The tantalizing smells of fresh coffee and buttery pastry woke Alice from a dreamless sleep. She shifted, growing aware of warm sunlight and clean cotton sheets against her bare skin. Traffic could be heard outside, and birds, too.

Then Colton's hand brushed her cheek, and she opened her eyes to find him fully dressed and alert. A sweet ache filled her heart as she smiled.

He gave her one of his rare smiles back. "How are you?"

"Sore, but in the best way." She sat up and stretched, reminded of that similar morning in Texas. Her body felt much better now compared to then, not in true pain so much as uncertain and tender. New. She was reminded of when she'd tried taking a martial arts class—the next day, every muscle and tendon in her body had felt raw, even the ones she hadn't known existed.

When her gaze fell on the steaming cups of coffee and sugar-dusted pastries waiting on the bedside table, he said, "Thought you might be hungry."

Ravenous, but as he settled beside her on the bed, the first thing she did was move closer to him, sinking into his scent and all that it held. His vast age and experience, heavy as stone. Blood that had long been washed off his skin but still marked what he was: a killer with the purity of a beast, never tormented by the bodies he left behind. Enigmatic even to sensitive noses, revealing little and offering less.

Terrifying glimpses, but she rested her head against his shoulder without fear, sensing new threads weaving into his scent as he nuzzled her in return. His love and protectiveness, one tender as a tongue and the other savage as teeth.

"This hardly feels real," she murmured. "I don't know how I came back."

"You're here. That's all that matters."

She smiled, knowing it really was that simple for him. "Maybe, but I like learning answers."

"I've noticed." Then he shifted enough to look at her. "There aren't many vargr because few people know the ritual. And when it's performed, most of the time nothing happens."

"But it is considered a punishment."

He shrugged. "For most of us. It can be used for other reasons. The vargr pining after your friend—he was brought back by his granny. He'd been murdered, and she wanted him to have a second chance. The only thing we all have in common is dying angry."

She nodded, remembering her rage at feeling so helpless. "It wasn't the coven who did it. I'm sure of that. In their eyes, as soon as he stopped wanting me, I stopped being worth their attention, even for punishment. They just wanted to—"

Then she stopped, bile rising in her throat. When she spoke again, the words were as vicious as the bite she'd given the hag king. "To feed. I wanted to tear them apart so badly. I still do."

"Who says you can't?" he said, voice lowering into a growl. "He's still alive. So are two of his witches."

Her anger felt clean and savage, matching his until it seemed her skin would spark wherever he touched her. "And the hag mother?"

"Dead. Always kill the true believers first. It turns the rest into cowards."

Dark exhilaration rose through her, but she sobered just as quickly. "I want to do this right. Throughout this hunt, I've done everything wrong. Screwed up."

He traced the curve of her cheek. "First hunts are like that. With more experience, you'll make less mistakes."

"I know, but... when we find the hag king, I want to be able to rip into him as well as you can. I want him to know it's me bleeding him dry."

His eyes never looked absent while he thought. Instead, they turned piercing. "All right. We'll stay here for a week or two and practice hunting. It'll also give you time to recover. Get used to yourself. Feeling wobbly?"

"A little," she admitted. "Is this normal?"

He nodded and offered one of the pastries. "Eating helps."

She reached for it, already smelling the butter and lemon zest. It looked like a croissant but was sweeter, softer, and stuffed with cream. She ate two before even thinking about her cappuccino. It was rich and strong, chasing away the last of her haze. "I'm glad you're here to help me through all of this. I was so confused when I woke up in that room. I couldn't imagine what I would have felt like if I knew nothing about vargr."

When guilt and anger spiked through his scent, she looked up at him. "Colton. Don't feel bad about not being there. You were still protecting me. The owner of the club helped out only because he was terrified of you."

At that, he grimaced. "I smelled the fucker."

"He said his name was Adair, and that he had nothing to do with what happened. I don't think he did. He wasn't there with the coven, anyway." She was surprised by how calm she felt while discussing it. "Maybe it was his club, but... I'm not interested in going after him. He's nothing to me."

It felt like her first shaky step in returning to their hunt, if only in deciding what to do. She glanced up at Colton with a half-smile. "It still feels uncomfortable to make decisions. I guess death didn't take that away."

"No." Then he licked the traces of foam from her lips. "You weren't meant to be leashed. You'll remember how to live without it."

It was exactly what he had told her in the grocery store while she'd tried not to cry over coffee, now so long ago. It was what she'd asked him to remember in that underground chamber filled with death. Her breath hitched. "I wasn't sure you heard me."

"Every word." His voice sounded casual, but his eyes said so much more, and when her fingers brushed his unshaven jaw, he moved in, catching her chin to give her a hard, devouring kiss.

