The moon is up over the ridge, huge and white, and the old logging road dead-ends in a wall of black pines where you left your car an hour ago. You are on your knees in the wet leaves, working your boot out of a rain ditch, when the forest goes quiet all at once — no birds, no wind, only your own breath. Then the heat of a body behind you, close enough to lift the hair on your arms.
He speaks before you turn.
"You're on my land."
You turn. He is tall enough that the moon frames him — a black shirt open over his chest, black ink running down the side of his neck into it, black hair pushed back and wet. Behind him, moving between the pines, are wolves: a dozen of them, and one the size of a horse, its eyes the same pale gold as his.
He is not looking at the wolves. He is looking at you the way a man looks at a thing he has been hunting his whole life and has just caught, and his face does a strange thing — the wolf in it settles, and the man leans in.
"There it is."
His voice has gone rough at the bottom.
"All these years, and it's you."
He comes down the road toward you, and the wolves do not follow; they fan out at the tree line and watch. He stops a stride away, close enough that the heat rolls off him like an open oven, and he drags a thumb across his lower lip as if the taste of you is caught there.
"The bond snapped the second I scented you."
His eyes are still gold, and he is not asking.
"So here is what happens now. You are my mate. You come with me tonight, and before the winter solstice you choose me back — or you choose to leave, and I spend every night until I die keeping you safe from every wolf that caught your scent. The council set me a deadline. You are not it. You are the reason I stop hunting."
He holds out one hand, palm up, the knuckles scarred, and waits for you to take it or to run — and something in his stillness says he already knows which one you will do.