and then looked at him, putting the two things together with those steady, careful eyes. She had always been like that. Seeing clearly and saying what she saw without apology or decoration.

He wondered how long it would take her to see clearly enough to say the thing that was already forming behind those eyes.

He thought it would not be very long at all.