A car horn startled her into breaking it off. Her teeth suddenly felt very sharp against her lips. She'd grown out her fangs without effort or thought, merely reacting to a sudden noise and the possible threat hiding behind it. Colton seemed amused, glancing at the mirror in a silent signal for her to look, too. Her irises had shifted into a wild gold.

"It's that easy?" she said, trying to figure out how to change them back.

"You'll learn to control it." Then he kissed her again, now slow and soothing, licking her teeth until they were blunt and human. When she checked her reflection, her eyes were back to normal. "Just need to get used to sharper senses."

She understood what he meant when they left the apartment to explore the village. She wore sunglasses just in case, but scent overwhelmed her much more than sound. Smells pressed in from all around, as strong as when she was a wolf. It felt disorienting to understand strangers with one breath.

She knew who was angry, or worried, or sick, or pregnant. She knew who had bled that morning from shaving too hastily and who had drunk too much the night before. The cafes all breathed their own special blend of coffee and milk, of butter and yeast and candied orange. Cars and scooters radiated hot plastic and gasoline. When they passed by a man with cologne reeking of cedar and vetiver, she sneezed.

Disorienting, but not distressing. Her fascination grew with each street. She didn't miss how the roads sloped in one direction or another, or how turning a corner often revealed untamed earth rising sharply above apartment buildings and businesses, making it clear they were in a village that existed in pockets along the mountainside, as hardy and surprising as flowers growing from cracks in a rock.

She didn't know how much time had passed before she caught the first hint of saltwater. She looked over at Colton, confident that he'd also smelled it. "Are we near the ocean?"

"Far above it. There are some trails that give you a good view."

The idea of seeing it turned her curiosity into sheer excitement. "Are any of them nearby? I feel strong enough to try it."

He seemed to know exactly where to go, leading them into a side alley and through an iron gate rusted with age and left open. Trees and shrubs swallowed civilization from sight as effectively as the forests back home. Their path turned into dusty earth and chipped rock, narrow and twisting as it led them up. They walked in silence for some time, meeting no one else.

Considering how exhausted she was the day before, she was surprised by how long she lasted before feeling winded. When weariness slipped into her scent, Colton stopped beside a slab of rock that had pierced through the earth, its surface worn smooth by the elements.

As they sat together, comfortable and wordless, she studied the village below, red roofs bright against the surrounding greenery. The ocean glittered beyond, deep blue and gentle. A few speedboats cut white lines through it, too far away to be heard. After the hectic smells of the village, this peace felt like sweet relief, and she found her attention drifting between the lulling rhythm of those distant waves and Colton's quiet presence, his face giving away nothing of what he thought.

He'd told her that he knew the area, but she couldn't guess whether he was glad to be back. Throughout their hunt, he'd never seemed to care about the places they visited, showing familiarity only in how to travel through them and which language to use to be understood.

Just then, he said, "You're studying me more than the view."

A wry glance followed the words. Under the bright sun, his pupils had constricted to pinpoints and there was a bead of sweat running down his neck, but he otherwise seemed unaffected by the hike.

Any casual observer would have considered him a normal man, but she well understood why even the other vargr were unnerved in his presence. Sometimes, he seemed so remote from the pettiness of thought and the weakness of flesh, his motives primal and pure. The other black wolves knew how to use their teeth and disdained humans as blind and feeble, but only he seemed truly comfortable with being a beast.

"Where's your birthplace?" she said, voice soft.

He seemed unsurprised by the question. "Don't know. I don't remember much about being human."

"What about childhood memories? Or family?" At the shake of his head, she added, "Isn't there any place you can call home?"

"Sure. Wherever you are."

When she blushed, overcome by the words as much as the tender gleam in his eyes, he wrapped an arm around her shoulders, coaxing her to lean into him. "Lands change and so do the people living there. Sharing a bed with you means more than wherever I was born."

Birds wheeled lazily on the wind currents far below as he added, "Worried about forgetting the same things?"

"No. I think my past is too much a part of me to ever fade." The words left a lingering bitterness in her mouth. She had entered the world of witches and escaped again without receiving the answers about her mother that she'd hoped for. "Nothing about coming back as a vargr feels like a curse. If anything, I feel... free. I'm not afraid anymore."

Her lack of fear only grew in the days that followed. They would hike in the morning, finding ruins that Colton remembered. She would sit and study the worn bricks while he told her how old they were and what life had been like when they were new. She asked about the eruption of Vesuvius, and whether wolves really had been revered by ancient Italians, and countless other questions, always receiving answers.

His patience extended into their night hunts, tracking elusive boar and skittish rabbits. They never killed; there was no need to. Chasing prey over the steep mountainsides strengthened her stamina and perfected her timing.

They fucked whenever they had the privacy to. It was then that he turned teasing, pinning her hands behind her back while she straddled his lap, his thumbs stroking her wrists with surprising tenderness even as his teeth left her in a frenzy. The bed threatened to break from the power of his thrusts, so she often found herself facedown on the flat couch in the living room, panting against the cushion while her fingers dug at the fabric in ecstasy. Afterwards, her sleep would always be quiet and mindless... at least, at first.

