Anna's POV
We have one day, and we spend all of it getting Evan ready to walk into a ring designed to kill him.
The morning comes grey and cold over the harbor, and I wake in the boathouse with a crick in my neck and Evan already gone from beside me, and for one lurching second I panic, until I see him through the open door, down at the water's edge, standing very still with his eyes closed, and I understand he's doing the thing again, the holding, practicing it in the dawn while the town still sleeps. I watch him from the doorway for a while before he knows I'm awake. There's a stillness to him now that's different from the old stillness. The old stillness was a wall, a thing held rigid against what was underneath. This is something else, a balance, a boy and a wolf occupying the same s
