Sera's POV
It doesn't move.
Whatever is standing in those trees — big, silent, watching — it just stays there. Not attacking. Not retreating. Just holding the dark around itself like a coat.
My legs are the ones that make the decision for me.
They give out.
Not slowly — not a graceful sink to the ground. They just stop working. One second I'm upright, the next my knees crack against the forest floor and I'm grabbing at a tree root with both bleeding hands, trying to find something solid in a world that has stopped being solid entirely.
The brand on my neck screams. The cold air hits it and I grit my teeth so hard my jaw aches.
Behind me, the pack border hums. That invisible wall of pack magic, warm and familiar, the thing I have felt at my back my entire life without ever once being grateful for it.
It's gone now. Just — gone. Like a door slamming shut.
I press my back against the tree root and pull my knees to my chest. My right boot strap snapped somewhere during the march to the border. The leather flaps loose against my ankle. I have no coat. No food. Nothing in my pockets except the pregnancy test I still haven't been able to throw away because throwing it away feels like giving something up and I am done giving things up tonight.
I press my hand to my stomach.
The thing in the trees still hasn't moved.
"Okay," I whisper. I don't know if I'm talking to the baby or to myself or to whatever is watching me from thirty feet away. Maybe all three. "Okay. Think."
I know these woods. I grew up on the eastern edge of pack territory — I ran drills in this forest, tracked game here, learned to navigate by moonlight in these exact trees. I know where the river is. I know there's a ranger outpost two miles north that the pack uses in summer. I know that if I can get to the ridge by dawn, I can follow the old trade road south toward neutral territory where no pack has jurisdiction and nobody can drag me back.
I know all of this.
And I cannot make my legs move.
Get up, I tell myself. Sera. Get up right now.
Nothing.
My wolf is still doing that strange silent thing — coiled tight inside my chest, completely motionless, every piece of her attention aimed at the dark ahead of me like a compass needle finding north. She isn't scared. That's the part I can't figure out. She should be scared. I'm scared enough for both of us. But she's not. She's just — focused.
On whatever is out there.
A branch snaps.
Not far. Maybe twenty feet.
I stop breathing.
The footsteps are quiet but deliberate. Not sneaking — choosing to be heard. Getting closer one careful step at a time, the way you approach something wounded when you don't want to spook it further.
Don't let it spook you, I think savagely. You are not wounded. You are fine. Get up.
I get up.
It takes everything I have and my legs shake the whole way but I get my feet under me and my back against the tree and my hands up — bleeding palms, broken nails, not exactly a threat display but the best I've got — and I face the dark.
"I know you're there," I say. "I can hear you."
The footsteps stop.
Silence.
Then a voice comes out of the dark. Low. Male. Unhurried, like this is a perfectly normal conversation to be having at midnight in a forest.
"You're Silver-Blooded."
I blink.
Of all the things I expected something in the dark to say to me, that was not on the list.
"I can smell it," the voice continues, "even through everything else you're carrying."
Everything else I'm carrying. My brand. My blood. My—
My stomach.
He knows.
My hands drop to my belly without thinking and the second they do, I want to scream at myself because I just confirmed it, I just showed him, and I don't even know what he is yet or what he wants or why he knows the word Silver-Blooded when I barely know what it means—
"I'm not going to hurt you."
"Nobody who means that ever needs to say it," I snap back.
Another silence. Then — and this is the part that throws me completely — he laughs. It's a short sound. Quiet. Surprised, almost, like it caught him off guard too. Like he didn't expect to do it.
"Fair point," he says.
He steps out of the trees.
He's tall. That's the first thing — genuinely tall, the kind that means he has to think about doorframes. Wide across the shoulders. He moves like someone who has never once in his life been unsure of where his body is in space.
And he's wearing a mask.
Not a costume mask — a real one. Dark, fitted close to his face, covering everything from his forehead to his jaw. Only his eyes are visible. Even in the dark I can see them clearly.
They are the most focused eyes I have ever seen on a living creature.
He stops six feet from me. Far enough to not be threatening. Close enough that I can see him assess me the same way I'm assessing him — quick, efficient, filing information away.
"You're exiled," he says. It isn't a question.
"You're very observant," I say. My voice only shakes a little.
"You're also about to fall down again."
"I'm fine—"
My vision goes grey at the edges. I grab the tree root again. He doesn't move to catch me, which I appreciate more than I can explain right now. He just waits while I pull myself back together.
When I look up, something in his expression has shifted. Not softer exactly. More — decided.
"I have a proposition for you," he says.
Every alarm bell I own goes off at once. A masked stranger in a forest saying I have a proposition is not the beginning of any good story.
But my wolf—
My wolf goes completely still. And then she does something she has never done in my entire life. Not for Cole. Not for anyone.
She lowers her head.
Not in fear.
In recognition.
The ground tilts under my feet and this time it has nothing to do with hunger or exhaustion. This time it's something deeper — something ancient and bone-level wrong and right at the same time slamming into my chest like I just walked into a wall I couldn't see.
I stare at the masked man.
He stares back.
And I realize — with a slow, terrible clarity — that my wolf isn't reacting to a stranger.
She's reacting to something that was always supposed to find me.
My lips part. No sound comes out.
His eyes drop — just for a second, just a flicker — to the hand I still have pressed against my stomach.
And for the first time since he stepped out of those trees, the masked man goes completely, utterly still.
Like he just walked into a wall too.