The cabin door swung open before Constance could reach it, and Duke Fletcher filled the frame, loud and careless, smelling of whiskey and the road. “Constance, there you are. ” He shrugged off his coat, his face ruddy, his eyes bright in that unfocused way that meant he’d been drinking since noon. “Miss me?
”
“You’re back early,” she said, keeping her voice carefully neutral. “Cards went bad. ” He waved a hand. “Doesn’t matter.
I’m home now. ”
He looked around the cabin—at the table, the fire, the general state of things—and his lip curled. “Hell, Constance, have you even tried to keep this place up while I was gone? ”
She didn’t rise to it.
She’d learned a long time ago that rising to it only made it worse. “I’ve been managing. ”
“Barely. ” He dropped into his chair at the head of the table and stretched out his legs.
His gaze drifted over her, slow and appraising. “You look tired. ” He softened his voice, put on that smile meant to be charming. “Come here.
Sit with me. ”
The way he said it—*come here*—as though she were something he could summon. Constance’s stomach tightened. “I need to check on Abby.
”
“Abby can wait. ” He reached out and caught her wrist. “I’ve been gone two weeks. Don’t you want to—”
“Duke.
” She extracted her wrist. “You’re drunk. ”
“I’m relaxed. ”
He let her go, but the smile turned sour at the edges.
“You know, I met a woman named Helena. Lovely thing. Didn’t complain when a man wanted company. ”
He said it casually, the way you mention the weather.
Constance felt nothing. Or rather, she felt the nothing very precisely, like pressing a bruise and finding it numb. “How nice for you. ”
Duke’s smile flickered.
He didn’t like being dismissed. “Don’t be like that. ” He stood. “I provide for this family.
The least you could do is—”
Constance glanced toward the window. Brooks was there, on the other side of the glass, half-turned toward the door like he’d been moving fast and had just stopped himself. He must have heard. Their eyes met.
His were gold—unnaturally gold, burning, furious, fixed on Duke. Constance gave a shake of her head. *No. Stay back.
Keep hidden. *
Something in Brooks’s face tightened. For a long, terrible moment she thought he was going to come through that door anyway. He didn’t.
But he didn’t step back from the window, either. *I’m here*, his stillness said. *I’m right here. *
Constance tore her gaze away before Duke could notice where she was looking.
“The least you could do,” Duke was saying, “is act like a wife when I’m actually—”
“Papa? ” Abby’s voice came from the doorway to the back room, small and uncertain. Duke turned and sighed. “Go back to your room, Abby.
”
Abby didn’t move. She stood very still, one hand on the door frame. Behind her, two small dark shapes pressed close together in the shadows of the hallway. “I want to stay.
”
Her chin lifted, just a fraction, but enough. Duke’s face changed. The charm dropped away like a mask slipping, and what was underneath was ugly—small and petty and too drunk to bother hiding it. “Hell, child, do as you’re told.
” He took a step toward her. A growl interrupted, coming from somewhere near Abby’s feet. The larger pup had its hackles up, a ridge of dark fur standing stiff along its spine. The smaller one was beside it, vibrating with attention.
Duke looked down at them, blinked. “What the—”
The larger pup barked, sharp and loud. The smaller one snarled and took a step forward. Something flickered across Duke’s face—not fear, exactly.
Irritation. “Shut up. ” He grabbed the smaller pup by the scruff. The sound it made was terrible—a thin, strangled yelp, high and desperate and wrong.
Abby cried out, lurching forward. But Duke had already lifted the pup to chest height, dangling it with one hand, squeezing just enough to make it squirm. “Mangy little—” he began. The cabin door blew open.
It swung wide and slammed against the wall, and Brooks filled the doorway. Shirtless. His chest was bare and smooth where the wounds had been, and every line of his body was taut, coiled. His eyes were gold—not the burning gold from the window.
Something else. Something raw and barely leashed that made Duke take an involuntary step back before he caught himself. “Put him down,” Brooks said. Duke stared at him.
