Irina’s POV

The border was nothing.

That was the first thing I noticed. I’d spent the whole night in my head building it up into something — a wall, a checkpoint, armed guards who would take one look at me and know — but when I finally dragged myself across it, it was just a road. A cracked two-lane stretch of asphalt with a faded yellow line down the middle and a sign that said WELCOME TO CLEARWATER in cheerful green lettering. One booth. One guard. He was eating a sandwich and watching something on his phone, and he barely looked up when I shuffled past.

Just like that. I was through.

I stood on the other side for a second, blinking.

The human world smelled different. Cleaner, maybe. Or just — quieter. No pack bond humming at the edges of my skull, no ambient pressure of other wolves, nothing pressing in from the outside. Just exhaust fumes and wet pavement and somewhere nearby, a bakery already starting its morning run.

I started walking.

My feet had stopped hurting about two hours ago, which I was pretty sure meant the nerve endings had given up. Now they just felt like two lumps of concrete attached to my ankles. Every step was a negotiation. I’d swapped my shoes for a pair of worn flats I’d found stuffed in my bag — a leftover from months ago — and the left one had a seam that had been eating into my heel since midnight. There was definitely a blister. Probably multiple.

I didn’t stop.

The sun was still below the horizon, just a gray smear across the eastern edge of the sky, and the streets were mostly empty. The occasional car. A delivery truck backing into an alley. A woman walking a dog who looked at me once and then looked away, which was fine. I was good at being looked away from.

I found the park by accident.

I’d been following the main road, and then I turned, and then I turned again, and then there were trees. Just a city park — nothing special, a square of green squeezed between two office buildings, a fountain that wasn’t running yet, a row of benches along a gravel path. One of the benches was set back enough that it was in the shade.

I sat down.

My body made a sound that wasn’t quite a groan. More like everything inside me exhaling at once.

I told myself I’d close my eyes for five minutes.

I was asleep in thirty seconds.

---

The bed was soft.

That was the first thing my brain registered — this specific, bone-deep softness, the kind that comes from a mattress that costs more than most people make in a year, sheets that had been washed so many times they were like sleeping inside a cloud. I knew this bed. I knew the exact weight of the duvet, the way the pillow held the shape of my head.

Nicholas’s room.

I was in Nicholas’s room.

For a moment I just stayed there, not moving. Eyes closed. Breathing it in. It smelled like him — that dark, cedar-smoke scent that I’d spent weeks trying not to notice and failed every single time. My body had catalogued it without permission. Filed it somewhere I couldn’t reach to delete it. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

Then the mattress shifted.

His arm came around me.

Heavy. Warm. He pulled me back against him like I belonged there, easy and certain, and his breath was slow against my hair, and I felt — safe. Ridiculous word. The most ridiculous word in the world for anything involving Nicholas. But that’s what it was. My chest had stopped bracing for impact. My shoulders had come down from around my ears. I was just — there. Held. And it didn’t feel like being trapped.

It felt like the opposite.

I should stay here, some half-conscious part of me thought. Just stay here. Don’t open your eyes. Don’t move. Maybe if you don’t move—

His grip shifted.

One second he was holding me. The next second his hands were on my shoulders and he was shoving me — hard, sudden, no warning — and I was falling backward off the edge of the bed and hitting the floor and when I looked up he was standing over me and his eyes were black, completely black, and his voice came out like a crack of something splitting open—

"You ungrateful little murderer."

The words hit like a fist.

I couldn’t breathe.

"I took you in." His voice was shaking. Or maybe I was shaking — I couldn’t tell. "I gave you everything. I was — I was right there — and you—"

He stopped.

He looked at me the way you look at something that doesn’t deserve to be looked at. Something you picked up thinking it was one thing and found out too late it was something else entirely.

"Get out," he said.

"Nicholas—"

"Get out of my sight."

I woke up with a gasp that scraped the back of my throat raw.

---

Cold sweat. Everywhere. My shirt was stuck to my back, my hair to my face, and for two full seconds I didn’t know where I was — I was still in that room, still on that floor, still looking up at the black of his eyes — and then the gravel path came into focus, and the fountain, and the first thin light of morning coming sideways through the trees.

Park bench.

Right.

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and sat there, breathing.

My lower abdomen ached. Not sharp — just this dull, low throb that hadn’t been there yesterday, or maybe it had and I’d been too busy walking to notice. My lower back was a disaster. Every vertebra felt like it had spent the night grinding against the wooden slats, which, to be fair, it had.

I shifted. Something in my spine popped loudly.

And then I sneezed.

A huge, full-body sneeze that startled a pigeon off the path and made my already-aching ribs scream in protest. I sat there after it, blinking, eyes watering, one hand pressed to my side.

"Fantastic," I said to no one.

My voice was hoarse. My throat felt like sandpaper. I pressed two fingers against the side of my neck and swallowed, and yeah — that was the start of something. A cold, maybe. Which made sense. I’d been walking through damp cold air all night with nothing but a jacket that wasn’t quite warm enough, and now I was sitting on a park bench with wet-from-sweat clothes and no sleep and apparently a body that had decided now was a great time to stage a full systems protest.

I sneezed again.

The pigeon did not come back.

I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, and stared at the gravel between my feet.

The dream was still sitting at the back of my throat. The warmth of it. The way he’d held me — like it was nothing, like it was just what he did, like I was something worth holding. I hadn’t let myself think about that. About what it had actually felt like to be near him when he wasn’t angry, when it was quiet, when it was just the two of us in the dark and neither of us had to be anything in particular.

And then the way it had flipped.

*You ungrateful little murderer.*

I closed my eyes.

My hands were cold. I pressed them together between my knees and concentrated on that — the pressure, the bone against bone, something real and physical and present. The ache in my back. The throb in my feet. The scrape of my throat.

This was the real thing. Not the dream. This.

A bird started somewhere above me, two notes repeating, and a car passed on the street beyond the trees, and the city was starting to wake up around me whether I wanted it to or not.

I couldn’t sit here.

I understood that. Sitting here meant thinking, and thinking meant going back to that room, back to those black eyes, back to the way I’d let myself believe for half a dream that I was actually safe somewhere. That was a trap. I’d spent long enough falling for that kind of trap.

I stood up.

Too fast. My vision went white at the edges for a second, and I grabbed the back of the bench until it cleared, and then I straightened up and took stock.

Feet: destroyed but functional.

Back: bad but survivable.

Throat: getting worse.

Money: the small amount I had wouldn’t last the week.

Everything I owned: in the bag currently on the ground next to my feet.

Okay.

I picked up the bag and slung it over my shoulder, and the seam of the left flat immediately reintroduced itself to the back of my heel, and I winced and kept walking anyway.

First thing: somewhere to sleep that wasn’t a park bench. Somewhere cheap. Somewhere no one would ask too many questions.

Second thing: a job. Any job. Something that paid and didn’t require paperwork that didn’t exist.

I didn’t know this city. I didn’t know anyone here. I had no wolf spirit, no pack bond, no name that meant anything to anyone on this side of the border.

Which was, for the first time in a long time, exactly what I wanted.

I squared my shoulders — it hurt, everything hurt — and I started looking for a place to stay.