The Blackpine changed at dusk. By day it was timber and birdsong, a working wood with paths worn honest by boots. By evening the light went red between the trunks, the birds fell silent in order, tallest branches first, and every woman in the village knew the rule her mother had taught her before she was old enough to understand why it made her thighs press together in the dark: stay on the path, keep home in sight, and whatever you do, do not run.

Running was an invitation. Running was a confession. In the Blackpine, running told the Wolf exactly what you wanted him to do about it.

Wrenna Vale was twenty-eight years old, too grown for ghost stories and too honest, in her private hours, to pretend she did not arrange her life around one. She came down the north path with her basket on her hip and her mother's medicines packed in straw — tincture for Old Nan's joints, dried feverfew, a heel of black bread, a small jar of honey — and she wore the red cloak.

She had not needed to wear it. The evening was warm. The cloak's wool breathed heat against her back and shoulders, and the hood lay folded down so that anyone watching — anything watching — would see the color from a long way off. Her mother had sewn it three winters ago without comment, double-stitched at the throat, cut to swing when she walked. Cut, though neither of them ever said so, to be seen.

At the shrine stone, where the path divided, Wrenna stopped.

The long way home went left, lit and lawful, forty minutes of good road past the Beck farm and the chapel bell. The shortcut went right, under the black pines, through the hollow where the mist collected and the old offerings rotted sweetly in a stone bowl. Fifteen minutes. Nobody took it after the light turned. Nobody admitted to taking it at all.

She looked left, once, the way she always did — performing the consideration for an audience of no one — and then she felt it, and the performance ended. The back of her neck knew before her eyes did. A stillness had come into the trees behind her, the particular stillness that was not empty but occupied, the way a room is different when a man has silently entered it. Her nipples tightened against her dress. Her mouth went dry and her sex, traitor and oracle, went wet.

He was there. He was always there, some evenings, and on the evenings he was not she walked the long way home hating the birdsong and her own disappointment like a sore tooth.

"I'm taking the shortcut," she said aloud, to the trees, to him, clear as a bell. "The light's going. Anyone with sense would."

Nothing answered. The stillness deepened, amused.

"Anyone with sense," she repeated, and stepped right, off the good road, under the black pines, wearing red like a flag run up a pole in wartime.

The mist took her to the knees within fifty paces. The path narrowed to a deer track, soft with needles, and the light went the color of old wine. Wrenna walked the way she had taught herself to walk in this wood — unhurried, shoulders loose, basket swinging — and listened to her own heartbeat deliver the message her pride would not: he can hear this. He can probably smell it too. The stories said the Wolf could scent a lie at a hundred paces and a woman's want at a mile. She had stopped being embarrassed by that particular piece of folklore around her twenty-fourth birthday, alone in her bed with her hand between her legs and his imaginary eyes on her from the tree line. Embarrassment had burned off. What was left was appetite, and appetite had a schedule: it liked dusk, it liked mist, and it liked the moment — coming now, she felt it in her spine — when walking stopped being enough.

Behind her, unhurried as weather, something matched her pace.

She did not turn. Turning was for the walk. She let three more paces go by, slow, slower, feeling the heat climb her throat and the delicious pressure build low in her belly, and then — with a laugh she did not entirely feel and a prayer she did not entirely mean — Wrenna ran.

The wood took the sound of it and gave it back doubled. Her boots struck needles, then roots, then stone; her basket banged her hip hard enough to bruise and she did not care, would not have slowed if the jar had smashed and honeyed her whole side. Her cloak streamed behind her like the signal it was. Under the trees the mist tore at her ankles. She ran laughing — actually laughing, the fear and the wanting braided so tight they had become one hot cord — and the thing behind her stopped pretending at the same moment she stopped pretending, and the chase became honest.

He was faster. Of course he was faster; he was six feet of hunter built by this forest for exactly this, and she heard him not as footsteps but as a decision approaching — branches not breaking, breath not laboring, the gap closing the way night closes. She veered off the track toward the ruined shrine because some deep female instinct in her wanted witnesses, even stone ones, even old dead gods. The shrine rose out of the mist, a waist-high altar and three standing stones drowned in ivy, and she got her hand flat on the cold altar top and one knee up on the stone before he took her.

One arm, iron-hard, around her waist. The world tipped. Her back hit his chest and stayed there, pinned by the whole length of him — the breadth of him, the heat coming off him through wool and leather, his breath in her hair. Her basket hit the ground. The honey jar, miraculously, did not break.

"Running, Red?" Kael Fenris said, into the side of her neck, in the voice the village imitated badly around fires — gravel under velvet, low enough to live in her spine. "In my woods. At dusk. In that cloak."