For one long, suspended second, something like self-preservation flickered behind his eyes. Some animal part of him recognized, even through the whiskey, that the thing in the doorway was not something to argue with. It wasn’t enough. “Who the hell are you?
” Duke demanded. His grip on the pup tightened, his knuckles going white. Brooks took one step into the cabin. The air in the room seemed to change—thickened, charged, like the moment before lightning struck.
“I said,” he repeated, very quietly, “put my kid down. ”
Duke opened his mouth to argue, but Brooks crossed the room in two strides and took the pup from his hand. His fingers closed around Duke’s wrist and moved it, and Duke’s grip broke like it was nothing—like his hand was made of paper. The pup dropped into Brooks’s other arm, pressed immediately against his chest, and went silent.
And then Brooks pushed Duke out of the cabin. A single shove, just a hand flat against Duke’s sternum. Duke went flying across the cabin, through the still-open door, off the porch, and into the mud of the yard with a wet, graceless thud. The silence that followed was absolute.
“Sleep it off in the barn,” Brooks said. It wasn’t a suggestion. Duke lay in the mud for a long moment. Then he lifted his head, spat, and looked up at Brooks, who stood in the doorway.
Without another word, he walked to the barn. Brooks was pacing back and forth across the cabin, the smaller pup still held against his chest. His eyes were still gold, and Constance couldn’t stop looking at him. She wanted to touch him.
She wanted it so badly her fingers ached with it. Abby appeared at Brooks’s side then. She reached up and touched the smaller pup where it was pressed against his chest. It let out a thin, exhausted whine.
“Come on,” Abby said softly. “Both of you. Let’s go. ”
Brooks loosened his grip, the smaller pup sliding from his arms into Abby’s.
The larger one, still at his feet, followed without hesitation as she took them both to the back room. “Brooks. ” Constance insisted when he started pacing again. He stopped, turned, and the look in his face—she’d seen him gentle.
She’d seen him quiet and guarded and careful. This was none of those things. “He touched them. ” His voice was rough, almost a growl.
“He put his hands on my—”
“The pup is fine. ” Constance kept her voice steady. “Brooks, it was awful and I’m sorry, but—”
“They’re not pups. ” The words came out hard, flat.
“What? ” Constance blinked. Brooks looked at her. The gold in his eyes was still burning.
“They’re not pups. ” Quieter this time. “They’re my children. ”
The words landed in the space between them and stayed there.
Constance stared at him. “Brooks,” she said carefully. “They’re wolves. ”
Exhausted frustration crossed his features, like he’d been carrying a weight for too long.
“I know what they look like. ” He nodded toward the back room. “Go. Check on them.
Then come back and tell me what you see. ”
She held his gaze for a moment longer. Then she turned toward the back room, and she heard them before she saw them. Crying.
Small, hiccuping, frightened crying. The kind that came from throats that didn’t know how to cry yet. Two voices, both very, very young. Constance gasped and pushed the door open.
Abby was on the floor, her back against the bed, her arms full with two children. Small boys—toddlers, barely three, naked and shivering and real—were pressed against her daughter’s chest, one on each side. They were crying, both of them. Tears and snot and hitching little breaths, their tiny fingers twisted into Abby’s clothes with a desperate, clinging grip.
Abby looked up at Constance. Her face was white. “They changed,” she whispered. “Mama, they just—they changed.
” Her voice wobbled. She looked down at the boys, at the way they were shaking against her. “They’re so scared, Mama. ”
Constance didn’t move for one long, breathless second.
Then she crossed the small room in two steps and dropped to her knees in front of Abby and the boys. Sensing her, maybe, they lifted their faces from Abby’s chest and looked at her. Two pairs of dark eyes, wet, terrified. “Oh,” Constance breathed.
“Oh, sweethearts, both of you. Come here. ”
She opened her arms. The smaller one went first, peeled himself away from Abby and stumbled forward.
