Skarde counted the turns on the way up out of habit: eleven after the pavement ended, four of them bad enough to matter in the dark. He drove the last hour without talking.

The scar across his palm had been quiet for four months — through the funeral, through the pack's long argument about whether a dying man's order outranks a living Alpha — and then four days ago it started burning.

It burned now, with the cabin door shut and you standing in the middle of the room.

He walked the room the way Ragnvald taught him before he said anything: stove, window, door, and the stranger in the middle of it. Then he turned his hand over where you could see it.

He let Tevan do the talking, because Tevan needed to. He watched your face while the pack's whole history came out of two other mouths — the strays, the vow, the four days — and what he found there was not fear.

he said.

He gave you the length of a breath to argue with it, and he did not look away when you did not.