The farmhouse had been empty for decades.
You could feel it in the way the silence sat inside the walls — not the active quiet of an inhabited place between sounds but the deep structural quiet of somewhere that had stopped expecting people a long time ago. The roof held. Barely. The floorboards held better than they looked like they should. And Damien had been right about the land — the moment I stepped through the front door something in my wolf went still and then slowly, carefully, began to uncurl.
Old markers. Old protection. Old wolf, whoever had lived here, who'd embedded something into the soil and the stone that had outlasted them by years.
It felt, faintly, like being held.
I hadn't expected that.
Nkechi moved through the rooms with a torch, checking — always checking — whil
