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I look at the tree line instead. It's safer.

The trees give me nothing back. Whatever crouched at her step is gone and that patience is the part that scares me. Animals don't wait like this. People don't either. Not the living ones.

I crouch by her bottom step. The ash is real, a smear of it ground into the wood where something knelt. I rub it between my fingers. Still faintly warm.

"That's ash," she says.

"Burned herbs."

"How would you know that?"

I don't have an answer that isn't the whole truth, so I give her none.

She's cold and scared and she hides both the way she hides everything, behind her mouth. "You growled. Back there. Like an animal." Her chin comes up. "Don't tell me I imagined it."

Tell her.

"Not yet," I say back to my wolf but say nothing to Maren.

I watch something in her face shut, and I hate myself a fair amount for how far it closes. But how do I tell her your blood is about to wake up and every dark thing in three counties can already taste it? She's had enough for one night.

She holds my eyes a second longer, hoping I'll break. I don't break. It's the one thing I'm good at.

What she didn't see, back in her bedroom when that voice hit the door, is how close I came to shifting. My wolf was already in my teeth, already in the bones of my hands. One more breath and I'd have shifted in the middle of her hallway with her watching, and there'd have been no not yet left to give. I've held that line for six months. Tonight it held by a hair.

I get her inside. I walk the perimeter while the sky goes from black to red and pink. Under her bedroom window the sigil's still there, scorched into the siding, a circle split by three straight lines. The Veiled Hand's mark.

By the time the sun clears the roofline she's asleep at her kitchen table, chin on her fist, and I could watch her breathe for a year.

There's a smear of dried mud on her wrist she missed. Her hair's a wreck. She frowns in her sleep like she's winning an argument with someone who isn't there. I want to carry her to bed. I want to sit in the corner of her room with my back to the door and let anything that comes through it find out exactly what I am. I want a hundred things I've got no right to reach for.

I want her in my guest room. Behind my locks. But, she said no. She's so stubborn.

I let myself out.

Twelve feet of wet lawn between her door and mine. It's the longest walk I take all day.

My house is quiet in the way that used to feel like peace.

I get the door shut and my back is against it and I just stand there, because part of her came home with me. Her scent's on my hands from the ash and the doorframe, in my shirt from her kitchen, all through the animal parts of me that don't answer to sense. Clove and old paper and warm skin, and under it the bright green thread of her magic starting to bloom.

Mate, my wolf says. Quieter now. Wretched. Ours.

Not ours. That's the whole problem.

I pull my shirt off because her scent is all over it and I can't think through it. Big mistake. My wolf drags up every second I've refused to look at yet.

Thinking about when her wrist locked around mine that first morning in the shop, her pulse going wild against me. The way she tips her head back to glare up at me and pretends it's irritation. Her mouth. Six months of her mouth, saying my name like a dare she's daring me to lose.

You want her.

I do want her. But, wanting her isn't the sin. The sin would be doing something about it while she's still got no idea what she is. Fate's steering her at me and she doesn't even know it.

She'd choose me because the bond told her she should. But, I don't want to take her that way. I'd rather she hated me and stayed free.

But there's nothing here right now except the dark lawn, and a hunger that's been eating me alive since spring.

So, I step into the hot shower and I finally let myself have this much.