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Bruno, the shepherd dog, going quiet beneath my hands.

The grizzly lowering its head in the ravine. In the Pit, the red leaving its eyes while I stood in front of it. And lying against my back in the dark the night before, all that restless tension inside him easing while I slept.

Where she walketh, the madness of the beasts lieth down.

I touched the white streak in the painted woman’s hair, then lifted my fingers to my own temple without thinking. White roots had been growing steadily through the cheap brown rinse for months.

“Ronan,” I said quietly. “Am I really a Wildheart?”

He did not answer.

He could not.

I watched him try. His mouth opened, his hand moved immediately toward his throat, and the first faint red glow appeared beneath his loosened collar.

Then he closed his mouth again.

He looked at me instead.

That was answer enough.

The word felt different now that it belonged to me.

Forty-one years earlier, the Council had erased this bloodline and replaced it with a history lesson Master Crewe could recite to children. Then, two weeks before my envelope arrived, someone had put the same word on my file. They had sent for me, arranged for me to arrive ignorant, and waited to see what I would become.

Aldric Vance had not suddenly taken an interest in me at the Proving.

He had been waiting for confirmation.

When I raised my hand to my hair, my sleeve slipped down my forearm. The silver thread around the inside of my wrist caught the Archive’s lamplight.

It had never completely faded after the night it blazed beneath the blankets. Since then, a trace had always remained, visible day and night: a narrow silver line that I had assumed only I could see.

Ronan saw it.

His attention fixed on my wrist, and his entire body went still.

Then he reached for me slowly, giving me plenty of time to move away, and closed his hand around my wrist.

His fingers were startlingly hot against my skin. The heat traveled sharply up my arm, and desire tightened low in my body with enough force to interrupt whatever I had been about to say.

Ronan turned my wrist toward the light and bent his head to examine the silver line. He studied it with the same intense concentration he gave a damaged manuscript, taking in every detail before his thumb traced the thread once.

The silver brightened beneath his touch.

“A Thread,” he said quietly. “It is the first visible stage of a Wildheart bond. It forms when a Wildheart reaches for a shifter and the shifter willingly reaches back.”

The brand did not react.

“So you’re allowed to tell me that?”

“It isn’t restricted information. It is merely old. Most modern texts no longer use the term. You would find references to it only in books written before the Hollowing.”

A Wildheart bond.

I already had one.

For weeks, I had carried the scent and presence of cedar and snow somewhere beneath my breastbone, ever since that first night. Nothing that had happened afterward had managed to loosen it.