[Nell’s POV]
The man fixing Doris's gate hinge is not the man Callum described. I keep circling this thought from the cabin step, knitting in my lap, watching Rhys Adler drive a screw into old wood.
Callum's version was specific—a concerned shake of his head across the dinner table, voice pitched low. Rhys has episodes, Nell. Don't be alone with him. He delivered it the way he delivered all his worst work: gently, wrapped in the costume of a brother burdened by his sibling's dysfunction.
The pack swallowed it whole. I swallowed it whole, because when the man you're afraid of tells you someone else is the dangerous one, you believe him—not out of trust but out of relief that the danger has a different face.
Four days, and the feral wolf Callum constructed hasn't shown up once. Rhys stacked firewood without being asked, sat through Doris's forty-minute monologue about her late husband's fishing, and helped Maren carry crates while she interrogated him until she gave up and asked about the weather.
"You're staring." Sable drops beside me on the step with a mug of tea she didn't offer to share. "You've been staring at the Adler for three days and I want you to know it's extremely noticeable."
"I'm observing." I pull a stitch through and keep my eyes on the yarn. "There's a difference."
"There absolutely is not." She blows across her mug. "He's fixing a gate. It's not a personality test."
"It's the fourth thing he's fixed this week, unprompted." My needles click faster. "Nobody asked him."
"Some people are handy. Serial killers are also handy—Ted Bundy changed tires for strangers." She sips her tea with the serenity of a woman delivering an assassination. "Handiness is not a character reference."
The fire pit sits at the centre of the compound, ringed by stones that hold heat long after the flames die. By the time I find Rhys there that evening, the compound has gone quiet—embers and wind through pine, nothing else.
He's sitting on the ground with his forearms on his knees, watching the coals. I sit on the stone opposite and neither of us speaks for long enough that the silence stops being awkward and becomes a room we're both standing in.
"Can I ask you something?" My fingers find a thread at the hem of my sleeve and pull, winding it around my index finger until the tip goes white.
"You've been working up to something for three days." His eyes don't leave the coals. "Maren told me you watch me from the cabin step—she finds it hilarious."
"Fantastic. My surveillance has a fan club." I tuck the thread back and press my hands flat on my knees. "Why didn't you ever tell anyone what Callum was really like?"
His fingers lace together between his knees and the grip goes tight—knuckles pale, tendons standing out. My breath catches because I know that grip. I've worn it for years, the grip of someone holding down a sound.
"Who would've believed me?" His voice comes out scraped clean. "The whole pack already decided I was the dangerous one. Callum spent twenty years making sure of that."
"The whispers." I say it quietly, my thumb pressing hard into the stone beneath me. "About you being unstable—I heard all of them."
"Those weren't whispers—they were investments." He picks up a stick and turns it between his fingers. "A concerned word to Elder Marsh after dinner. A joke at a gathering about his loner brother. A story about something that never happened, told so many times it grew its own details."
"He told me one of those stories." The admission slips out before I can catch it. "About you and a neighbour's dog. He said you—"
"Lost control and hurt it." He finishes the sentence without flinching. "That dog died of old age in its owner's kitchen. I was twelve and buried it for her because she couldn't dig the hole herself." The stick snaps in his hands. "Callum watched me dig and told Father I'd killed it."
My nails press crescents into my palms. Twelve years old, dirt under his fingernails from a kindness, and his brother turned it into a weapon before the soil settled.
"He broke three of my ribs at fourteen." Same flat delivery, like a weather report about someone else's life. "Cornered me after a gathering. Couldn't breathe for a week."
"What did Harlan do?" My voice comes out steady but my hands are fists inside my sleeves.
"Callum told him I fell from a training wall. Then sat at my bedside with a glass of water and this concerned look—vigil face, like he was the devoted brother keeping watch." The stick is gone, both palms open now, empty. "Father called him thoughtful. Said he was a good brother."
The fire pops and sparks spiral upward. My throat works around something I didn't plan to say, and it comes out anyway—low, aimed at the coals, like I'm confessing to the fire instead of him.
"There's a hole in the bedroom wall. Head-zised, a bit over shoulder-height. He hid it behind a painting of a generic happy family."
Rhys goes still. Both hands wrapped around each other again, eyes on me now—dark, steady, waiting.
"I learned his footsteps on the stairs." My thumb runs across the calluses at my fingertips. "Which rhythm meant shouting, which meant silence, which meant sleep in the kitchen and don't breathe until morning."
"The choreography was the worst part." I keep going because stopping means sitting with it. "Making yourself furniture. Learning which version of invisible kept you safest—too present and you're a target, too absent and he comes looking."
"I'm sorry I didn't see it." His voice drops to something barely above the fire's crackle. "I should have—"
"Nobody saw it." I cut him off because the apology is a door I am not walking through tonight. "He was too good at it. Smiled at dinners, built the perfect surface, and nobody flipped it over to check what was underneath because why would they?"
"What made you leave?" The question comes out careful, placed gently between us, and every nerve ending in my body goes bright and sharp at once.
"I woke up one night and knew it wouldn't stop." Close enough to truth that my voice holds steady and the kitchen knife stays buried in the past under three feet of silence. "That's all. I just knew."
He watches me for a long moment. Then his hand crosses the space between us and covers mine—warm, rough, fingers closing gently, not gripping, not pulling, just there. An offered surface I can push back from whenever I choose.
I don't push back. My hand stays under his and the fire burns low between us, and Ash lets out a single low note somewhere across the compound.
His thumb crosses my knuckles once. The space where Callum's version of this man should live—the feral brother, the monster in the margins—sits empty, and what fills it is a pair of hands that grip the way mine do, holding down a sound that has waited twenty years to be heard.
Behind us, the guest quarters window is dark. On its desk sits a letter addressed to Harlan in steady handwriting—the second lie, or the third—and I don't know yet which number will be the last.