Constance caught him against her chest. He pressed his face into her neck and let out a sound—not a word, not yet, just a raw, broken exhale of relief. The larger one followed a beat later. He tucked himself against his brother, pressed his cheek against Constance’s collarbone, and went very still.
Constance held them both. “It’s all right,” she murmured. “I’ve got you. ”
The smaller one’s breathing slowed by degrees.
The larger one hadn’t moved, just pressed closer, a small, warm, solid weight against her chest. They were children. *My kids*, Brooks had said in the barn, half-dead and barely conscious. Constance closed her eyes.
When she opened them, Brooks was in the doorway. He was leaning against the frame, one hand braced against the wood, watching her. Watching her hold his sons. “Let’s put them down,” Constance said quietly.
He nodded and pushed off the door frame and came to help her. Abby watched too, from the floor, her chin resting on her knees. “Are they going to be all right? ” she asked.
“Yes,” Brooks said simply. Softer: “Thank you for holding them. ”
Abby nodded, serious and solemn. “I won’t tell anyone,” she said, with the gravity of someone making a sacred vow.
Brooks smiled—a real one, small and quiet and a little bit sad. “I know, sweetheart. ”
Later, when the boys were asleep and Abby was tucked into her own bed, Constance found Brooks standing by the fire, staring into it. The flames threw sharp shadows across his face.
He looked, for the first time since she’d known him, like he might come apart at the seams. “Talk to me,” she said. He didn’t turn around. “You know what I am.
” Not a question. “I know something is different about you. The healing. The eyes.
The strength. ” A pause. “The boys. ”
He turned then, slowly.
The careful composure he wore like armor was gone. What was underneath was hungry, barely leashed and burning with it. His eyes were gold again. “I’m a shifter,” he said.
“Wolf. I shift. So do they. ” A glance toward the back room.
“It’s what we are. ”
Constance took that in. “And the boys—they really are your children? ”
“Yes.
”
“And when you said—” She stopped, swallowed. The pull was stronger now, almost painful. A heat low in her chest that spread outward every time he looked at her. “When you said you were made for me.
In the barn before. What did you mean by that? ”
The pretense dropped out of him entirely. He crossed the room in three strides and stopped just short of her.
His pupils were blown wide, the gold of his irises almost swallowed by it. “I meant exactly what I said. ” His voice had dropped so low it was barely a sound. “Every part of me has been pulling toward you since the moment you touched me.
I have been fighting it every hour because you are not mine to take. ” His hand came up, stopped itself midair, fingers curling. “And yet, you are. You are mine.
My mate. ”
The confession hung between them, raw and wrecked. Constance’s heart was hammering so hard she could hear it in her own ears. “I’m a married woman,” she stammered.
Brooks’s jaw tightened. Something flickered in his expression—pain, or fury, or both. “Duke Fletcher does not deserve you. He doesn’t see you.
” His hand rose again, and this time he didn’t stop it. “I have seen nothing else since the moment you put your hands on my wounds and chose not to let me die. ”
“Brooks,” she whispered. His fingers brushed her jaw.
“You are mine. ” He said it like it was the only true thing left in the world. Like everything else—the law, the marriage, the danger—was just noise. And the terrible thing, the thing that made her chest crack open, was that something inside her answered.
It answered, and it said *yes*. She closed the distance herself—one step, just one—and grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him down to her. The kiss was nothing like before. This was Brooks’s mouth on hers like he’d been drowning and she was air.
His arm locked around her waist and hauled her flush against him. His hand slid into her hair, and the kiss went deeper, hungrier, wilder, like a dam breaking. “Brooks. ” Her voice was wrecked.
“Isaiah, the sheriff—he’s Duke’s brother, and Duke will talk, you know he will. If Isaiah comes here—”
“I know. ” His thumb moved against her scalp, shaking. His mouth moved to her jaw, her neck.
