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After a moment, he spoke again, even more quietly. "I know what men like him are for. I used to work for them."

I put my hand on the back of his head. His hair was short and soft beneath my palm. I turned my face and kissed his temple, then his cheekbone, and felt his whole body become still.

I wanted him.

There was nothing complicated about the wanting itself. I had spent the day frightened, bleeding, watched, and talked about. I had changed into something in front of the entire island and had not known how to change back. Now Silas was kneeling between my knees with traces of my blood still on his fingers, and I wanted his cock inside me so badly that my pussy ached.

What frightened me was how clean and immediate the need felt.

I kissed the corner of his mouth.

He turned toward me and kissed me back. It was only one kiss, but it was slow and deep enough that my hand tightened in his hair.

Then he pulled away abruptly and sat back on his heels. His hands closed hard over his thighs.

"Not tonight," he said, his voice rough. "Wren. Not tonight."

"Why?"

"Because I watched you bleed." His voice broke slightly on the last word, and he looked away before forcing himself to meet my eyes again. "And he's close. Too close."

He didn't have to tell me who he meant.

I could see the change in his eyes, a faint red beginning deep inside the brown.

"If I lose hold of him with you under me, I don't know what happens," he said. "I'm not going to find out with you there. I won't risk it."

I looked at him kneeling on the floor in front of me, scarred and exhausted, using every bit of his strength to remain careful.

"Then stay," I said.

So he stayed.

He lay down behind me on the narrow bed and settled himself around my body, one heavy arm resting across my stomach. Within a few breaths, he was asleep. Silas always slept that way, completely and without transition, as though whatever kept him alert during the day simply released him all at once.

I stayed awake.

For a long time I lay in the dark with his arm across me and the wren perched on the sill. I thought about the Pit. I thought about black fur forcing its way through my skin and the sudden smell of cedar and snow inside my lungs.

When Silas's breathing had become slow and even, I carefully lifted his arm and slipped out from beneath it.

I stood barefoot on the cold floorboards in my T-shirt and closed my eyes.

Then I breathed into the seam beneath my breastbone, exactly the way Fenwick had taught us. I pressed my awareness against it and reached for the place inside me where the wolf had come from. I searched for the opening I had felt in the Pit, trying to find whatever had allowed it through.

There was nothing there.

The old ache remained beneath my ribs, familiar and dull. A faint warmth circled my wrist where the silver thread gave off its weak light in the darkness. Deeper than that, I sensed the smallest movement, something so faint I couldn't tell whether it was real or whether I wanted it to be.

But there was no wolf.

There was no hidden doorway waiting for me to find it, and nothing inside me answered when I reached.

That was when I understood.

The wolf had never been mine.

It had been his.