Three years changed Jason again—but not in the way the first seventeen had.
This change was quieter.
Deeper.
The kind that didn’t show up in how he looked anymore, but in how he was.
At twenty, he moved between forms with control most wolves never learned in a lifetime. The shift no longer felt like loss of self, but a doorway he could open and close with intention. Human. Wolf. Something balanced between the two.
Dakota was no longer a voice he struggled to understand.
He was a presence Jason moved with, like breath in the same lungs.
And together, they learned restraint.
Not suppression.
Control.
—
The village had grown used to him.
Not as a boy who had once been abandoned.
Not even as the blacksmith who stayed on the edge of things.
But as something in-between—someone who
