Free Web NovelChapter 3: The Lake
Trishelle’s POV
The kitchen garden existed in a state of productive neglect.
It ran along the eastern wall of the pack house in a long strip that got good morning light and afternoon shade, which suited the herbs well enough, though the vegetable beds at the far end had been allowed to go ragged at the edges where the bindweed came in from the tree line. Trishelle had been quietly fighting that bindweed for two years. It was one of those ongoing, low-grade battles that she waged without anyone noticing or caring, pulling the pale, wiry stems from the soil whenever she had a spare ten minutes, because if she didn’t, eventually it would strangle the tomatoes and the runner beans, and then she would have a different problem entirely.
She was on her knees between the bean rows on a Tuesday afternoon when she realized she had the grounds to herself.
This was unusual enough that she registered it the way she registered any deviation from pattern, with a careful, systematic check of what it might mean. Training was finished for the day. The afternoon duties had dispersed the pack into the various buildings and outbuildings that comprised the Bloodmoon territory, and the particular combination of timing and task had resulted in something she rarely encountered outside the pre-dawn kitchen hours.
Quiet. Unobserved quiet.
She sat back on her heels and looked at the garden for a moment, and then looked at the sky, which was high and blue and doing nothing to justify itself, and then she made a decision that she did not think about for long enough to talk herself out of. ƒreewebηoveℓ.com
The lake was at the back of the property, a ten-minute walk through the eastern edge of the forest along a path she knew well from the few times she had been sent to collect wild garlic in season. It was pack territory, which meant it was technically available to any pack member, but in practice it was used by the ranked wolves for recreation and the lower omegas knew better than to be there when others wanted it. In the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, with training done and the evening meal still three hours out, no one was going to be at the lake.
She left the bindweed and went.
The water was cold even in June, fed by a spring somewhere further into the forest that kept the temperature honest regardless of what the air was doing above it. Trishelle stood at the bank and pulled off her boots and her socks and then looked once over each shoulder, the way you looked when you were doing something that wasn’t prohibited exactly but would become prohibited the moment someone decided it was.
Nothing. The forest held its sounds, birds and the distant percussion of a woodpecker somewhere to the north, and the low, constant undertone of the water itself.
She undressed quickly and without ceremony and waded in.
The cold hit her like a second thought, immediate and total, driving the breath from her chest in a sharp exhale that she muffled with the back of her hand. She pushed through it, the way she pushed through most things, by not stopping, and went under to her shoulders and then let the cold settle around her and become its own kind of warmth.
She had been carrying the smell of the kitchen for four days. The grease and smoke and accumulated scent of cooking that she couldn’t fully get out of her hair with the limited means she had. It lived in her skin, that smell, the way smells did when you worked in an enclosed space with industrial heat for sixteen hours a day. She worked the water through her hair with her fingers, methodically, sectioning and rinsing, tilting her head back so the surface of the lake received the oils she was working loose.
She was not thinking about anything in particular. This was the rarest state she inhabited, the still, uncomplicated neutrality of a body simply existing in water without a task in front of it, and she let herself have it without analysis.
She floated on her back for a while, looking up at the blue sky through the lattice of overhanging branches, and felt, for approximately seven minutes, like a person rather than a function.
Then she heard something move in the tree line.
She righted herself immediately, water rushing around her shoulders as she turned toward the sound, one arm crossing her chest by instinct. Her heart was suddenly loud in her own ears. She scanned the bank, the shadows between the trees, the path she had come in on.
Nothing visible. A bird settling. A branch.
She waited another minute, the cold now registering as cold rather than relief. Then she moved to the bank and dressed quickly, her wet skin making the fabric stick and cling in ways she didn’t examine, and she gathered her things and walked back through the forest toward the kitchen garden.
She did not look back.
She didn’t know what she had heard. She told herself it was nothing. She had been alone in the woods dozens of times on errands and had never had cause to feel threatened by a sound she couldn’t identify. The forest was full of things that moved without being what you feared.
She went back to the kitchen and started the evening prep, and by the time the first warriors came through the door for dinner she had filed the whole thing away in the cabinet where she kept things she couldn’t change and had no use examining.
She did not notice that James Black was already at the head of the table when she came through the pass-through with the first serving dishes.
She did not notice the way he looked up from the table the moment she appeared, or the way that look held a beat longer than anything in the room required.
She did not notice any of it.
James’s POV
He had not intended to be at the lake.
He had been walking the eastern boundary, which was something he did periodically and without scheduling, a habit inherited from his father that he had retained because it was genuinely useful rather than out of any sentimental attachment. You learned things walking your own borders that you didn’t learn from reports and from Beta briefings. The way the scent markers were holding. Where the undergrowth had grown too dense to serve as clear sightlines. Whether any of the boundary stones had been disturbed.
He had been focused on the north-facing section of fence line where the posts had been showing wear, making a mental note to have a maintenance crew out within the week, when the scent reached him.
It was not a scent he had catalogued before. Or rather, it was, but under other conditions, covered by other things, the way a note in a chord gets lost until you hear it isolated and realize it was there the whole time. Something warm and clean underneath the lake water. Something that moved through the trees on the slight afternoon breeze with an unhurried quality that made him stop walking. freёwebnovel.com
He stood still on the path and his wolf, who had been quiet and uninterested through most of the boundary walk, came forward with an attention that James found irritating for reasons he could not immediately name.
He followed the scent to the lake’s edge. He stopped at the tree line.
He would say, later, in the privacy of his own accounting of it, that he had stopped because he needed to identify the source before deciding whether there was a security concern. Whether an unauthorized person was on his land. Whether there was a reason that the scent was unfamiliar in its uncovered state.
He would not say, even in private, that he stood there for longer than any security assessment required.
She was in the water to her shoulders, her brown hair dark and slick against her neck, her head tipped back to catch the light. He had seen her every day for years. He had looked at her with the specific and deliberate absence of interest that was a kind of looking in itself, the same way you looked away from something bright enough to leave marks. He had called her Trash since they were children because that was what she had always been called, because her name in his mouth felt like a weight he didn’t want to account for.
He had not, until this moment, seen her in the particular way that his wolf was insisting on seeing her now.
The water moved around her as she turned, the surface catching light, and in the second before she heard him and crossed her arm over her chest, he understood with a cold and inconvenient clarity what the warriors who had reported to him last week had been describing.
He stepped back behind the tree line before she looked toward him.
He stood in the trees and listened to the sounds of her leaving, the quiet of the water settling back, the soft crunch of her footsteps on the path, and felt the particular fury of a man who has been surprised by himself.
He walked back to the pack house the long way. He went to his office. He sat behind his desk and looked at the wall and thought about the boundary fence that needed maintenance, and the Summit meeting with the three packs that Marcus had been pushing him to confirm, and the quarterly report on pack resources that he was already two weeks late reviewing.
His wolf refused to cooperate with any of this.
When she came through the pass-through at dinner with the serving dishes, he was already seated at the head of the table. He looked up. He watched the way she moved through the space, quiet and precise and entirely inside herself, and felt the fur of his wolf rise up his spine like a hand running wrong against the grain.
He picked up his fork and looked at his plate and decided, with the focused certainty he applied to all decisions that required removing variables, that he would resolve this quickly and efficiently and that it would not become anything other than what it was.
A distraction. A temporary distraction, easily managed.
He ate his dinner. The French toast at breakfast had been, as it always was, exactly right.
He did not examine that observation.
