▪︎ chapter one
Dakota Vale had been called the baby of Alderreach for twenty-six years, which was twenty-one years longer than she considered reasonable.
“Take a coat.”
Kota stopped with one hand on the back door and looked over her shoulder at her mother, who stood at the kitchen counter slicing apples into a bowl, apparently unaware that she had just proven Kota’s point. “I’m going across the yard.”
“It’s cold.”
“I’m a werewolf.”
Tessa Vale glanced up from the apple in her hand. “Do werewolves not get cold?”
Kota considered that for half a second before deciding it was irrelevant. “Not the point.”
“Take a coat.”
Her father had wisely stayed out of the conversation, sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee and the morning paper spread in front of him, but the twitch at the corner of his mouth gave him away. Kota narrowed her eyes. “You have something to say?”
“Nope.”
“You’re smiling.”
“I’m drinking coffee.”
“Suspiciously.”
Nolan raised the mug and took another sip, hiding the rest of his smile behind it, and Kota glared at both of her parents before snatching her jacket from the hook beside the door and pulling it on with considerably more aggression than the situation warranted.
Tessa went back to slicing apples. “Thank you.”
“I wasn’t cold.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You implied it.”
“I said take a coat.”
“That is literally an implication of cold.”
Nolan lowered his newspaper just enough to look at her. “You know, if you’d just left without arguing, you’d be halfway to the Hearth by now.”
Kota stared at him until he calmly raised the paper again.
Traitor.
She stepped outside and shut the door behind her, immediately meeting the sharp October air that meant winter was already waiting in the mountains, impatient for its turn. Frost silvered the grass around the house while the morning sun crept over the eastern ridge, and as Kota shoved her hands into her jacket pockets, she had to admit the temperature was lower than she’d expected.
Fine.
It was cold.
Her mother did not need to know.
The Vale property sat on the southern side of Alderreach, where the mountain eased into a broad stretch of woods and meadow before dropping toward Briar Glen. Kota could have driven to the Hearth in less than three minutes, but walking took ten if she followed the road and seven if she cut through the trees, so she turned toward the woods without bothering to consider the longer route.
Alderreach was quiet at this hour, with woodsmoke hanging low between the family properties scattered across the valley and the occasional sound of someone beginning the day carrying farther than it would once everyone was awake. Somewhere down the slope, a truck engine turned over, sputtered, then caught, and Kota recognized Elias Mercer’s ancient pickup before his headlights appeared between the trees. That was the problem with living in the same place your entire life—eventually even malfunctioning vehicles became acquaintances.
The trail behind her parents’ house wasn’t really a trail anymore. Years ago, children had worn the ground bare cutting between the Vale property and the Hearth rather than taking the road, and Kota could still remember racing Serena along it, both of them jumping the creek instead of using the little footbridge because using the bridge obviously meant you were afraid of getting wet. Serena had fallen in once, and Kota still considered it one of the better days of her childhood.
Now the old path had narrowed, ferns browning at the edges after the first frosts while young saplings crowded in from either side. Kota stepped over a fallen branch and ducked beneath another without breaking stride, knowing every turn well enough to walk the trail in darkness, just as she knew she was one of the only people who still used it regularly.
The thought came and went. Most thoughts did if you didn’t invite them to stay.
By the time the Hearth appeared through the trees, her fingers were warm inside her pockets and she had almost forgiven the jacket.
Almost.
The building rose beyond the woods in a haphazard combination of stone, timber, additions, and architectural decisions made by people who had apparently believed future generations would enjoy guessing where the original structure ended. Smoke curled from one chimney while light glowed behind the kitchen windows, and Kota was crossing the yard when she noticed two trucks already parked beside the gravel drive.
One belonged to Callum Rourke.
She frowned. He was supposed to be on the northern boundary this morning.
Kota went inside through the kitchen, where warmth reached her at the same time as the smell of coffee and cinnamon. Maeve Rourke stood at the long central counter with a mixing bowl tucked against one hip while her son leaned against the sink eating something directly from a baking sheet. When Callum reached for another, Maeve slapped the back of his hand.