Within a week, memories appeared, just as Colton had warned. Much like dreams, some cut and some confused, bringing back to life moments she had long forgotten.

The terror of her mother screaming at her for getting crayon marks on a white table. The awkwardness of her first kiss with a boy named Stefan Fisher, both of them so nervous that his braces ended up gouging her lower lip. The bubbling excitement of receiving an acceptance letter from UC Davis, her first choice for college.

And then one night, she sank into a memory of being woken by the creak of her bedroom door. At the sight of her mother's silhouette, she squeezed her eyes shut again. She might get yelled at if she was found awake, so she remained very still, even when footsteps approached. Her heart pounded hard enough to make her ribs ache.

A hand brushed her face. Pulled the sheets up to cover her against the cold. Then her mother started to whisper, sounding so different from the loud, frustrated voice that filled the day. Her words were small and trembling. "It's too late. It's too late for me. All I can do is make sure it's never too late for you."

She tried not to twitch as her mother stroked her cheek again. They never touched. It was her father who hugged her, and held her hand while walking, and showed her how to hold crayons and draw with them.

"You'll never know your grandmother, not while I can help it. Not her, not any of us. But that's not enough. It's never enough, running away. I learned that early on and began collecting everything I could find, much more than Mom ever knew. Rituals long forgotten and spells thought to be lost. The rarest magic. The most forbidden curses. I'll tell you them all, my poor daughter. I'll plant their power in your heart like seeds. It's the best I can do. Please, be better than me. You can't just run whenever they find you. You have to escape."

Then she woke up with wet cheeks, tears trailing down in a ghostly imitation of her mother's fingers. At the first hitch of her breath, Colton shifted against her, his voice rough with sleep yet already alert. "Alice?"

"I know how I became a vargr." Even as she spoke, it was as if she could taste the hag king's blood in her mouth again, her fury transforming her death with all the potent magic of the ritual she unleashed by refusing him. Heart bright even as she bled out. "My mother knew the curse, and she told it to me. She..."

Then her voice cracked, and she had to swallow hard before explaining it all to him. Once she finished, she let out a shaky sigh. "Just last night, I relived a memory of her yelling at my father that I was the biggest mistake of her life. Nothing's simple, is it?"

The black wolf never said the answer when it was obvious. Instead, he kissed the tears from her face, his mouth gentle even as his voice remained harsh as a growl. "You're not a mistake."

"I know. And I know why she left me in the forest that day, too. She was scared." Then she closed her eyes, remembering white knuckles against the steering wheel and a simmering tension in the air. Signs that now seemed so clear to her. "I think... I think she was supposed to take me along with her. Whoever called her away, whether it was my grandmother or another witch, they wanted me, too. And that's what she was so scared of—me ending up just like her. So she left me behind at the very last minute, because she couldn't escape but she thought I could."

Then her heart clenched in grief and agony and terrible, terrible relief. The question that had always haunted her finally had its answer.

Her next breath came out as a sob, and for several minutes, she simply shuddered, clutching at the shoulders of a nightmare creature that scared all other monsters lurking in the dark. He held her tightly, chasing away her trembling with the warmth of his hands and the steady beat of his heart. When the anguish choking her scent finally faded, he nuzzled at her and said, "Want to stay up for awhile?"

"Please," she said, grateful that he understood.

Within minutes, she was curled up on the couch, clutching both the fistful of tissues and the cup of coffee he'd given her. When he sat beside her, she leaned into his reassuring heat, all out of words. It felt like her heart had been cut open and drained. Finally able to heal. Would this erase all the ways her mother had hurt her? No, but it was the final piece of her past that could be left behind.

She stared at the mild yellow wallpaper of the room until his nose brushed her temple. Then she weakly smiled at him. "I'm all right. Just... not ready to sleep. My mind is filled with so much noise."

He studied her. In the warm lamplight, his eyes were dark and intent. "I could tell you a story."

When she looked at him in open surprise, he added, "What about the one with the two wolves that live in the sky?"

It was the same myth she had told him on their first night together, when it had been his heart struggling to heal. Her eyes burned for a new reason. "I'd love that."

Then she shifted closer to him until she could rest her head against his chest, closing her eyes as he began to talk. He remembered it without trouble, the words reverberating all the way to her bones while he ran fingers through her hair.

Alice didn't realize she'd fallen back asleep until she opened her eyes to a room softly lit by the sunrise. Colton was still awake, still holding her close, and she had the feeling he'd watched her the entire time. She rubbed at her raw eyes and said, "I missed the ending again."

He traced the curve of her ear. "There is none. Their hunt continues to this day."

She nodded, aware of how sore but whole her heart felt. "I don't want ours to do the same. I'm ready to move on. I'm ready to finish the hunt."