The Hunter's Mark

Chapter 2: Three Bodies, Zero Truth

The first shot didn't come from the rafters.

It came from Kelvin's gun, aimed not at the wolf but straight into the floodlight housing above her head. Glass exploded. Sparks rained down in a hissing curtain, and the warehouse dropped into a darkness thick enough to swim through.

"Hunter's gone rogue!" someone screamed from the catwalk.

Zoey didn't wait to find out if that was true.

She grabbed the boy by his jacket collar, hauled him against her chest, and ran.

Bullets chewed through crates behind her, splinters biting at her shoulders. She didn't feel them. Pain was a tomorrow problem. Right now there was only the gap in the loading dock floor, eight feet down to black water, and a kid sobbing into her collarbone like she was the only solid thing left in the world.

She jumped.

The harbor swallowed them both, cold enough to stop a human heart. Zoey's didn't stop. It never did. She kicked hard for the pylons under the next pier, surfaced in the shadow between two barges, and clamped a hand over the boy's mouth before his gasp could turn into a scream.

"Quiet," she breathed. "Just a little longer."

Above them, flashlight beams swept the water like dying searchlights, found nothing, and moved on.

She waited until the shouting thinned to radio static before she moved again — half-carrying, half-dragging the boy up a maintenance ladder slick with algae, toward the alley behind the fish market where she knew a night clerk who wouldn't ask questions and would call his mother for him.

The clerk took one look at the kid, then at her, and didn't ask a single thing. Good. She didn't have answers tonight anyway.

Only once the boy was safe, wrapped in a stranger's jacket and sipping coffee that was mostly sugar, did Zoey let herself stop.

Let herself shake.

Three confirmed kills, the file said. Her bite pattern. Her territory.

Lies. All of it.

She'd checked. The night of the first murder, she'd been forty miles north settling a dispute over a stolen shipment — Ronan had been with her the whole time, could swear to it under oath. The second murder happened on a night she'd spent flat on her back with a dislocated shoulder from a training bout, useless for anything more athletic than wincing.

The third —

The third was the one that made her stomach turn every time she thought about it, because the body had been found six blocks from the pack house. Inside Ashwood territory. Somewhere she patrolled three nights a week.

Somewhere almost anyone in the pack could have been.

Bite radius too wide for her jaw. She'd noticed that in the leaked photo before Dane confiscated every copy. Too wide for any wolf her size. Whoever did this either had bigger teeth than the entire pack roster, or wanted it to look that way on purpose.

Someone had built a killer's resume out of her name.

And the hunter who'd been sent to put a bullet in her for it had shot out a light instead.

That part made even less sense than the murders.

Zoey pressed her back against the cold brick of the alley and finally let herself breathe — three slow counts in, four counts out, the rhythm Dane had taught her years ago for after-mission nerves, back when she still trusted every word that came out of his mouth.

She needed to get to the pack house. Needed Ronan, needed Dane, needed someone who'd actually believe her before the Vigil's version of tonight reached them first.

She pushed off the wall.

And froze.

A shape detached itself from the dark at the alley's mouth — tall, unhurried, soaked from the waist down exactly the way a man would be if he'd followed her into the harbor instead of waiting topside like every other hunter in his unit.

Moonlight caught the gun still in his hand.

"You're bleeding," Kelvin said. Not a question. His eyes dropped briefly to the splinter wound at her shoulder, then climbed back to her face like he couldn't decide where to look. "Pier debris. Left side."

"You followed me." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "Through gunfire. Through a harbor jump. Alone."

"Yes."

"Your own people think you've gone rogue."

"They might be right."

She didn't move. Couldn't, not with her back against brick and a hunter blocking the only way out, his weapon still drawn even if it wasn't quite raised.

"So which is it," she asked, low. "Did you come to finish the job they think you already failed? Or did you come for something else?"

Kelvin's grip tightened on the gun.

And he didn't answer.