His Forbidden Human

Chapter 4: Rules of a World I Never Asked For

The one day turned into two.

Maya told herself it was practical. Her phone was still dead. Her shoes were still damp. And every time she thought about walking back through those trees alone, she remembered the breathing. The gold eyes. The way whatever it was had just... stopped. Like it was waiting for something better.

So she stayed.

Ethan didn't say anything about it. He just put a spare toothbrush on the bathroom counter and moved on with his day like having a human girl stranded in his house was completely unremarkable.

Which was somehow more unsettling than if he'd made a big deal of it.

By the second morning, Maya had developed a routine. She woke up before him — or at least, she came downstairs before him, she was starting to suspect he didn't sleep much — made herself coffee, and sat at the kitchen table with the old phone he'd lent her, pretending to read and actually just listening to the house.

It was a strange house to listen to.

Things moved in it. Not people — she was almost certain it was just the two of them — but sounds. Shifts and creaks and once, at two in the morning when she couldn't sleep, something that might have been voices very far away. She never asked about it. She filed it away with all the other things she was collecting, waiting for the moment he'd promised her. The everything conversation.

It came on the second afternoon.

He found her on the back porch, sitting on the steps with her second coffee of the day, watching the tree line. He sat beside her without asking. She noticed he always left a careful amount of space.

"You're going to have questions," he said.

"I have approximately four hundred questions."

"Ask."

She turned to look at him. In the daylight he looked different than he had in the dark forest. Less like something out of a story and more like a person — tired around the eyes, jaw unshaved, wearing a shirt that had seen better days. Still unsettling in ways she couldn't fully explain. But more real.

"How long have you been here?" she asked. "In this town."

"Three years."

"Where were you before?"

"Different places." He said it in a way that meant he wasn't going to elaborate. She let it go.

"The pack you had. What happened to it?"

The pause this time was longer.

"That's not part of what you need to know," he said.

"You said everything."

"I said everything about what's happening to you. Not everything about me."

She considered arguing. Decided to table it. "Fine. The Hollow Pack. Tell me about them."

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, looking out at the trees. "There are rules," he said. "In our world. Territories, hierarchies, agreements between packs about where they can go and what they can do. Most of them hold. Not because everyone's honorable." He glanced at her. "But because breaking them has consequences."

"And the Hollow Pack breaks them."

"They operate outside the system. No claimed territory. No alpha structure, not a real one. They move, they take what they want, they disappear before anyone can respond." His jaw tightened. "They've been moving through this region for months. Three towns before this one. Each time, something goes missing."

Maya felt something cold settle in her stomach. "What kind of something."

"People," he said simply. "Humans, usually. Young. Unconnected." He turned to look at her. "People who wouldn't be immediately missed."

She was quiet for a moment.

"Why me?" she asked. "I'm not — I'm not special. I'm a regular person. I go to classes and work a part-time shift at the campus library and walk in the woods at night because I can't sleep. There's nothing remarkable about me."

Ethan looked at her for a long time without saying anything.

"That you know of," he said finally.

The cold feeling spread.

"What does that mean?"

"It means I don't know yet why they were following you specifically." He held up a hand before she could interrupt. "I'm not keeping things from you. I genuinely don't have the answer. But the fact that they tracked you — specifically you, not just any human who wandered into the wrong place — means there's something. I just haven't found it yet."

Maya stared out at the trees. A bird moved somewhere in the branches. Completely normal. Completely ordinary.

"This is a lot," she said.

"I know."

"I had a normal life three days ago."

"I know."

"I had a quiz on Thursday that I have definitely failed by now."

Something shifted in his expression. "I'll write you a note."

She looked at him sharply. He wasn't smiling exactly. But there was something there. Something almost human.

"That's not funny," she said.

"It wasn't a joke. I know the dean."

"You know the—" She stopped. Pressed her fingers to her forehead. "Of course you do. Okay. Sure."

She stood up, wrapping both hands around her mug, looking down at him. He looked back up at her, patient in that still, unnerving way of his.

"I want to go home tomorrow," she said. "My actual home. My apartment."

"It's not safe yet."

"You don't know that."

"I know they haven't left the territory." He stood too, which put her back at the disadvantage of having to look up. She really needed to stop letting that bother her. "Give me two more days. I'll know more by then."

"Two more days," she repeated. "And then I go home, regardless."

"If it's safe."

"Two more days," she said again, firmly.

He looked at her for a moment. Then, slowly, he nodded.

She went back inside before she could say anything else, because she was running out of arguments and she didn't want him to know that.

She stood in his kitchen and stared at nothing for a while.

Then she refilled her coffee and tried to figure out how her life had turned into this.

She came up with nothing useful.

But the coffee helped.

It always did.