“Ow.”
“Those are for tonight.”
“There are forty of them.”
“There were forty-two.”
Kota shut the door behind her and glanced at the tray. “Forty-one.”
Callum turned toward her, still chewing, while Maeve counted what remained. Kota simply waited until he swallowed.
“There are forty.”
Maeve pointed her wooden spoon at him. “Out.”
“I’m leaving.”
“You said that ten minutes ago.”
“I was waiting for Micah.”
“You were eating my pastries.”
“Two things can be true.”
While Maeve muttered something about grown men being worse than children, Kota crossed to the coffee pot and reached into the cabinet above it for the mug she kept there. Her name was painted across the side in Serena’s handwriting beneath a lopsided silver wolf that looked more like an angry fox, and although Kota had threatened to throw it away when her sister gave it to her, that had been six years ago.
Callum watched her pour the coffee. “You’re here early.”
“So are you.”
“I work here.”
Kota looked over her shoulder. “You don’t.”
“I work everywhere.”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It is.”
He reached for another pastry, but before his fingers touched it, Maeve spoke without even turning around.
“Try it.”
Callum’s hand stopped.
Kota took a sip of coffee, enjoying this far more than she should. “Future Alpha of Alderreach, defeated by his mother and a wooden spoon.”
“Future possible Alpha.”
“Still defeated.”
“You seem happy about that.”
“I enjoy strong leadership.”
Maeve snorted, and Callum pushed away from the sink with the long-suffering expression of a man surrounded by people who refused to respect him properly. He was already dressed for the boundary, his heavy boots muddy from wherever he’d been before sunrise and a weathered jacket pulled over a dark thermal shirt. His hair looked as though he’d run a hand through it instead of finding a comb, which was probably exactly what had happened.
As he turned, the kitchen light caught the pale scar running from his left temple toward his cheek. The eye beneath it had been blue once, something Kota remembered vaguely in the same way she remembered the Hearth before the upstairs windows were replaced or her father before gray appeared in his beard. Callum’s left eye was gray now while the right remained blue, and unless someone new stared at him long enough to make it obvious, she rarely thought about the difference.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
Kota lifted her mug. “I work here.”
“You don’t.”
“I work everywhere.”
Callum stared at her while she smiled into her coffee, and Maeve laughed.
“You walked into that one.”
“I did.”
Before he could recover, the back door opened and Micah Dorne came in carrying enough cold air with him to make Maeve turn from the counter.
“Door.”
“It’s closed.”
“It wasn’t.”
“It is now.”
Micah pulled off his knit cap, leaving his dark hair flattened in every direction, and glanced from Callum to Kota. “Why are you both here?”
“I work here,” they answered together.
Micah paused, and Maeve set down her spoon. “I need all of you to leave.”
“I actually do work here,” Kota pointed out, lifting her coffee again.
“You’re allowed to stay.”
Callum looked offended. “Favoritism.”
“Absolutely.”
Micah made the mistake of reaching toward the baking sheet, but the moment Maeve raised her spoon, he reconsidered. Kota leaned against the counter and watched two adult men who regularly handled emergencies, territorial disputes, storm damage, injured wolves, and whatever else Alderreach threw at them retreat from a woman armed with pastry dough and a wooden spoon.
This was why she came early. Entertainment was harder to find in the archives.
Her attention returned to Callum’s muddy boots. “What happened at the north boundary?”
“Nothing.”
“You were supposed to be there until noon.”
“We finished early.”
If they had simply finished early, his truck wouldn’t be sitting outside the Hearth before breakfast. “Then something happened.”
Micah looked at Callum. “She does this every time.”
“Does what?”
“Asks a question, ignores the answer, then waits until you give her the one she already knows exists.”
“I don’t do that.”
Both men looked at her, so Kota drank her coffee and waited.
Callum folded his arms. “A tree came down over the eastern access road.”
“That’s not the north boundary.”
“No.”
“So you were called back.”
“Yes.”
“See? Easy.”