His teeth grazed the skin just below her ear, and her knees went weak. His arm tightened. “You have to leave,” she gasped. “Tonight, before—”
He opened his eyes, gold still, bright and desperate and aching.
“One night,” he said, rough, barely a whisper. “Give me one night. Let me—” He stopped, swallowed. His hand tightened just slightly in her hair.
“I will be gone by morning. But give me this. Please. ”
Constance looked at his face—open and raw and wanting her so badly it was written in every line of him.
She thought about Duke, sleeping it off in her barn, about everything that was coming and how little time they had before it arrived. “One night,” she said. Something in Brooks’s face broke. He kissed her again, softer this time, but no less desperate.
And she let him, and let herself sink into it, and stopped pretending it was anything other than what it had been since she first touched him. Inevitable. Constance woke to warmth. Brooks’s arm was around her waist, heavy and solid.
His breath was slow and even against the back of her neck. She lay still for a moment, just a moment, and let herself have it. The quiet. The warmth.
The steady press of him against her, like he’d been holding on all night and hadn’t let go. Then she untangled herself carefully and went to make breakfast. The cabin was quiet in the way mornings were quiet. Soft light, the creak of the fire settling.
She moved through it on instinct, hands busy. Water on for coffee, cornmeal into the pot. Brooks stirred somewhere behind her. She heard him sit up, heard the quiet rustle of him pulling on his shirt.
She glanced toward the barn door without thinking about it—and stopped. A horse on the road. One rider coming fast, dust rising behind him in the still morning air. Isaiah.
Constance’s hands went still on the pot. The pieces fell into place, fast and cold and obvious. Duke’s side of the barn empty this morning. The boot prints in the mud she’d noticed on her way out for water.
The road to Clearwater, half a mile away. Duke had woken up. Duke had gone to his brother. Of course he had.
She set the pot down and turned. Brooks was already on his feet. The boys pressed against his legs, one on each side, holding fistfuls of his shirt. Their small faces turned up toward his with a trust so complete it made her chest ache.
“Stay behind me,” Brooks said to the boys, quietly, firmly. “Right there. I’ve got you. ”
The larger boy nodded, solemn.
The smaller one pressed closer to his leg and said nothing, but his grip tightened. Abby appeared from the back room, already dressed. She looked at Constance, then at Brooks, then at the boys. She understood.
Or understood enough. Her face set in a way that made her look much older than six. “Stay with them,” Constance told her. “Behind Brooks.
Don’t move. ”
The knock at the door was sharp, official. The kind that didn’t wait for an answer. Constance opened it.
Isaiah Fletcher filled the doorway. Up close, he looked tired—more tired than she’d seen him in years. His eyes moved past her, into the cabin, scanning. She watched him find Brooks, and the boys, and Abby, all in one sweep.
She watched something shift behind his expression. “Constance. ” Flat. “Step aside.
”
“Isaiah. ”
“I know he’s in there. ” His gaze hadn’t left Brooks. “Duke told me what happened.
What he is. ”
“Duke told you what Duke wanted you to hear,” Constance said. She didn’t move from the doorway. “That’s not the same thing.
”
Something flickered in Isaiah’s expression—irritation, maybe, or the faintest edge of uncertainty. He wasn’t used to being challenged, not by her. “Move, Constance. ”
“No.
”
The word hung in the air. Isaiah’s jaw tightened. He looked at her, really looked, the way he hadn’t in years. Then he pushed past her.
He saw Brooks first. The man standing in the middle of the cabin, bare-armed, steady on his feet. The gold eyes. Isaiah’s gaze snagged on them and stayed.
His rifle came up. “Don’t,” Brooks said. One word, quiet, utterly calm. The two of them faced each other across the small cabin—the sheriff and the shifter, the rifle and the gold eyes.
The air between them was so tight Constance could feel it pressing against her skin. “You’re coming with me,” Isaiah said. “Isaiah. ” Constance’s voice was sharp.
