The rest of the morning passed in a strange domesticity that felt borrowed from someone else’s life.
Derek cooked eggs, thick toast, bacon that filled the cabin with the smell of salt and smoke.
They ate at the small wooden table while sunlight strengthened outside.
He answered her questions about the pack in clipped, careful sentences: how long he had been alpha (eleven years), how the Change felt under a full moon (like being unmade and remade in the same breath), how the treaty had been struck generations ago by an ancestor who understood that secrecy was the only lasting protection.
Allison listened, filed every detail, and tried not to stare at the place on his throat where her mouth had been the night before.
After they ate, he showed her the cabin properly: the loft storage above the main room, the reinforced shutters that could be locked from inside, the shortwave radio that still worked when cell towers failed, the locked chest at the foot of the bed that he did not open.
Outside, a small generator shed and a woodpile stacked with military neatness completed the picture of a man who expected to need to survive without the town.
Cal and Rian remained visible at the treeline, two restless shapes moving through the morning light.
Every so often one of them would lift a hand in acknowledgment when Derek stepped onto the porch.
Around noon, the shortwave crackled.
Elias’s voice came through, calm and clipped.
A set of tracks had been found along the northern boundary large, wrong, the stride length changing mid-path as if the creature had altered its shape while moving.
No scent trail that any of them could follow cleanly.
The Wraith was testing the edges again.
Derek’s expression hardened as he listened.
When the transmission ended, he stood silent for a long moment, staring out at the trees.
“It’s getting bolder,” he said finally.
“It wants us to know it’s close.”
“What does it gain by announcing itself?”
“Fear.
Confusion.
Division.” He glanced sideways at her.
“And distraction.
If the pack is busy watching the boundaries, it has more room to reach what it actually wants.”
“Me.”
“Yes.”
The word sat between them, heavy.
Allison watched a crow lift from a high branch and wheel away into the blue.
“Then we don’t give it the distraction.”
Derek’s hand found the small of her back, a brief, grounding pressure.
“We don’t.
But you stay inside the cabin’s sightline today.
No arguments.”
She didn’t offer any.
Allison spent part of it at the kitchen table with her notebook, writing down everything she could remember of the previous night’s conversation and the creature’s partial appearance.
Derek moved in and out of the cabin, speaking in low tones with Cal and Rian, checking the radio, the perimeter, the sky.
The tension in him was a living thing.
Every hour that passed without further contact seemed to wind it tighter.
Near dusk, Mara and Thorn returned from their watch.
Mara’s report was brief: more tracks, fresher, circling closer to the old treaty line before veering away again.
Thorn added that the temperature in one hollow had dropped sharply for no meteorological reason, an old sign, he said, that the Wraith was drawing power.
Derek listened, issued new orders, and sent them to rest while Sable and Elias took the next rotation.
When the cabin was quiet again, he closed the door, locked it, and turned to Allison with eyes that had begun to pick up gold at the edges.
“The moon is closer,” he said.
“Control is thinner.
I need…” He stopped, jaw flexing.
“I need to not be careful with you for a while.”
Allison felt the answering heat rise under her skin.
She set the notebook aside and stood.
“Then don’t be.”