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"Hi," she says.

I've had him in my head since I was nine years old. Every night of my life. Nobody has ever heard him. Not my father, not Cass, not one of forty wolves, not one person in thirty-eight years, and this woman says hi to him like he's stepped onto her porch.

Something in my chest that has been braced since April puts itself down.

Ours, he says again, and there's nothing in it I have to be ashamed of. He isn't asking to take her. He's standing where I'm standing, on my side of the line, with his shoulder against mine.

Three of us holding one rope.

I can feel what it does to her. It goes through her like a current finding better wire, and she gets taller in her boots, and her hands stop shaking for the first time all night.

"Oh," Maren says, in a voice with all three of us in it.

And under her boots, without any of us laying a hand on it, the crack in the floor of the world closes half an inch on its own.

49

MAREN

STILL MIDNIGHT

There's a wolf holding the other end of me.

I've had a sarcastic cat in my head for thirteen days and thought that was a lot to get used to. This is not that. This is standing in the dark with a rope in both hands and feeling something on the far end that could take the rope, and me, and the building, any time it wanted, and is choosing not to.

He's on Gage's side of the line. That's the part I keep coming back to, later, at two in the morning, for years.

He never crossed. He came up through his man the way he's come up through him for twenty-nine years, and he stopped at the edge and put his weight down beside him, and now the two of them are standing shoulder to shoulder at the far end of a line I tied off myself.

Nobody warned me it would feel like being braced.

"Maren." Gage's voice comes from somewhere near my hands. "Say something."

"Give me a second. There's two of you."

Ours, says the wolf, pleased about it.

"There's a lot of you."

My hands have stopped shaking. I notice that the way you notice a headache leaving. Fifteen minutes ago I couldn't hold my own arm down after a ward, and now I can feel every window in this house and the shape of the hill under it and the cold seam sixteen feet long running past my boot, and none of it is heavy.

That's not my power. Mine woke up an hour ago and it's already all the way up.

That's what the three of us weigh.

I go down the line to see what I've tied myself to, because I want to know, because I have never once in this entire mess been handed a thing without checking it for strings.

The wolf steps aside and lets me past.

That's when he shows me.

Not fate. There isn't a scrap of fate in it, which is what everyone in this town has been selling me since the marigolds. Evelyn called him compromised. Seraphine built a religion out of what a completed Alpha bond does to a woman. His own father took one the way a man takes a coat off a hook.

What's in there is cordwood.

A railing sanded at four in the morning. Mushrooms picked off a pizza. Twelve feet measured and never crossed. A man in a doorway at one a.m. with his hand on the frame, choosing, again, the way he chose the day before. Every one of those days is a separate act and it's piling up under his ribs, and the wolf is lying on top of the pile.

He's been keeping count of them.