CHAPTER 1: The Return
Nora Vane had left Silverpine at seventeen with twenty dollars and a duffel bag and the absolute certainty that she was never coming back.
She was twenty-five and driving a rented car up the mountain road at sunset, watching the pines close in on both sides, and she was thinking about that certainty and what had happened to it.
Her grandmother had died. That was what had happened to it.
Opal Vane had been the last of the mountain Vanes—the lineage that had settled Silverpine three generations ago, when the wolves and the humans had made the compact that kept the mountain peaceful. Nora had grown up knowing this and not understanding it and eventually deciding, at seventeen, that whatever it meant was not her problem.
She was now being told by the family lawyer that she was the heir.
Not of property—there wasn’t much. The cabin, a parcel of forest that had been in the family since the compact, and a role that the lawyer had described with the careful vagueness of someone explaining something he didn’t fully believe in: the human representative of the compact.
“What does that mean, exactly?” she’d asked.
“I’d recommend speaking with the pack,” the lawyer had said.
She’d driven six hours and she was pulling up to the cabin in the dark and there were lights on inside, which was interesting, since she was the only heir and she hadn’t called ahead.
She got out of the car.
The door opened before she knocked.
Not one person. Three.
Three men, standing in the doorway of her grandmother’s cabin, watching her with the specific quality of attention she was later going to identify as the way wolves watched something that had returned to territory they considered theirs.
“Nora Vane,” said the one in the center—dark-haired, the oldest, with the gravity of someone who’d been leading something for years.
“That’s me,” she said. “Who are you?”
“I’m Kieran.” He stepped aside. “This is Eli and Colt. We’re the pack’s alphas.” He met her eyes. “We need to talk about what you inherited.”
