The fog in Ross Hollow never used to feel like this.
It used to be soft, a curtain that turned the streetlights to halos and made Liam’s laugh sound closer than it was. Now it presses cold and wet against my skin, swallowing the sound of my boots on the cracked sidewalk as if the town itself is holding its breath.
I should have come back in daylight.
My duffel hangs heavy off my shoulder, biting into skin through my jacket. The houses are mostly dark, half-hidden behind bare-limbed trees and creeping ivy. The same peeling white fences. The same sagging porches. The same hollow in my chest that opens wider with each step toward the edge of town.
Home.
“Just a few weeks,” I mutter to myself as another curl of fog slides across the road like a living thing. “Long enough to make sure she’s okay. Then gone.”
The hospital’s voicemail had said "worsening" and "come if you can." My mother’s text had said nothing at all. That silence was louder than any diagnosis.
The turnoff to our lane appears out of the gray like a memory. I stop at the rusted signpost for half a heartbeat, knuckles whitening around the strap of my bag. Three years. I swore I would never walk down this road again.
My phone is dead, of course. No map, no distraction, nothing to look at except the familiar path into the trees and the shadows that never quite behaved like normal shadows here.
I draw in a lungful of damp air that tastes faintly of pine and iron and something older, then start down the lane.
The forest reaches in close almost immediately, branches knitting overhead, shutting out what little light leaks through the mist. The sound shifts—city noise replaced by the hiss of leaves, the distant murmur of water, the quiet thud of my heartbeat in my ears.
Don’t think about him.
A twig snaps somewhere to my left.
I stop. Every instinct I don’t want to claim goes wire-tight, all my attention funneling toward the sound. It comes again, heavier this time, like deliberate steps pacing just beyond the edge of the path.
“Probably a deer,” I whisper, but the words feel thin, foolish.
The smell changes. Not just wet earth now. Muskier. Wilder. A thread of copper rides the air, metallic and hot, and my skin crawls.
“Okay, Emma,” I tell myself, voice barely more than breath. “You’re not fifteen. There’s no such thing as—”
A low growl rolls out of the shadows.
It’s not loud. That almost makes it worse. A quiet, rumbling sound that vibrates through the soles of my boots and slides up my spine. My pulse kicks hard. Fight, flight, freeze—my body can’t decide.
Then it steps onto the path.
I’ve seen wolves before. Nature documentaries, late-night internet rabbit holes. They do not look like this.
This thing is massive, shoulders nearly level with my chest even at a crouch. Its fur is a mottled, dirty gray, patchy around the ribs as if it’s been in too many fights. Its eyes catch what little light there is and twist it into something red-gold and wrong. Its lips peel back slowly, deliberately, off teeth that are too long for its mouth.
I can’t move.
Breath saws in and out of my lungs with a faint wheeze. My fingers have gone numb on the strap of my bag. Somewhere beneath the frozen panic a smaller, colder voice catalogues all the ways this doesn’t match any normal predator. The way its gaze sticks to me, not my throat or my hands or my bag, but my face. The faint shimmer of…heat?…around its paws on the damp ground.
My mother’s warnings slam back into me. Don’t go into the woods at night, Emma. Don’t go out when the fog is thick. Don’t—
The wolf’s body coils.
“No,” I gasp, stumbling backward. The duffel slips off my shoulder and hits the path with a dull thud.
It launches.
Claws rake down my arm as I throw it up without thinking, white-hot lines of fire scoring skin through my jacket. The impact knocks me flat, the world spinning as I hit the dirt. Weight slams into my torso, crushing the air out of me. Hot, wet breath blasts across my cheek, stinking of blood and rot.
I scream.
Teeth scrape my collarbone instead of my throat because I jerk at the last second, some terrified animal instinct taking over. Pain explodes along my shoulder, bright and disorienting. My hands fly up of their own accord, shoving uselessly at solid, furred muscle. The wolf snarls, a horrible, tearing sound that feels like it could rip the sky open.
“Get off!” I choke, flailing. My fingers brush its muzzle, its teeth, the slick of saliva and blood—
And the world drops into slow motion.
Sound warps. The beat of my heart stretches between seconds. The air grows thick, humming around me, charged. Something in my chest pushes back against the weight on top of me, a pressure that is not muscle or bone but heat, gathering, building—
The wolf’s eyes flare, widening as if it senses it too.
Then the night shatters.
A blur tears the weight off me so fast I barely feel the shift. The snarl above my head turns into a yelp, cut off by a meaty crack. I roll onto my side, coughing, vision smeared with tears and fog. Shapes streak through the mist—two bodies, one dark, one gray, colliding with bone-jarring force.
