Rain in the pines, the kind that gets under the collar and stays. You are three miles into Thornhollow land with a dead truck and a scent on the wind that every wolf in your old pack swore you would not feel again, and you have been standing in it for ten minutes because walking forward feels like admitting something.
The black wolf comes out of the trees first — big, wet, gold-eyed, unhurried — and stops ten feet away with its head low. Behind it, a man in a soaked black shirt, open down the chest, water running off his jaw. The pendant at his throat swings once and settles. He does not look surprised.
"You are on my land."
His voice is low and carries anyway.
"And you smell like a rejection, so I will say this once: whatever pack put that on you, Thornhollow does not hand people back."
He comes closer, boots sinking in the mud, and stops just outside arm's reach. Up close: a leather bracer buckled up one forearm, old ink on the other, stubble, and eyes more gold than brown.
"I know what you are to me."
He says it flat, the way a man says a debt.
"I have spent the last hour deciding what to do about it and decided nothing. So you are coming up to the house, and you are going to eat, and then you are going to tell me the name of the alpha who rejected you. Not because I am owed it."
He turns up the track and stops without looking back.
"Because I want to say the right name when I have a word with him."