Micah pointed at her. “That. That is exactly what I meant.”
“You could save time by answering correctly the first time.”
The corner of Callum’s mouth shifted, and because Kota had known him long enough to recognize the almost-smile, it did very little to support the annoyed look he was attempting. “Tree’s cleared. We’re heading back up now.”
“Why?”
“Because we still have work to do.”
“You said you finished early.”
Micah made a strangled sound as Callum closed his eyes, and Maeve had begun laughing quietly into her mixing bowl by the time he opened them again.
“The road crew finished early,” he said. “Micah and I did not.”
“Ah.”
“You knew that.”
“I suspected.”
“Why do I talk to you?”
“You keep coming back.”
His eyes met hers, and something in the room went unexpectedly still for half a second—not strange or uncomfortable, merely a pause in which neither of them seemed to have an immediate answer.
Then Micah stole a pastry, Maeve hit him with the spoon, and the moment disappeared beneath his yelp.
Kota laughed hard enough that coffee nearly sloshed over the edge of her mug.
“You saw her threaten me!” Callum said.
“I thought she was bluffing!”
“My mother never bluffs.”
“You could’ve shared that.”
“You watched me almost lose a hand.”
“I assumed it was family business.”
Maeve pointed the spoon toward the door. “Both of you. Go.”
Micah shoved the rest of the stolen pastry into his mouth and obeyed while Callum grabbed his gloves from the counter. As he passed Kota, his hand drifted toward her mug, and she moved it out of reach before he got close.
“I wasn’t taking it.”
“You were thinking about it.”
“You can’t smell thoughts.”
“I can smell bad intentions.”
“That isn’t how scent works.”
“You keep believing that.”
He shook his head and followed Micah outside, leaving Kota watching the door for a moment before she noticed Maeve watching her.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“That face isn’t nothing.”
Maeve’s eyebrows rose. “Interesting.”
Kota frowned. “What is?”
“You sound like him.”
“I absolutely do not.”
Maeve only smiled and returned to her dough, which was enough to convince Kota not to pursue the conversation. She had learned from experience that Rourke women were dangerous when they looked pleased with themselves.
Taking her coffee with her, Kota left the kitchen and crossed the main room toward the stairs. The Hearth always felt different when it was empty. At night or during pack gatherings, people filled every chair and leaned against the walls while food moved in and out of the kitchen, conversations overlapped, doors opened and shut, and someone was inevitably laughing, arguing, calling across the room, or searching for something they had probably left somewhere obvious. In the morning, without all those bodies and voices filling the space, the building seemed larger than it really was.
Kota had made it halfway upstairs when something below caught her attention. The tables were already arranged for that evening’s harvest dinner, with long ones for the adults covered in folded linens Maeve would undoubtedly rearrange three times before anyone arrived, but along the far wall sat a much smaller oak table.
Someone had placed the desserts there.
Maeve’s pastries occupied one tray beside two covered cake stands, with enough room left for whatever Serena planned to bring later. Kota rested a hand on the banister as she looked down at the little table and remembered sitting there herself, though the memory returned in pieces—the wooden bench beneath her bare legs, Serena telling her not to touch something, someone laughing after Kota spilled juice down the front of her dress. Then she remembered the crayons, a coffee tin full of them that used to sit in the middle of the table.
She went back down three steps and leaned over the railing, trying to see beneath the linen. Her father had built the table before she was born, back when Alderreach apparently needed furniture sturdy enough to survive generations of small wolves, and although scratches covered its surface and one leg had been repaired twice, it had held up remarkably well.
It was a good table.
Useful.
Apparently the perfect height for dessert.
“Kota?” Maeve called from the kitchen. “Everything okay?”
Kota kept her eyes on the table for another moment before straightening. “Yeah.”
She continued upstairs.
The archives occupied two rooms at the back of the Hearth, where the floor slanted slightly toward the eastern wall and the windows rattled whenever mountain winds came down hard enough. Kota unlocked the first door and stepped into the familiar smell of old paper, wood, dust, and the faint trace of lavender from sachets someone had begun putting in the storage cabinets decades ago.
