Bitten

She was supposed to be a trespasser he frightened off the mountain inside a week. Garrett Wainwright buried his brother in October. A flat crack in the woods that did not belong there, Caleb dropping mid-stride — four-legged one heartbeat, two-legged the next — and blood going black in the moonlight while Garrett's own shift tore out of him like a bad breath. He has spent every season since keeping humans off this land and keeping his own kin from asking the questions that would require answering. Then Lydia Hargrove comes up the fire road with a map she should have burned. She is chasing an echo — a sound recorded on this mountain that no animal makes and no machine explains. She has no idea what she has walked into the middle of. She has no idea the cabin she rented is where the last outsider learned exactly what it costs to be seen here. Garrett means to scare her off. Instead he starts learning the shape of her days. What she eats. Which trail she takes. How long she sleeps. He tells himself he is keeping watch. That this is about the mountain. It stops being about the mountain somewhere around the night he realises he would tear out the throat of anyone in his own bloodline before he let them near her. There is a Rite of the Silver Veil and an apology from a broken mouth. There is a cliff where the answers die, the weight of a territory nobody wants to inherit, and a sister who has been wearing two names for longer than anyone noticed. *He needs to be bound to us in a way that can't be broken with a signature on a confidentiality agreement.* *You want to bite her.* *I want to offer.* Then the truth arrives, and it burns the way truth does here. *You killed my father. You lied to me. You're about to tell me you did it for the greater good, and I'm about to—* He is out there fighting. Everyone is out there, bleeding, while she stands in a storage room holding a knife that belonged to a dead man and does the arithmetic of a siege. He is not letting her leave this mountain. Not ever.