Chapter 4: Cold Creek

"Hazel!"

Duncan's voice cracked across the last hundred yards.

I did not turn around.

I put one foot down on the far side of the line, and the ground felt exactly like the ground on the other side.

That was the strangest part.

Four years as Luna had ended with me stepping over a line of painted rocks.

I made it barely into the trees before my legs gave out.

I sat down hard on a root with my arm in its wet sling and my wolf whining, a low and tired sound.

Nineteen miles.

I had done it, and the only person who had seen was the beta who pretended not to.

Behind me, boots hit the ground at the stone and stopped.

"Don't," Clint said, very quietly. "Alpha. That's Cold Creek land. If you cross, it's an invasion."

"She's my wife."

"She was your wife at the last stone. Now she's a woman on someone else's territory, and you can't touch her."

"Clint, get out of my way."

"I can't," Clint said. "Neither can you."

Then there was silence, and a very long breath, and Duncan's voice again, rough with something I had never heard in it.

"Hazel. Please. I'll do whatever you want. Just come back to the road."

I put my face on my knee.

Twigs snapped ahead of me.

Not Duncan's.

A big russet wolf slid out of the pines about twenty feet away and stopped, ears forward.

It shifted without any fuss, and Orson Ebbesen stood there in jeans and a canvas jacket, pulling the jacket on over his bare chest.

"Morning, Hazel," he said. "You look like hell."

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