This was her favorite room in Alderreach, though she had never told anyone that. They probably knew.
She set her coffee on the desk, shrugged out of the coat she definitely hadn’t needed, and draped it over the back of her chair before turning to the three boxes waiting beside the filing cabinet. The Briar Glen Historical Society had called two days earlier after receiving another donation from the estate of Harold Wynn, a retired pharmacist whose family had supplied half the mountain communities in the region for nearly a century. Most of the material belonged to Briar Glen, but several boxes contained invoices, letters, and photographs connected to Alderreach.
Humans had always known the community existed; they simply didn’t know exactly what lived in it, and Kota preferred it that way.
She pulled the first box closer and removed the lid. Sorting other people’s history required patience because people kept the strangest things and discarded the important ones. They saved grocery receipts for thirty years and threw away letters, wrote names on photographs but not dates, dates but not names, and occasionally nothing at all because apparently everyone in 1974 had assumed future generations would possess psychic abilities.
Kota had opinions about this.
Strong ones.
Working through the first layer, she separated Briar Glen material from anything belonging to Alderreach—an invoice for lumber, three photographs of a building she didn’t recognize, a handwritten order for veterinary supplies, two letters concerning a washed-out bridge. The ordinary evidence made her smile because, despite what people liked to believe, history didn’t live only in wars, deaths, elections, and disasters important enough to earn chapters in books. It lived in receipts and grocery lists too, in who bought flour, who repaired a fence, which road washed out every spring and who eventually got tired of fixing it.
People forgot how much of their lives they left behind.
As she lifted two invoices from the box, a photograph slipped from between them and landed facedown on the desk. Kota picked it up and recognized the Hearth’s front porch immediately, although the picture was old enough that the second floor hadn’t been added yet. Adults stood behind a crowd of children in summer clothes, all of them squinting into the sun while one little boy covered his face, a girl beside him stuck out her tongue, and another child sat cross-legged in the dirt as if whoever held the camera had finally given up trying to organize them.
Smiling, Kota turned the photograph over and found names written across the back in faded blue ink.
Her father. Gideon. Maeve. Tessa.
She flipped it over again, studying the faces with renewed interest. Of course she knew her parents had been children together; everyone in Alderreach knew everyone’s history, or at least the version repeated at dinners. Knowing something and seeing it were different, though, and when she found her mother in the front row at perhaps eight years old, her hair in two braids and one knee visibly scraped, Kota laughed at the sight of her father standing behind Gideon making rabbit ears over his head.
That was worth keeping for blackmail purposes alone.
She set it aside and reached for the next photograph, this one showing a picnic near the river with even more children. Another showed a winter gathering inside the Hearth, children packed together near the front, and as Kota moved through several more, she began to slow.
There was nothing unusual about seeing children in old Alderreach photographs. She had catalogued hundreds of them and had always known the pack had once been full of families much larger than the ones she had grown up around. Seeing photograph after photograph together, though, changed the scale of what she already knew.
One photograph could be sentimental.
A box became evidence.
The next showed a birthday cake surrounded by children wearing paper hats. Kota counted them without meaning to, then counted again because she thought she had missed one.
Eleven.
Something crashed downstairs, followed immediately by Maeve swearing, and although Kota smiled at the sound, her attention stayed on the photograph.
Eleven children at one birthday party.
She had never attended a birthday party with eleven children in Alderreach. Not unless she counted herself eleven times.
Kota looked toward the archive shelves lining the room. Entire sections were devoted to family records—births, marriages, deaths, First Runs, school photographs, even medical histories where families had chosen to preserve them. None of it was secret, and none of it was material she hadn’t handled before.
She also knew exactly where the birth registers were.
Kota looked from the shelves back to the photograph. “No.”
She said it aloud because she knew herself, and she had actual work to finish. The photographs weren’t going anywhere.
Picking up the next invoice, she read three lines before her attention drifted toward the shelves again.
“Absolutely not.”
