Chapter 3

Allison

The waterfall runs steadily. Water folds over rock, and the sound carries until everything else, the music checks from the lawn, the pack chat lighting up my phone, drops to a quiet I feel sinking into me.

I'm on my flat of stone with my shoes off, toes pressed to the cool edge. The air is damp and clean and my phone sits face down beside me on Do Not Disturb. The PR team pushed a banner for the Blue Ridge stream to everyone so the screen wakes and flashes it again. I swipe it away and set the phone back down. If I let the world in, I'll talk myself out of what has to happen.

Twenty minutes ago, Daniel texted: You good? That is his code for Where are you, and do I need to run interference? I typed I'm at the water. I'll come back when it's over, then didn't send it. If I send it, he'll show up, and if he shows up, I'll delay the one conversation I can't avoid.

Ruby paces under my skin with the same restlessness as the falls. She loves this place but she also loves the pull across my chest that has been growing since last week, a line that slid into place the morning after the triplets took their power. It's steady and sure and I press my hand to my sternum and breathe until it feels like part of the air instead of something dragging me across it.

I know the sensible option. If I reject the bond now, it will hurt and then ease. I can keep my job split between the library and the bookstore, save for more classes, run inventory with the Omegas when they're short, and sleep without replaying the elders' talk about "wolves like us." If I let the bond stand, I become the girl who asks Blue Ridge to change its rules, and I've lived here long enough to know how that goes.

My parents, the ones who chose me, found me here, a bundle on a blanket with river grit on my cheeks. The Alpha and Luna said yes when they begged to take me home and people like that story because it paints their leaders in a good light. They don't tell the part where a child who isn't a wolf learns early to make herself smaller than the room requires. They don't tell the part where a thirteen-year-old promises her mother she won't show anyone what she is, because she shifted once by this water, came back with four tails, and a name in her mouth that a wolf wouldn't understand.

I rub my thumb over the smooth river stone in my pocket. It fits the notch between my fingers and the texture steadies me until the sound of steps threads into the falls, quickly as if someone is covering ground on purpose.

His scent reaches me before I turn. Rain on grass, warm and clean. I don't need to look to know which brother found me. "Hi, Alpha Elijah," I say. "You can sit."

He does, not too close and not so far it makes me feel like a problem. He looks at the water first, then at me like he doesn't want to startle whatever I am. Black trousers, the baby-blue shirt everyone has been talking about, tie loose as if it tried to strangle him and he bargained it down. The stream's audio carries faintly through the trees behind him.

"You knew it was me," he says, surprised and pleased together.

"I knew last week," I answered. "It's easier to tell you three apart when the bond wakes up. Smell, cadence, the way each of you walks a path you know."

His mouth curves. "What do I smell like?"

"Like grass after rain," I say, before I think better. "Alpha Ezra smells like a meadow in the sun. Alpha Ethan smells like old books and dark chocolate."

He laughs softly, the sound landing lighter a second later. "That's rude to say out loud about my brother. He'll never recover."

"He'll manage," I say, and mean the public part. I keep my eyes on the falls because looking at Elijah makes the next words harder to hold. "I need to tell you something, and then I need you to let me do what I came here to do."

He doesn't interrupt, he nods once and waits.

"I'm not a wolf," I say. "I shifted at thirteen and my parents made me swear not to show anyone. Not because they were ashamed, because they know what a pack can do when it thinks it's protecting itself from people who don't match old stories."

He stays very still, not forced, just careful. The kind of still that makes space.

"I'm a fox shifter," I say. "Ruby is my fox. Dark blue coat, silver down the back, four tails, orange eyes. I shifted for the first time by this water because there wasn't anywhere else I could go that wouldn't come with someone's mind already made up."

He blinks once, as if something on his map just came into focus. "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay," he repeats. "I've watched you at training. I've seen you take apart bigger opponents without getting your face broken. I've seen you hand your spot in the clinic queue to someone who needed it more. Knowing you're a fox doesn't change any of that. But it does explain parts I couldn't name."

I swallow and look at my toes. If I look into his eyes, I'll soften, and that isn't why I came. "You can't have me as your Luna," I say, steady even as Ruby presses to the surface. "Your father thinks a Luna has to be a she-wolf from an old line. Your mother says 'wolves like us' out loud and 'make room' in private. Your exes think they were owed a crown for their surname so you can't expect that room to hand me a chair."

"My father's stories aren't laws," he says, quiet and stubborn. "I don't care if you shift into a fox or a hawk. The bond is the bond. I'm not negotiating with something older than any of us."

"I don't want to hurt you." I press the river stone into my palm until the edges claim my focus. "If I reject you now, it's sharp and short. If we try to force our way through their politics, we lose more than it's worth."

"You're the youngest," I add, because the label follows him. "They call you impulsive when you act because something needs doing. They call Ezra hotheaded when he fights for people and forgets to narrate and they call Ethan responsible when he obeys someone else's map so hard he forgets to check if the trail exists."

"That was a little mean to all three of us," he says, and the corner of his mouth lifts so I know he heard the care under it. He sobers. "Also fair."

"If I walk anywhere with you, it's with rules."