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“You got bigger,” he said, and the tone he wore when he did reminded her of the muscles that had gone soft after she’d given up on the pack’s acceptance.

She was sitting on the cot. Her hands were flat on her knees. Her spine was straight. She could feel her wolf pressing forward, snarling, every instinct she’d trained over twenty years of pack life screaming at her to shift, to fight, to put her teeth into the throat of the man standing five feet from her bed.

Her body did nothing.

It was an old program. Written into her body before she’d had language to describe it, before she’d understood that fathers were not supposed to leave marks in places clothes could cover. Be still. Be small. Make yourself quiet, make yourself nothing, let his hands do what they came to do, wait for it to end. She’d learned this through repetition, through the body’s blind commitment to survival. Stay still. Don’t flinch. Flinching makes it worse.

“I’ve been patient.” Garrett crossed the room. Two steps. The cottage was so small he barely had to move. “You know that. I’ve been very patient with you.”

Her mouth opened. Nothing came out.

“All those years.” He crouched in front of her. His knees cracked. His breath smelled of tobacco, the same brand, the same acrid sweetness that lived in the walls of her childhood bedroom. “All those years I let you play at being one of them. Being strong. Being important.” His mouth twisted. “You wanted to be Luna, my little girl, thinking she could be somebody.”

“I’m not your little girl.” The words scraped out of her, raw, barely audible. Her voice had dropped to the register of a child. She heard it happen, heard herself shrink.

“You’ve always been mine.” His hand came up. She watched it rise the way she’d watched it rise a thousand times, knowing where it would land, knowing the pressure, the duration, the exact point where his fingers would close. He wrapped his hand around her throat. “You will always be mine.”

His grip tightened, steady, controlled. He wasn’t trying to kill her. He was calibrating, the way he always had. Finding the pressure point between air and no air, the place where her vision would grey at the edges, where panic would flood her limbs, but her lungs would keep pulling in just enough to keep her conscious.

She could break his wrist. She knew seven ways to free herself from a single-hand chokehold. She had the training, the strength, the speed. She was twice the fighter he was, three times; she’d thrown wolves his size and larger across training mats without breaking stride.

Her arms stayed at her sides.

Be still. Be small. Wait for it to pass.

Her vision narrowed. The cottage walls pulled inward. She could hear her own pulse, wet, thick, slowing. His face filled her field of view, those grey-blue eyes watching her with the same focused attention he’d always brought to this: checking, measuring, making sure she felt every second of it.

“You’re going to come with me.” His voice reached her from a distance. “We’re going to walk out of here together, quietly, and you’re going to be good.”

The edges of the room were going dark. She felt her hands twitch against her thighs, a reflexive grab at something her muscles remembered but her mind couldn’t reach.

Then the door hit the wall.

The sound was enormous in the tiny space. Wood cracking against stone, the hinges screaming, daylight flooding in so fast that Garrett’s head snapped toward it, his grip loosening by a fraction.

A man filled the doorway. Tall, broad, moving with a speed that didn’t match his size. His face was set in an expression Sloane had never seen on Chris Williams before. Chris Williams was the steady one, the calm one, the man who held doors open for people, who spoke in a measured voice, who had stood at Kahn’s and kept him calm.

Chris Williams did not look steady.

He looked like he was going to kill someone.

Air hit her throat as Garrett’s fingers loosened. She gasped, choked, her body folding forward over her own knees while the room spun. She heard a sound, a raw, guttural noise from the doorway, felt the floor shake as someone moved fast, heard the impact of a body being driven into a wall.

She couldn’t lift her head. She stayed bent over, pulling air in through a throat that felt crushed, her hands gripping the edge of the cot, her eyes streaming.

Above her, Chris Williams had her father by the collar, pinned against the cottage wall with one arm, his other hand drawn back in a fist that shook with the effort of not connecting.

Garrett smiled at him. Thin, knowing, his eyes already calculating what this meant.

Then he twisted free. Ducked under Chris’s arm, hit the door frame at a sprint, cleared the porch in two strides. By the time Chris turned, he was at the tree line.

Sloane heard him go. Heard the underbrush snap, heard the silence close behind him. She was still bent over her knees, still pulling air through her bruised throat, still shaking with a force she couldn’t locate or stop.

A hand touched her shoulder. She flinched so hard her teeth clacked together.

“It’s me.” Chris’s voice, rough, strained, stripped of every bit of calm she’d ever heard in it. “Sloane, it’s me. He’s gone.”

She couldn’t speak. Her throat was swelling. She could feel the bruises forming, the blood rushing to the places his fingers had pressed, her body already beginning to catalog the damage the way it always had, automatically, efficiently, without her permission.