“Stay down,” a voice snaps. Male. Calm in the way of someone used to violence.
I freeze, half-propped on my elbow, the world tilting. The gray wolf—no, the wolf—recovers faster than anything that size should, twisting midair, claws flashing. The other figure is just a silhouette at first, a smear of black coat and pale skin moving with impossible speed.
They hit the trees.
Bark explodes. The wolf lunges, jaws gaping for the man’s throat. The man pivots, one hand closing around the beast’s neck with inhuman force. For a heartbeat they lock like that—fangs inches from flesh, fingers digging into fur.
Then the man bares his teeth.
He doesn’t snarl. He doesn’t need to. The sound he makes is low and soft, a kind of amused contempt that sends a colder fear sliding through me than the wolf ever did.
“Rogue,” he says, voice almost conversational. “How tiresome.”
He twists.
There’s a horrible pop. The wolf convulses, back arching, claws scrabbling at empty air. It slumps, heavy and wrong, hitting the ground in a boneless sprawl that kicks up dirt and wet leaves.
My stomach lurches.
The man straightens slowly, dusting his hand on the side of his coat as if shaking off nothing more than rain. He turns toward me.
For a second, all I see are pieces: the dark fall of his hair, the high cut of his cheekbones, the long line of his mouth. His clothes are anachronistic but expensive—a black coat that fits like it was made for him, a shirt open at the throat despite the chill, shadows clinging to him like they know he owns them.
Then his gaze hits me.
It pins me to the ground as securely as the wolf’s weight had. His eyes are a strange, bottomless gray, ringed with something darker. They skim over my face, down to the torn fabric at my shoulder, the smear of blood on my collarbone, the red tracks welting my forearm.
Heat blooms under my skin wherever his attention lingers. My pulse, which had just begun to slow, spikes again for an entirely different reason.
He moves.
One moment he is several paces away; the next he is kneeling beside me, close enough that the air shifts with his presence. I flinch, muscles protesting, a hiss of pain slipping out before I can stop it.
His expression changes, a flicker of something almost like regret crossing his face. It’s gone before I can name it.
“You’re bleeding,” he says quietly.
“Really?” My voice comes out thin and shaky. “Hadn’t noticed.”
One corner of his mouth lifts, not quite a smile. “Still capable of sarcasm. That’s a good sign.”
My fingers curl into the damp earth, grounding myself. “What…what was that?” I jerk my chin toward the unmoving shape in the fog. Saying "wolf" out loud feels like crossing a line I can’t uncross.
“Hungry,” he answers, as if that explains anything. His attention returns to my shoulder. “You’re lucky he was sloppy.”
“I don’t feel lucky.” The world tilts again. Black specks gather at the edges of my vision.
He notices. His hand comes up—long fingers, pale against the darkness of his sleeve—and hovers a second away from my skin. "May I?"
“Who are you?” I breathe.
There’s a pause, almost imperceptible, as if he’s deciding how much of the truth to give a stranger bleeding on the forest floor.
“Dante,” he says at last. “Dante Marek.”
The name hits something in me I didn’t know was there. An echo, faint and familiar, rippling through the hollow spaces left by the years I can’t remember.
The fog presses closer, whispering against my ears.
“Emma,” I say, because it seems polite to tell the beautiful, terrifying stranger my name after he just broke a monster’s neck for me. “Emma Ross.”
His focus sharpens. I feel it like a temperature change.
“Ross,” he repeats slowly, tasting the word. His eyes flick toward the trees, to the darkness beyond. Some calculation happens behind them that I’m not invited to see. “Of course.”
I don’t have the energy to ask what that means. Pain throbs in time with my pulse now, radiating from my shoulder down my arm and into my chest.
“May I?” he asks again, softer this time. His hand is still hovering, respectful of the last scrap of space between us.
I should say no. Every instinct that isn’t screaming or shaking is huddled in a corner whispering, Stranger, danger, run. But another part of me—something low and primal that I hate—uncoils at his nearness, drawn toward him like a moth to an open flame.
“Yes,” I hear myself say. “Just…don’t make it worse.”
He huffs out a quiet sound that might be a laugh. “I will try to restrain myself.”
Then his fingers brush my skin.
It’s such a light touch, a ghosting of contact along the torn edge of my jacket, but it might as well be a live wire. Heat shoots from the point of contact, flooding my veins, chasing away the cold that had started to seep into my bones.
I suck in a sharp breath.
“Easy,” Dante murmurs. His hand is steady now, deft as he peels back ruined fabric to expose the bite.
