UNDER THE SAME MOON

Chapter Four: The Names He Still Says Aloud

The cabin was smaller than Ezra expected, and older — hand-hewn logs gone silver with weather, a woodstove in the corner still ticking with the last heat of a fire lit hours ago. It smelled like cedar and, faintly, like woodsmoke and something underneath that Ezra didn't have a word for yet and would later learn to recognize as simply *Row*.

He got him to a chair near the stove, found a first-aid kit without needing to be told where it was kept, because there was only one cabinet in the kitchen and it was the obvious one. His hands were steadier than he expected them to be, cleaning the wound, wrapping it, while Row sat very still and watched him with an expression Ezra couldn't parse — somewhere between wariness and something softer he didn't seem to want caught doing.

"You've done this before," Row said.

"Summers on my uncle's ranch. Fence wire did this to a dog once." Ezra tied off the bandage, sat back on his heels, and finally let himself really look at the man in front of him — the sharp planes of his face, the scar along his sternum that hadn't been visible in wolf shape, the sheer *weight* of exhaustion sitting behind his eyes that had nothing to do with tonight's injury. "Okay. Talk. Start anywhere."

Row exhaled, long and slow, like a man setting down something he'd been carrying so long he'd forgotten its weight had a name.

"There were seven of us," he said. "My pack. This valley's been ours — my family's — for longer than the town's had a name that anyone remembers. We weren't hiding, not really. Just careful. There's a difference, or there used to be." He looked at the fire instead of at Ezra. "Twenty years ago a man came through selling himself as a wildlife researcher. Grants, university letterhead, all of it real enough to check out. He spent eight months in this valley before anyone understood what he actually was."

"A hunter," Ezra said quietly.

"Not the kind with a rifle. Worse — the kind with patience." Row's jaw worked. "He found the den. Waited for the full moon, when the change is involuntary, when there's no controlling it, no hiding what you are even if you want to. And then he wasn't alone anymore. He'd brought others."

Ezra didn't say anything. He'd learned, in three weeks of one-sided conversations with a wolf that turned out to be listening the whole time, that some silences were meant to be held rather than filled.

"I was the youngest," Row went on. "Which is the only reason I'm the one telling you this. I was out past the den boundary when it happened — chasing a rabbit, of all the stupid things, sixteen years old and reckless the way you're allowed to be when you think you have forever." His voice had gone very flat, very controlled, the voice of a man who had told himself this story so many times in the dark that he'd worn all the rawness off the words, at least on the surface. "By the time I got back there wasn't a pack to return to. There was a valley, and there was me, and there's been a version of that arrangement ever since."

"Twenty years," Ezra said. "Alone."

"Careful," Row corrected, though his voice didn't fully commit to the distinction. "There's a difference. There's supposed to be."

"Is there?"

Row looked at him then — really looked, amber eyes catching the low firelight — and something in his expression cracked open just slightly, the door on a room that clearly hadn't been aired out in a very long time.

"I don't know anymore," he admitted. "I used to know. I used to be sure caution was the only thing standing between me and ending up like the rest of them. And then a man with a camera started talking to a wolf every night like it might talk back, and I kept showing up to listen, and I stopped being sure of anything."

Ezra felt that admission land somewhere low in his chest, warm and unbearably heavy. "You could have just — not shown up. Any of the nights. You chose to."

"I know." Row huffed, and even exhausted, even bleeding, there was a ghost of that same wry amusement Ezra recognized from the clearing. "Believe me, I've had several arguments with myself about how poor a decision that was."

"And?"

"And I kept losing them." Row shifted in the chair, wincing at the pull in his leg, and something about the small human vulnerability of it — a person managing pain, not an animal enduring it — undid a last piece of Ezra's disbelief. "You should probably be more frightened of me than you are."

"Probably," Ezra agreed. "I've had a lot of practice being told what I *should* feel about things. I've gotten pretty good at doing the opposite."

That surprised a real laugh out of Row — short, rusty, like a mechanism that hadn't been used in a long time and was startled to find it still worked. It changed his whole face, and Ezra understood, with the particular vertigo of a fact arriving exactly on schedule and still landing like a surprise, that he was in serious trouble.

"The names," Ezra said carefully, after a moment. "Your pack. Do you still—"

"Every day." Row's voice didn't break, but it came close. "I say them out loud sometimes. So the cabin doesn't forget how to hold a voice that isn't only mine."

Ezra didn't reach for him — it felt too soon, too large a gesture for the size of the night — but he moved his chair an inch closer to the fire, close enough that their shoulders nearly touched, and let the quiet between them hold something neither of them was ready to name yet.

"Tell me one," he said. "A name. Just one, if you want to."

Row was quiet for a long moment. Then, low, careful, like handing over something breakable: "Mira. My sister. She would have hated how much time I've spent as a wolf. She always said I sulked better on two legs."

Outside, the wind moved through the trees, and for the first time in twenty years, the cabin held two voices instead of one.