"Let me go," she said, and made it sound almost true.

"No." He said it simply, the way weather says no. His arm tightened a fraction, not to hurt, only to make the geography plain: she was caught, she was held, and the held thing in her — the thing that had walked past the shrine a hundred evenings performing consideration — went molten with relief so sharp it embarrassed her worse than desire ever had. "You know the law of this wood better than the priest does. What runs in the Blackpine at dusk is asking."

"And what walks?" she managed.

His hand came up, slow enough to stop if she meant stopping, and closed around her throat — not squeezing, never squeezing, just resting there, thumb on her hammering pulse, a collar of fingers. "What walks," he said, "gets watched. Gets followed home in my head every night and put to bed hungry. What walks has been driving me mad for three years, Wrenna."

Three years. Her name in his mouth did what his hands had not yet done. She felt herself go slick and shameless, felt the ache between her legs turn rhythmic, keeping time with the pulse under his thumb.

"Say it plainly, Wolf."

"You first." His teeth grazed the shell of her ear, deliberate, a promise with edges. "I have smelled you on this path since you were a grown woman playing at errands. I know what you do in your bed when the chapel bell rings, because the wind carries it and I am a cursed animal. But smelling is not having, and wanting is not taking. So say it, Red. Say why you ran."

Her hands came up and covered the arm at her waist and held on — not prying it off. Holding it there. She turned her head until her cheek was against his jaw, until she could feel the rasp of his beard and the heat of his mouth a breath from hers, and she gave him the truth she had carried through the Blackpine like a coal in her skirt pocket.

"I ran," she said, "so you would stop watching and start."

His mouth came down on hers like the end of an argument.

He kissed the way he hunted — no wasted motion, total attention. His mouth opened hers and took, and she answered with three years of stored-up fury at being imagined instead of touched: she bit his lower lip, she got her hands into his hair and pulled him down harder, she made a sound into his mouth that she had previously only made alone. His hand slid from her throat to the laces of her bodice and stopped there, fingers hooked, waiting — even now, even with her tongue stroking his and her hips working back against the hard length of him through his leathers, the bastard waited.

"Wrenna." He tore his mouth free a half-inch, no more. "Look at me."

She looked. Amber eyes, blown dark; a scar through one brow; a face built for winter. Thirty-six years of it, and all of them focused, at that moment, entirely on her.

"The word is hold," he said. "Say it and everything stops — hands, mouth, all of it — and I walk you home by the good road and we pretend your cloak is only a cloak. Do you understand me?"

"Yes."

"Then understand this too." His forehead rested against hers; his breath was not steady, and his unsteadiness thrilled her more than his strength had. "There is no pretending after tonight. If I taste you, Red, I will come for the rest of you. Not tonight — tonight is for you to learn what my mouth is for. But I will come."

She answered him by taking his hand from her bodice and pressing it flat and hard over her breast, over the nipple already straining against wool. "Then stop talking like a priest," she said, "and taste."

He laughed once, low and wrecked, and spun her to face the altar. The stone was cold through her palms. Mist curled around their legs; somewhere below the hill a dog barked twice and thought better of it. Kael gathered her cloak up in one fist and raised it, raised her skirts with it, layer over layer, until the evening air found the backs of her thighs and she shivered at being opened to the wood like that — displayed, deliberate. His other hand slid down her spine, learning the terrain at a pace meant to torment: the small of her back, the swell of her arse, the crease where thigh met cheek, and then, slow as sin, between her legs from behind, two fingers parting her where she was soaking and swollen and so ready it was a kind of confession.

"Look at you," he said roughly. "Three years of errands, and this is what you were carrying through my trees."

"Kael—" His fingers slid inside her and her knees nearly went. He caught her weight with the arm at her waist again, held her up and open on the altar stone, and worked her with a hunter's patience — deep, curling strokes against the place that made her shake, his thumb circling her clit in slow, filthy counterpoint, while his mouth moved down her neck biting gently, then less gently, at the tendon, the shoulder, the top of her spine where the cloak fell open. "That's it. Give it to the stones, Red. Give it to the whole wood. Let everything with ears learn who you run for."

"I don't—" she gasped, "I'm not—" and then she was, riding his hand in helpless grinding circles, her forehead down on the cold altar, her cunt clenching around his fingers as the orgasm rolled up from the base of her spine and broke her open with a cry she did not muffle. The mist took it. The trees took it. He held her through it with his teeth in the meat of her shoulder, not hard enough to wound, hard enough to sign.