I don’t want to look. I do anyway.
The wolf’s teeth have left a vicious crescent in my skin, puncture marks oozing sluggishly, flesh ragged where it tore. Blood runs in thin, bright lines down to my wrist, mixing with dirt.
“That’s…” I swallow hard. “That’s bad, isn’t it?”
“For you?” He tilts his head, studying the wound with an intensity that makes my cheeks heat. “Yes. For them?” His gaze flicks again toward the trees, his mouth flattening briefly. “Worse.”
“Who is ‘them’?” My voice shakes on the last word.
“The ones who think they own this forest.” His lips curl, the expression all disdain. “And you.”
The last word lands like a dropped stone in my stomach.
“I don’t belong to anyone,” I say, more sharply than I intend. My whole body protests the force behind it, pain flaring.
His eyes meet mine. For a heartbeat they are not amused, not distant, but something else entirely—hot and intent and disturbingly pleased.
“Good,” he says. “Hold on to that.”
He shifts closer. The fog seems to ripple away from him, like even the air doesn’t want to get too near. "This will hurt."
Panic spikes again. "What—"
His mouth is on my skin before I finish the question.
Not on my throat like the wolf’s, but at the inside of my wrist, just below the torn crescent of the bite. His lips are cool, impossibly soft. For a split second it feels almost gentle, almost reverent.
Then his teeth sink in.
Agony lances up my arm, white and blinding. It’s different from the wolf’s tearing pain—this is precise, deliberate, as if every nerve ending has been plucked and set on fire. A choked sound wrenches out of me. My back arches off the ground, vision fracturing into shards of light.
The hand not crushing my wrist is at my shoulder now, holding me still. His grip is firm but not bruising, the weight of it the only thing anchoring me to my body as whatever he’s doing sends waves of something—heat, cold, power—rolling through me.
He drinks.
I know that’s what it is. I can feel it in the pull at my veins, the hollow ache blooming in my chest. But there’s more to it, something threaded through the taking, a current that flows both ways. For every drop of blood that leaves me, something else pours in: a dark, rich sensation that tastes like old earth and midnight and the echo of a language I don’t remember learning.
My thoughts fracture.
Images slam against the inside of my skull—trees under a different sky, a stone hall lit by candles that never burn out, a pair of gray eyes staring down at me across centuries with the same unreadable intensity. A name whispers along my bones, not his, not mine, but something in between.
Then it’s over.
He pulls back, lips stained with a smear of my blood that looks obscene and intimate all at once. His eyes are darker now, pupils blown wide, the gray ringed with a faint, unnatural crimson.
I’m shaking so hard my teeth chatter.
“What did you—” My voice breaks. “What did you do to me?”
He lifts my wrist between us. The wolf’s bite is still there, angry and raw, but something has changed. A second mark blooms around it, paler, more precise—a thin ring of punctures forming a circle that wraps the original wound like a halo.
It throbs in time with my pulse.
“I marked you,” Dante says quietly.
The forest seems to lean closer, listening.
“Why?” The word scrapes out of me.
“Because,” he answers, and for the first time there’s no amusement, no distance at all in his gaze. Only certainty, dark and absolute. “They are not going to have you.”
The meaning sinks in slowly, like cold water seeping through cracked stone.
My heartbeat stutters. “You don’t even know me.”
His thumb brushes just once over the fresh mark, and a shiver rips through me that has nothing to do with fear. “Don’t I?” he murmurs. “We’ll see.”
The night seems to press in all at once. The fog thickens, swallowing the dead wolf, the path, the edges of Dante’s shoulders, until there’s only his face and my own ragged breathing.
Somewhere, far off, a howl rises, long and furious, slicing through the dense air.
Dante’s head snaps toward the sound. When he looks back at me, the softness is gone, replaced by sharp calculation.
“They’re coming,” he says. “Your wolves.”
“My what?”
But he’s already moving, one arm sliding under my knees, the other around my back. I yelp, fingers clutching at his coat as he lifts me like I weigh nothing.
“Put me down,” I protest weakly, though the world is spinning again, darkness licking at the edges of my vision.
He ignores the demand, but his gaze cuts to me, holding me there as firmly as his arms do.
“Try not to show them how much it hurts,” he says softly. “They’ll smell the weakness and call it love.”
The words lodge somewhere deep, where the ghost of an old hurt still bleeds.
I manage one last question before the blackness finally drags me under.
“How do you know that?”
His answer follows me down into the dark, cool and almost tender.
“Because, little wolf,” Dante Marek whispers, “I have seen what they do to the ones they claim.”
