The Rouges Moon

Chapter 4

Ashgrave territory announced itself before I ever saw a border marker.

The air changed first, the way it always does at the edge of a real pack's land, thick with the kind of layered scent-claim that only comes from decades of wolves marking the same ground generation after generation.

I stood at the tree line for a long moment just breathing it in, and underneath the general weight of it, unmistakable even after four years and a stranger's nose, I caught something that made my whole body go still.

Home. Or what used to be home, back when I still believed that word meant something safe.

I made myself keep walking before I could think too hard about that.

The plan, such as it was, had taken most of those four years in Hollow's End to build properly. I couldn't walk into Ashgrave land and announce myself as a rogue looking for pack placement, not directly, not without drawing exactly the kind of scrutiny I couldn't survive yet.

Packs vetted outsiders carefully, especially ones with any kind of fighting skill, and Rhys's inner circle would have every reason to look hard at a stranger who showed up asking for a place among his warriors.

So I didn't ask directly. I let myself get noticed instead.

There was a border skirmish happening when I arrived, the kind that flared up periodically between Ashgrave and a smaller neighboring territory over a disputed stretch of hunting ground, nothing serious enough to be called a real war but serious enough that Ashgrave's border patrols were stretched thin and irritable.

I found the skirmish on my second day near the territory line, three young Ashgrave warriors pinned down by a larger group of the rival pack's fighters in a rocky gully that gave the defenders almost no room to maneuver.

I want to be honest that I thought about walking past it. Some cold, practical part of me, the part Garrick had spent four years sharpening, pointed out that getting involved in someone else's fight was exactly the kind of unnecessary risk that got rogues killed before they finished whatever they'd actually come to do.

I didn't walk past it. I don't think the version of me capable of walking past three outnumbered kids getting overrun exists anymore, whatever else has changed.

I dropped down into the gully from the ridge above them, and for the second time since I'd woken up in this body, I let Vera Sharp's brutal, efficient instincts take over completely, and this time I didn't fight it the way I had that first night in the market square.

I'd spent four years learning exactly how to use what this body could do without losing myself inside it. It was, I discovered, considerably easier when I wasn't terrified of what I was capable of.

It was over faster than I expected. Six of theirs against three of ours, and I dropped four of the six myself before the rest broke and ran, and when it was done I stood there in the sudden ringing quiet with blood on my hands that wasn't mine and three young Ashgrave warriors staring at me like I'd fallen out of the sky.

"Who are you?" one of them finally managed, a wiry kid who couldn't have been more than nineteen, still catching his breath.

"Nobody," I said, which was truer than any name I could have given him. "Wrong place, wrong time. You should get back to your border captain."

I turned to leave. I'd planned this part carefully, planned to disappear back into the tree line and let word of an unnamed rogue who'd saved three Ashgrave warriors travel through the pack on its own, planting a seed I could return to harvest later once curiosity had done some of my work for me.

I hadn't planned on the fourth warrior.

He came around the bend of the gully a moment too late to help, breathing hard from running, and stopped dead when he saw the aftermath. Tall, dark-haired, dressed like the others but carrying himself with the specific weight of someone used to being listened to. It took me a full three seconds, standing there with someone else's blood drying on my hands, to understand why my whole chest had gone tight and cold at the sight of him.

Rhys Ashgrave was younger than I remembered him. Of course he was. This was four years before the night he'd order my death, which meant he was maybe twenty-three here, a few years into carrying an Alpha's title he'd inherited too young, and something in his face still had a softness to it that the man I'd married would eventually lose entirely.

He looked at the three warriors, checking them for injury with the fast, practiced eyes of someone who'd done that exact scan a hundred times before. Then he looked at me.

I made myself hold still. Made myself remember that this stranger's face was the only thing standing between me and a recognition that would end everything I'd spent four years building before it had even properly started.

"You did this," he said. Not quite a question, and not an accusation either, just careful, assessing.

"They needed help," I said. "I was passing through."

His eyes narrowed slightly, taking in the blood, the obvious skill it had taken to drop four fighters in what could only have been a matter of seconds, the fact that I was still standing here at all instead of already gone. I could see him doing the math a border Alpha does automatically: threat or asset, danger or opportunity.

"What's your name?"

I had four years to prepare for this exact moment and it still nearly stuck in my throat.

"Vera," I said. "Vera Sharp."

Something flickered across his face when I said it, so brief I almost thought I'd imagined it, some small hitch I couldn't read. I told myself it was nothing.

Rogues gave rogue names all the time. There was no reason for an Alpha who'd never met me, in this version of the timeline, to react to a name he had no context for.

I didn't understand what that flicker actually was until much later, and when I finally did, it was going to change everything I thought I understood about how this story was supposed to go.

"Ashgrave territory owes you a debt," he said instead, formal in the specific way pack law required. "Come back to the main hall. Let us thank you properly, and treat whatever wounds you're not mentioning."

"I'm not wounded," I said, which was true. His eyes flicked once more over the blood on my hands, and something like understanding crossed his face, the recognition of someone who'd also learned the specific, ugly lesson of which blood belonged to you and which didn't.

"Then let us feed you, at least," he said. "You saved three of my warriors. I'm not letting you walk back into the woods without so much as a meal for it."

I could have refused. Four years of careful planning had built toward exactly this moment and I still felt the pull to bolt back into the trees rather than stand one room away from him and pretend I'd never seen his face before, never felt those hands on my skin, never heard him say my old name like it meant something sacred to him.

But this was the door I'd spent four years building myself strong enough to walk through. I wasn't going to turn away from it out of fear now.

"All right," I said. "Thank you."

He nodded, something almost like relief crossing his face, and turned to lead the way, and I fell into step half a pace behind him, close enough to see the specific way he carried tension in his shoulders, the way an Alpha too young for his title always does.

I spent the walk back to Ashgrave's main hall cataloguing everything about him that had changed and everything that hadn't, the way I'd once catalogued my own borrowed body in a barn four years and a lifetime ago.

He was quieter than I remembered him being at this age, or maybe I simply hadn't known him yet at twenty three, hadn't been given the chance to before Marisol Thorne's influence started working on him in earnest.

I thought about Garrick's words at the crossroads outside Hollow's End, about being allowed to want more than just his ruin, and I pushed the thought away hard, because I hadn't walked four years and rebuilt an entire self from scratch to let myself want anything soft from the man who was, in another version of this exact timeline, going to order my death without turning around to look at me while he did it.

I told myself that. I mostly believed it.

Ashgrave's main hall rose out of the trees ahead of us, and despite everything, despite four years of careful preparation and every hardened instinct Garrick had built into me, something in my chest ached at the sight of it, familiar and wrong all at once, like coming home to a house that used to be yours and now belongs to strangers who don't know your name.

I straightened my spine, buried the ache somewhere Vera Sharp's cold competence could keep it from showing on my face, and walked through the gates of the pack that was going to kill me one day, for the first time since I'd died there.