“Look. ”
She didn’t point; she didn’t need to. Isaiah looked. It took him a moment.
His eyes moved past Brooks, past the man, past the threat, and landed on what was behind him. Two small boys, dressed in clothes too big for them, standing close together, one slightly in front of the other. The larger one had his chin up, defiant even now, with a rifle in the room. But his small hand was pressed flat against his brother’s back, steady and protective.
The smaller one was half-hidden behind him, one dark eye visible, watching Isaiah with an expression of such quiet, unblinking fear that it stopped the breath in Constance’s chest all over again. And in front of them, between the boys and the gun, stood Abby. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t flinched. She stood with her feet planted and her shoulders squared, her small face set in an expression of such fierce, stubborn determination that Constance felt her heart crack clean in two.
“You’re not going to shoot them,” Abby said, to Isaiah, to the rifle, to the whole room. Her voice didn’t shake. Isaiah stared at her. The cabin was very quiet.
No one else to look to, no one else to defer to. Just Isaiah and this. Something changed in his face. It wasn’t fast.
It wasn’t dramatic. It was slow, a gradual, almost painful shifting, like a man watching something he’d been certain about rearrange itself in front of his eyes. He lowered the rifle. Not all the way, not yet, but enough.
“What is this? ” he asked. And for the first time, his voice wasn’t flat. It was something else—underneath the authority and the habit of command, almost like confusion.
“This,” Constance said, stepping forward, “is a man with his children and my daughter. ”
Isaiah looked at her, then at Brooks, then at the boys again. Small, scared, dressed in clothes too big for them, holding each other up. “Duke said he was a monster,” Isaiah said quietly.
“Duke says a lot of things,” Constance said. “Have you ever noticed how few of them are true? ”
Something moved across Isaiah’s face at that—sharp and uncomfortable, the look of a man hearing something he’d been avoiding for a long time. He glanced toward the door, toward where Duke’s horse was tied beside his own, and back.
Constance watched him think about it—about Duke, about the man who had sent him here, to this cabin, to shoot a father in front of his children. His own brother. “He’s your brother,” she said, not pushing, just stating it. “And he sent you here to do his dirty work because that’s what he does.
He always has. ”
Isaiah was quiet for a long time after that. He was still looking at Abby. Abby looked back at him, steady, unwavering.
Her small hand drifted back without her seeming to notice until it rested against the larger boy’s shoulder. The boy leaned into it, just slightly. “Please,” Abby said simply. “They’re just kids.
”
The word landed like a stone in still water. Isaiah closed his eyes. When he opened them, the sheriff’s face was gone. Or not gone, exactly, but cracked.
Something underneath showing through—something older and tireder and less certain than the man who had walked through the door. He looked at Brooks, at the gold eyes still burning low and steady, at the way Brooks’s hand had come to rest on the back of the smaller boy’s head—gentle, automatic, the way you touch something you’d die for without thinking. He lowered the rifle the rest of the way and let it hang at his side. “How long?
” Isaiah asked. Brooks held his gaze. “They’re three. ”
Isaiah nodded, once, slowly.
He turned to Constance. “Duke is outside. ” His voice was flat again, but differently flat. Not the sheriff’s flat—something heavier.
“I’ll deal with him. ”
“Isaiah! ”
“I’ll deal with him,” he said again. And something in the way he said it—quiet, certain, with a weight behind it that Constance had never heard from him before—made her believe it.
He looked at Brooks one last time. Something passed between them. Not warmth, not trust, not yet, but something. An acknowledgment, maybe.
A line drawn. Then Isaiah Fletcher turned and walked out of the cabin and closed the door behind him. The quiet that followed was enormous. Brooks let out a breath, long and shuddering, like he’d been holding it for hours.
His hand was still on the back of the smaller boy’s head. The boy had pressed his face against Brooks’s hip and gone very still, the way he did when he was trying very hard to be brave and wasn’t quite managing it. The larger one looked up. “Papa?
