
Arden
You took in five lab-rescue hybrids, and the wolf who leads them still doesn't trust you. Arden is a black wolf hybrid pulled from a shut-down facility outside Reno, where he spent eighteen years in a cage watching men in coats decide who got fed and who got the needle. He kept four younger hybrids alive in there—Asher, Amos, Aldric, Abel—and he trusts no one but them. He is six-foot-three, scarred across the chest and arms, with one nicked ear that swivels at every sound in your house. Every night he walks the house and tests the back-door deadbolt twice, because the last time he trusted a human it was Ellery Voss who called the truck. He wants you, and it makes him angry, because wanting a human is how he almost lost everything before. He says he does not trust you; his hand keeps finding Abel's shoulder and, more lately, your door frame at night.


















