DEAN I bury my brother on a Tuesday, under a live oak on Callahan land, and by Thursday I’m on the road to Savannah with everything I own in the back of my truck and nothing in my chest but a hole shaped exactly like him.
Colt didn’t deserve what happened to him.
I keep saying that to myself the whole drive east, hoping repetition might make the weight easier to carry.
He was the gentle one, the one who wrote letters instead of picking fights, who worked in some Savannah bank office because he liked numbers and liked the idea of building something instead of just guarding it.
He wasn’t built for pack politics or territory disputes.
He was built for kindness, and kindness got him killed just the same as anything else might have.
I go through his things before I leave Fullerton Creek: his journal, his letters, a few objects that still carry pieces of him if you know how to read them.
I do, because I’m a wolf, and reading what a person leaves behind in the things they touch comes as natural to me as breathing.
That’s how I find the scarf.
It’s tucked in with his letters, folded careful, like something he meant to keep safe.
The scent on it stops me cold the first time I lift it to my face.
Sweet.
Cloying.
A woman’s scent, but wrong somehow, manufactured in a way I can’t name yet, too perfect, too composed, like perfume layered thick enough to smother what’s underneath.
Underneath the sweetness there’s something sharper, something chemical, something that doesn’t belong on skin.
My brother’s wolf died in stages, according to what little the pack managed to piece together before I got home.
False marked.
Claimed and then broken, on purpose, by a woman who never meant to keep him, and this scarf carries her work like evidence.
Silas told me once, back when I was young enough to still be learning pack law instead of living inside it, what a false-mark smells like on an object.
Not like perfume, not exactly.
Like something built to imitate a real bond, sweet in the way sugar is sweet right before it turns, missing the one thing an honest mark always carries underneath it, the scent of the wolf who gave it.
A false-mark is a mask with nothing wearing it.
I didn’t understand what he meant back then.
I understand it now, holding this scarf.
There’s a photograph folded in with the letters too.
A woman, dark haired, caught mid glance like she doesn’t know the camera’s there.
The angle’s too perfect.
She knew.
On the back, in Colt’s shaking hand: The woman who killed me.
Y.S.C.
I don’t know what the initials mean yet.
I will.
For now I just know a name starts with Y, and I know St.
Claire is a family Colt worked for in that Savannah office before he died, and that’s enough of a thread to start pulling.
Savannah doesn’t feel like home.
It never will.
The air’s too thick, too sweet, magnolia and money hanging over everything like a curtain nobody’s bothered to open in a hundred years.
I check into a hotel that costs more than it should and spend the better part of a week getting nowhere.
Colt’s old coworkers at the bank give me nothing, polite and closed-mouthed the way people get when they’ve been told not to talk to strangers asking about a dead man.
One clerk lets slip that Colt kept to himself the last few months before he died, quieter than usual, and then catches herself and won’t say another word.
I leave every conversation with less than I walked in with.
It’s only when I start asking specifically about the St.
Claire family, the name Beau’s kept surfacing in every dead-end conversation about Colt’s employer, that anyone starts paying attention to me at all.
I don’t find Yasmin St.
Claire.
She finds me, at a charity function I only got into by mentioning the St.
Claire name to the right hostess.
Golden hair, soft drawl, the kind of woman a room arranges itself around without being asked, and she crosses straight to me like she already knew exactly who I was and exactly why I’d come.
“You’ve been asking a lot of questions about a man who used to work for my father,” she says, before I’ve said a single word to introduce myself.
“I make it my business to know who’s asking questions in my family’s name.” There’s nothing sharp in her voice.
Just a warmth so complete it’s almost disarming, the kind of warmth that makes you forget to wonder why a stranger already knows your business.
“You’re looking into Colt Callahan,” she says, her voice pitched low and sympathetic, her hand light on my arm.
“I heard what happened to him.
It’s tragic.
Truly.” “You knew him,” I say, watching her face.
“Everyone at the office knew him.” Her eyes go soft, careful, exactly the right amount of sad.
“There was a woman he was seeing.
My sister, actually.
Yara.” She says the name like it costs her something to say it, like loyalty is warring with conscience right in front of me.
“I don’t like to speak ill of family.
But I saw the way he looked at her toward the end.
Frightened.
I always wondered.” I pull out the photograph, the one I found folded in with Colt’s letters, and hold it out to her without a word.
Her eyes go to it, and for just a second, something moves behind her face too fast for me to name.
Then it’s gone, and her expression settles into something gentle and sorrowful.
“That’s Yara,” she says, soft, sad, sincere down to her bones as far as I can tell.
“My sister.” Something in me settles into place after that, cold and certain.
I have a name now.
A face.
A woman who apparently frightened my gentle brother in his last weeks alive, whose scent, once I find a way to compare it, I’m certain will match the poison stitched into that scarf.
I get myself invited to dinner at the St.
Claire estate two nights later, under the thin cover of some business Beau’s interested in discussing, mineral rights, trust structures, nothing I actually care about.
I go because it puts me in the same room as her.
I see her before dinner even starts, watching me from an upstairs window when I come up the drive, though she thinks I don’t notice.
I notice everything.
It’s the only advantage I’ve got left.
At the table, she barely speaks.
Dark hair, dark eyes, a jaw that looks built for arguing rather than agreeing.
Nothing about her reads soft the way Yasmin reads soft.
If anything, she reads like she’s braced for something, shoulders set through the whole meal like a woman used to being on guard in her own house.
Beau asks me about ranch land, mineral rights.
Then, almost carelessly, he asks about the trust accounts, and my own answer comes out a beat too slow, careful, because the truth is I don’t give one single damn about the St.
Claire Trust and I’m terrified my face is going to say so before my mouth catches up.
Then I look up, and she’s looking at me.
Something happens in my chest I don’t have a word for.
A jolt, sharp, unasked for, gone as fast as it comes but leaving something ringing behind it.
I tell myself it’s nothing, recognition maybe, the face from the photograph finally matched to the woman in front of me.
It doesn’t feel like recognition.
It feels like something older than that, something that doesn’t care what my plans are.
“Would you pass the salt?” I ask her, mostly to have a reason to make her look at me again.
She reaches for it the same moment I do, and our fingers touch.
I feel it before I understand what it is.
A burn, sudden and sharp, right across my palm where her skin meets mine, gone almost before I register it as pain instead of heat.
I pull my hand back and look down at my palm under the table, half expecting to see a mark scorched into it.
There’s nothing there.
Just skin.
But it’s still warm, unnaturally warm, and underneath the skin my wolf stirs, low and insistent, the way it did the first time I shifted as a boy and understood what I was.
I know what a mate’s mark looks like.
I’ve seen it on older wolves in the pack, faint and gold, permanent once it sets.
I tell myself it can’t be that.
It can’t be her.
Not the woman I came here to destroy.
I excuse myself early, plead the drive, the hour, anything, and I don’t breathe right again until I’m alone in my truck at the hotel, Colt’s letter and the scarf spread on the seat beside me like evidence in a trial only I’m presiding over.
I lift the scarf to my face again, forcing myself to smell it clean, to find the sweetness, the wrongness, the proof.
It’s there.
Sweet.
Cloying.
Wrong, exactly the way it was wrong the first time I found it.
But when I close my eyes, that’s not what fills my chest.
All I can smell is her.
River water and wildfire, something wild and clean underneath the perfume of that house, something that has nothing in common with the poison stitched into this scarf.
My wolf is howling somewhere deep inside my chest, and it takes me a long, terrible moment to understand what it’s howling for.
Not vengeance.
Her.