He was not finished. While she still trembled he turned her around on the stone, sat her on the altar's edge with her skirts rucked to her waist and the red cloak spread under her like a banner on a battlefield, and he went to his knees in the mist between her thighs with a reverence that had nothing of worship's softness in it. This was appetite kneeling, not innocence. His hands pushed her knees wide. His mouth fastened on her.

Wrenna's hands flew to his hair. The sounds she made then she had never heard from herself — not the gasps of her own fingers in the dark, but something lower, wetter, wrecked. He ate her like a man making up for three years of famine, tongue stroking deep and slow and then fast at her clit, lips sealed around her, sucking until her hips were bucking off the stone and only his grip on her thighs kept her from sliding to the ground entirely. When he slid two fingers back inside her and curled them, crooking her toward him, her second climax hit harder than the first; she came with his name torn out of her loud enough to startle something winged out of the pines, and he stayed at her through the whole of it, relentless and tender in the same motion, until she was pushing weakly at his head and begging in a language of half-words.

He rose up her body slowly, kissing her hip, her belly, the underside of one breast through her opened bodice, and his mouth found hers and fed her own taste back to her. She reached down between them with a purpose — found the lacings of his leathers, got them loose, and wrapped her hand around his cock where it strained hot and heavy into her palm. He went utterly still. His jaw locked. The animal discipline of him, holding, was one of the most erotic things she had ever witnessed, and she stroked him slowly, base to crown, learning his shape, using the wetness he'd left on her fingers, watching his eyes come apart.

"Take me in your mouth, then," he said at last, hoarse. "Since you've decided to be thorough about your ruin."

She slid off the altar to her knees in the mist and the pine needles, red cloak pooled around her like a dropped flag, and she took him into her mouth with the same honesty she had brought to running. He was big enough to make her jaw ache and careful enough to let her set the pace, one hand fisted in her hair but never forcing, guiding. She worked him with tongue and hand and suction until his thighs shook, until his breathing broke, until she felt the surge beginning under her tongue — and then, with a restraint that cost him visibly in every muscle, Kael withdrew, stepped back, and stood over her with his chest heaving and his cock wet from her mouth and straining toward her like a compass needle.

"No," he said, before she could protest. "Hear me. What you did just now — what I did — that's the taste. That is not the meal." He hauled her up to her feet, not ungently, and straightened her cloak around her shoulders with hands that shook once before they steadied. "I will not spend myself in the dirt at a shrine like a boy who stole something. When I have you, Wrenna, it will be whole — your bed or mine, your door or mine, and you'll have said the words for it with your eyes open and the lamp lit. Do you understand what I am giving you?"

She understood. It was the leash, and he was handing her the end of it. It made her want him so badly she could have wept.

"Then hear what I'm giving you," she said, and her voice surprised her with its steadiness. She reached into her basket — still upright, the honey unspilled, the mundane world intact — and drew out the length of red ribbon she used to tie the medicine parcels. She held it up between them in the failing light. "Tomorrow it's mine to tie or leave in the drawer. If it's at my throat when I come down the path, Wolf, then the words you're waiting for have been said. All of them. And you had better not be standing there talking about patience."

Something moved across his face that no story had ever recorded on the Wolf — hunger, yes, but underneath it a naked, startled joy, quickly mastered. He took the ends of the ribbon from her fingers and tied it himself, once, loosely, at the base of her throat, knuckles brushing the pulse he had held in his hand. "Then tomorrow," he said, "run slower."

He walked her to the edge of the trees where the good road took over, and no farther; the village lights were coming on below, yellow and innocent, and Tomas Beck was ringing the chapel bell for evening prayer as if the world were still a place where men like him decided what women dreamed. Wrenna went down the hill alone with honey on neither hand nor skirt, her body singing in a register it had never used, the ribbon warm at her throat. She did her mother's errands in her head. She ate her supper. She barred her cottage door out of a habit older than desire and lay in her bed in the dark listening to her own blood.

She did not sleep. Near midnight she rose, in her shift, and did the thing she had in fact already done at the shrine, in the wood, on the path, for three years: she chose.

She took the ribbon down from the nail where she had hung it. She tied it at her throat. And she lifted the bar from her door.

The knock, when it came, was soft. Three slow raps of knuckle on good oak — a sound with all the time in the world inside it, a sound that had walked out of the Blackpine on two legs and crossed her yard without disturbing a single hen. Wrenna stood in the middle of her floor with her heart slamming and her thighs already aching, and through the door, low and amused and famished, came the voice she had been running toward all her life without ever once admitting the direction.

"Little Red," said the Wolf. "Let me in."