Constance found him collapsed behind the haystack, blood soaking through his torn shirt, three bullet wounds dark and seeping. A pistol lay just beyond his outstretched fingers. She should have turned and gone for the sheriff. Then the pups whimpered.
Two tiny wolves, barely bigger than rabbits, curled against his chest like he was the only safe place left in the world. They clung to him, shivering, burrowing into his bloody collar as though trying to disappear into his body. They weren’t snarling. They were pleading.
Constance crouched in the half-light of the barn and felt her sensible thoughts scatter. She knew the face on the wanted poster in town. Brooks Alston. Five hundred dollars, dead or alive.
The same face now slack and pale on her barn floor, breathing in shallow, stuttering gasps. She worked the bullets out with a paring knife, one by one, her hands steady while her heart hammered against her ribs. The third was buried deepest. She bit the inside of her cheek and kept going until the blade caught metal and pulled it free.
He woke once. Eyes flying open, wild and unfocused. Gold. Not amber, not brown, but burning gold, like lamplight.
“My kids,” he rasped. His fingers curled against the straw. “Where are—”
Then he was gone again. Constance told herself he was a wanted man.
She was a widow in all but name, abandoned by a husband who spent their last coins on cards and women. Harboring a fugitive could bring Sheriff Isaiah Fletcher to her door, and Isaiah was Duke’s brother. The last person she needed sniffing around her farm. But the pups had settled into her daughter’s lap like they belonged there.
Abby named them nothing, just loved them, and the smaller one fell asleep with its nose pressed against her chin. One of them lay draped across Brooks’s chest when Constance went back to check on him. The bigger one was tucked under his arm. He was awake, murmuring something soft, scratching slow circles into the pup’s fur.
“Right there, son. I’ve got you. ”
His hand moved to the pup’s belly when it rolled over. Like he’d done this a thousand times.
“They’re not pups,” Brooks said later, after Duke came home drunk and grabbed the smaller one by the scruff, after Brooks crossed the cabin in two strides and took the pup back, after he shoved Duke through the open door and into the mud of the yard. “They’re my children. ”
Constance pushed open the door to the back room and froze. Two small boys, barely three years old, were pressed against Abby’s chest.
Naked, shivering, real. Their dark eyes wet and terrified, tiny fingers twisted into her clothes. “They changed,” Abby whispered. “Mama, they just—they changed.
”
Constance dropped to her knees and opened her arms. The smaller one stumbled into her first. Then the bigger boy followed, pressing his cheek against her collarbone, going very still. They were children.
Brooks’s children. “You know what I am,” he said later, by the fire. His eyes were still gold. “I’m a shifter.
Wolf. So are they. ”
“And when you said you were made for me,” Constance asked, her mouth gone dry, “what did you mean? ”
He crossed the room in three strides.
Stopped just short of her. “Every part of me has been pulling toward you since the moment you touched me. I’ve been fighting it every hour because you are not mine to take. ” His hand rose, hesitated, then settled against her jaw.
“And yet you are. You’re mine. My mate. ”
She closed the distance herself.
Grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him down to her. They had one night, and then he meant to be gone by morning. Wake up, Duke had gone for his brother. Isaiah came the next morning, rifle in hand, with the law and the accusation and all the cold weight of a man sent to do his brother’s dirty work.
Isaiah’s gaze landed on Brooks and the gold eyes, and his finger found the trigger. “Isaiah,” Constance said sharply. “Look. ”
He looked past Brooks, past the threat, and saw what was behind him.
Two small boys, dressed in clothes too big for them. The larger one with his chin lifted, defiant, but his small hand pressed flat against his brother’s back. The smaller one half-hidden behind him, watching with quiet, unblinking fear. And in front of them, between the boys and the rifle, stood Abby.
“You’re not going to shoot them,” she said. Her voice didn’t shake. Isaiah stared at her. “They’re just kids,” Abby said.
“Please. ”
Isaiah Fletcher lowered the rifle. Not all the way, then the rest of the way. He looked at Brooks, at the way his hand had come to rest on the back of the smaller boy’s head, automatic, instinctive, the way you touch something you’d die for without thinking.
“How long? ” Isaiah asked. “They’re three. ”
Isaiah nodded slowly.
He turned to Constance. “Duke is outside. I’ll deal with him. ”
And something in the way he said it, quiet and certain, with a weight behind it she’d never heard from him before, made her believe him.
Six months later, the morning started with a crash. One of the boys had climbed the chair again. Nash stood on the floor with his shirt on backwards, insisting he had already been off the chair, while Eli climbed back up to attempt the same feat his brother had just failed at. “Off the chair, Nash.
Eli, don’t. ”
Eli looked at the spoon, looked at the chair, and sat down on the floor instead, leaning against his brother’s shoulder with an air of wounded innocence. “Sorry, Mama. ”
They were in Wolf Creek now, where everyone knew what Brooks was.
Sheriff Wyatt Hayes, a shifter himself, had made sure of that. His wife Elizabeth had become a friend, the kind who showed up with bread and stayed for hours. That evening, Abby was reading to the boys at the table. Nash had his chin in his hands.
Eli curled against her side. Brooks was by the fire, whittling a small wooden figure for the children. He looked up, caught her watching, and smiled. Small, private, just for her.
Outside, somewhere in the distance, a wolf howled. Not loneliness. A voice calling out into the dark, saying, “I’m here. I’m home.
“
