SARA

Chapter 1

The forest didn’t frighten her anymore.

It used to, when she was younger, when the sounds coming from beneath the ground at night made her hide behind the largest tree she could find and stay completely still until dawn. That was four years ago. Now she walked through the dark as she owned it, her leather boots silent on the wet earth, the encoded ledger tucked flat against her ribs underneath her jacket.

The job had been clean, too clean, insultingly even.

The Blackblood Keep border garrison sat at the northeastern edge of Blackblood territory, a squat stone building staffed by eight wolves on rotation. Sara had studied the rotation for six days before she moved. She knew which guard took an extra minute on his eastern sweep because he stopped to relieve himself behind the same boulder every single night. She knew which window on the second floor had a latch that didn’t catch properly because the wood had warped from last winter’s rain. She knew that the garrison commander kept his most sensitive documents not in the iron safe bolted to his office floor, where anyone would look, but in a false bottom beneath the third drawer of his table, because men who felt secure always hid things in the most obvious place they thought no one would think to check.

She had been in and out in eleven minutes.

The ledger was thin, about the size of her palm, bound in dark leather. Her Undercourt contact had described it precisely. She hadn’t opened it. She never opened the things she was paid to retrieve. Opening them meant knowing things, and knowing things meant becoming a target for reasons beyond the job itself. Sara had survived this long by keeping her world very small and very controlled.

She moved northeast through the trees, putting distance between herself and the garrison. Another two miles and she would cross back into Ashfen territory, where nothing with sense would follow her. The job would be complete. She would deliver the ledger at the designated drop point by dawn, collect her payment, and disappear back into the Wilds for however long it took for the next job to come in.

The scar on her collarbone started burning.

Sara slowed down but she did not stop, adjusting her pace while every instinct she had snapped to full attention. The scar was old, pale pink on her skin, running in a thin curved line just below her left collarbone. She had no memory of getting it. It had simply always been there, and it had never, to her knowledge, mattered or done anything.

Until tonight it had been burning on and off for the past hour, faint enough that she had been filing it away as a physical reaction to the cold. But this was different. This was sharp and sudden and directional, like something was pressing a heated coin directly against the mark.

She kept walking.

The forest changed around her, she felt it before she heard it. The small sounds of the night, insects, the distant call of something hunting, the soft movement of wind through the upper branches, all of it then went quiet. All at once.

Sara stopped.

She stood completely still for three seconds. No sound from behind her. No sound to her left. The silence was coming from her right, which was north, which was the direction she was not supposed to be intercepted from because the garrison’s northern patrol didn’t sweep this far east for another forty minutes.

She turned right and looked into the dark between the trees.

He was already looking at her.

She couldn’t see his face clearly. What she could see was the size of him, broad shoulders, a height that suggested he was built on a different scale than most wolves she had encountered, and the absolute, total stillness with which he was standing. He wasn’t crouched to attack. He wasn’t moving toward her. He was standing between two trees about thirty feet away, watching her. It came from a man who already knew how this ended and was in no particular hurry to get there.

The scar on her collarbone felt like it was being pressed with a lit match.

Sara’s first instinct was to run. Her second instinct, the one she had learned to trust over four years in the Wilds, told her that running from something that hadn’t moved yet was how you confirmed to it that you were prey. She stayed where she was.

“You’re not garrison,” she said. Her voice came out flat and even. She was proud of that.

“No.” His voice was low, the kind that vibrated through everything. “You’re not a border ghost. Garrison reported a grey operative. I assumed that meant someone stronger or older.”

“Disappointing,” Sara said. “I’ll try to age faster.”

She couldn’t tell if that landed well or not because she still couldn’t read his face in the dark. What she could read was the way he was standing, weight centered, hands loose at his sides, the posture of someone who had been in enough fights that his body had stopped preparing for them and started assuming them.

She took one careful step to her left, angling slightly south. Testing.

He moved in the same direction without appearing to hurry, cutting off the angle before she completed it.

So he was not going to let her maneuver, she thought.

“What were you doing in garrison territory?” he asked.

“Walking,” Sara said.

“I find the daytime crowded.”

Another silence. Then, without any warning, he closed the thirty feet between them. Not running, not lunging, just walking at a pace that covered distance faster than it had any right to, and Sara had exactly enough time to decide that bolting would be pointless before he was close enough that she could finally see his face.

She had made a significant mistake, she realized, in assuming the darkness was a disadvantage for him.

Dark hair. A jaw that looked like it had been cut rather than grown. Eyes that were a pale grey so cold they looked silver in the dark, were currently fixed on her with an expression that was a combination of anger or suspicion.

There was a scar through his left eyebrow, thin and old, that somehow made him look less like someone who had been hurt and more like someone who had caused the thing that tried to hurt him considerably more damage in return.

Sara had seen powerful wolves before. Alphas who walked into rooms and changed the pressure in them just by existing. She had made a name out of navigating around that particular kind of danger.

She had never felt it this close.

The scar on her collarbone was burning so badly now that she had to work to keep her face from reacting to it. She had no idea why. She filed that problem away for later and kept her eyes on his.

“You’re going to tell me what’s under your jacket,” he said.

“I’m going to tell you it’s cold and I dressed accordingly,” Sara said.

Something moved in his expression. It was not amusement exactly, maybe faint irritation.

“Or,” he said, “I can take it.”

“You could try,” Sara said while debating whether she should be on her heels.

In seconds, he reached out and took the ledger from inside her jacket in one movement that was so fast and so precisely aimed that she registered what had happened only after his hand had already withdrawn.

She hadn’t felt him move toward her. She had felt the brief warmth of his hand through the fabric and then the absence of the ledger’s weight against her ribs.

Sara stared at him in disbelief and in disappointment of her unawareness.

He looked at the ledger, then at her.

“Walk,” he said, using his wide shoulders to point at the direction.

“That’s garrison territory,” Sara said.

He said with a voice of cold death to Sara.

“Walk.”