She forced herself through another line, but the birth registers remained exactly where they had been for decades, apparently unconcerned by her resistance.
Kota put the invoice down. “This is why I never finish anything.”
The oldest registers were kept in a glass-front cabinet away from the exterior wall, and once she crossed the room, unlocked it, and ran a finger along the labeled spines, finding the years covered by the photographs took only seconds. The volume she pulled free was heavy and dusty and entirely innocent, which was precisely what she told herself as she carried it back to the desk.
She wasn’t looking for anything.
That was important.
She was satisfying a question so her brain would shut up and let her return to work.
Opening the register, Kota found page after page of names accompanied by birth dates, parents, and households. She turned through several years before reaching for her notebook—not because anything was wrong, obviously, but because she liked numbers and counting them would answer the question faster.
That was all.
She wrote down the first year and counted the births, then continued through the next several. Some years had more, some fewer, and nothing about the older records looked particularly strange. Children had simply been born in Alderreach with the kind of regularity she had seen in every other community’s records: a handful one year, several the next, occasionally only one or two, followed by another small cluster.
Kota kept going.
Her parents’ generation became adults. Names she knew moved from the column marked child to the one marked parent, and the familiarity of them made the years pass strangely beneath her fingers. People she saw at the Hearth every week appeared here as newborns, then siblings, then mothers and fathers.
She reached Serena.
Serena Vale.
Kota smiled faintly and made a mark in her notebook before turning the page.
There were other births around Serena’s. Nothing remarkable. Nothing that would have made anyone looking at the records then think Alderreach was approaching the end of anything.
Kota continued.
The following year had births too.
So did the next.
Then she found herself.
Dakota Vale.
Daughter of Nolan and Tessa Vale.
Born October 17.
Healthy female.
Nothing remarkable.
Kota rested her finger beneath her own name. She had seen the entry before, of course. She had probably handled this exact book a dozen times, but she had never arrived at herself by following everyone who came before.
She turned the page.
The next year was blank.
Kota’s finger stopped.
She turned another page.
Blank.
Another year.
Nothing.
She already knew what she was going to find, but knowing did not stop her from turning the pages. Year after year passed beneath her hand without a single new name until the emptiness stopped looking like unused paper and began to feel like a record of its own.
Twenty-six years.
Kota sat back.
Everyone in Alderreach knew she was the last child born before the Silence. It was one of those facts so old and so thoroughly absorbed into pack life that no one needed to explain it anymore. There had been children, then there had been Kota, and after Kota there had been none.
Except that wasn’t quite what the book said.
She pulled the register closer and went back several years, checking the entries around Serena’s birth and then the years between Serena and herself. Births. Ordinary births. Different families. Different seasons. Nothing that looked like a population slowly dwindling toward zero.
Then Kota.
Then nothing.
She reached for her notebook and began writing the years down properly this time, adding names beside them, counting households, checking whether any births had been recorded somewhere else or under another family register. When she finished, she went back and checked everything again.
Same result.
Kota stared at the final cluster of names before hers.
The pack had always called it the Silence.
She had never really thought about the word.
Silence sounded gradual when people used it now, softened by twenty-six years of living inside it. Couples stopped expecting children. The nursery became storage. The children’s table became a dessert table. Everyone learned not to ask certain questions too loudly.
But this wasn’t gradual.
At least, the beginning of it wasn’t.
Children had been born.
Kota had been born.
Then no one had.
She looked toward the old photograph lying beside the register, eleven children crowded around one birthday cake, and tried to imagine someone in that room being told there would come a day when Alderreach wouldn’t have enough children to fill one side of the table.
Downstairs, the Hearth was waking around her. A door opened, someone called for Maeve, boots crossed the main floor, and outside a truck started before pulling away. Kota heard the sounds only at the edges of her attention as she flipped back to her own entry.
Dakota Vale. October 17.
She had spent her entire life thinking of that date as the end of something.
Now, for the first time, it looked like the beginning of a question.
Kota reached for a clean sheet of paper. At the top, she wrote:
What changed?