”
The word, so small, so matter-of-fact, filled the cabin like sunlight. Brooks knelt, gathered them both against him, one arm around each, and pressed his face into the space between their heads and held on. Constance watched from across the room. Abby had moved to her side, slipping her hand into her mother’s, leaning against her hip with the easy, unconscious weight of a child who felt safe.
Outside, she heard Isaiah’s voice—sharp, low, directed at Duke. She couldn’t make out the words. She didn’t need to. Brooks lifted his head and found her eyes across the room.
The gold was fading, slowly, like a fire burning down, and underneath it was just brown, just a man. Just the way he looked at her when no one else was watching. Constance squeezed Abby’s hand and held his gaze and didn’t look away. Six months later, the morning started the way mornings in Wolf Creek always did—with a crash.
Constance looked up from the stove, where she was stirring porridge and trying very hard not to burn it. The answer, as it usually was, was the two boys. One of them had climbed the chair again, standing on it triumphant, arms spread wide. His brother was in the process of trying to pull him down by the hem of his shirt.
“Nash. ” Constance said without turning around. “Off the chair. ”
“I was already off the chair.
” Nash informed her from the floor, with a dignity somewhat undermined by the fact that his shirt was on backwards. The smaller one, Eli, was already climbing back up. “Eli. ” Constance pointed the spoon at him.
“Don’t. ”
Eli looked at the spoon, looked at the chair, looked at Constance. He sat down on the floor instead, next to Nash, and leaned against his brother’s shoulder with an air of wounded innocence. Brooks found them like that when he came in from the yard—the boys on the floor, Abby at the table reading, the cabin warm and smelling of breakfast and wood smoke.
“Morning,” he said, and crossed the kitchen to press his lips to the top of her head as he passed. He crouched in front of the boys. “Did you climb the chair again? ” he asked Nash.
“No,” Nash lied without a flicker of guilt. Brooks looked at him, one eyebrow raised. Nash held for approximately four seconds before dissolving into a grin. “Maybe.
”
Brooks reached out and tugged Nash’s shirt around the right way. “Eat your breakfast, both of you. ”
The boys scrambled up and climbed into their seats. Constance set the bowls down and watched Eli immediately stick his finger in his porridge to test the temperature, while Nash stole a spoonful from his brother’s bowl when Eli wasn’t looking.
Brooks sat down beside her, and she handed him his coffee. For a moment, they sat there, side by side, watching their children eat breakfast. Wolf Creek was nothing like Clearwater. Small, yes, but warm in a way Clearwater never had been.
People nodded when she passed. No one whispered. Because in Wolf Creek, everyone knew what Brooks was. Sheriff Wyatt Hayes, a shifter himself, mated to a human woman named Elizabeth, had made sure of that.
Elizabeth had become a friend—the kind who showed up uninvited with bread and stayed for hours, who asked about Duke without flinching, who listened and didn’t offer pity. Brooks had opened up too, in his own way. In pieces, late at night, always with Constance close enough to touch. His first wife.
The birth that had gone wrong. The boys—the only bright thing left in the wreckage of it. They were healing, both of them. Slowly, unevenly, but together.
That evening, the cabin was full of noise. Abby was at the table reading aloud to the boys, the two leaning in, entranced. Nash had his elbows on the table and his chin in his hands. Eli had curled into a ball against Abby’s side.
Brooks was by the fire whittling something—a small wooden figure, Constance realized. Toys for the children. Constance leaned in the doorway and watched them. How the firelight moved across Brooks’s face.
The way his mouth twitched when Abby did one of the voices wrong. The boys, small and warm and alive, tucked against their sister. Brooks looked up, caught her watching, smiled—small and private and just for her. Outside, the first stars were appearing.
Somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled. Not loneliness, just a voice calling out into the dark, saying, “I’m here. I’m home.
”
