[Rhys’ POV]
The blue scarf sits across my knees. The green one is in my coat pocket, folded along the same creases it's held for three years. Two pieces of wool from the same hands, separated by everything that happened between them.
Through the window, the compound settles into its evening rhythm—cabin lights clicking on, Doris shuffling toward the elder hall, the security changing shifts. I've memorized the pattern without meaning to. My father's training doesn't ask permission—it reads terrain the way other men breathe.
I could draw Blackvale's blind spots in my sleep. The gap between the storage barn and the elder hall where the sight lines don't cross. The twenty-minute window when the western path goes unmonitored during the evening meal.
The creek. Where the rocks create a natural funnel toward the faster current, and children play within arm's reach of adults who trust the shallow bank. Where two boys crawl toward the water the way their mother moves toward anything that might hurt her—without checking, without hesitating.
I noticed it on my second day. Stood at the bank, read the current, clocked the distance between the rocks and the nearest adult. My mind ran the scenario the way it runs every scenario—clinically, automatically, the way a knife finds its edge on stone.
Not a plan. Never a plan. Just the cold arithmetic of what would be easy.
Then it happened for real. My body was chest-deep in freezing water before my brain caught up—two boys screaming against my ribs, the current trying to rip them free, my shoulder splitting open on a rock I could have pointed to blindfolded.
The distance between the man who imagined that moment and the man who prevented it fits inside a single breath. My hands should be steady—they carried my brother's weight at fourteen without trembling. They are not steady now, and the blue wool shakes with them.
A knock. I fold the scarf beneath the pillow before the door opens—a gesture so absurd I'd laugh if my jaw could unclench.
Maren leans against the frame with a plate balanced in one hand. "Doris sent food. She's convinced you'll die of your wound overnight and wants your last meal to be adequate."
"Six stitches." I take the plate because refusing Doris is a war nobody in this compound has won, or so I’m told. "I've had worse from the whittling knife."
"That's what I told her. She said whittling knives don't earn scarves from pretty women, so clearly your shoulder knew what it was doing." She watches me as if she hasn't decided whether this is dinner or reconnaissance. "How is it?"
"Functional." I set the plate on the desk beside stationery I haven't touched. "Thank Doris for me."
"Thank her yourself—she'll be at your door by dawn with an ointment and strong opinions about your protein intake." She doesn't leave. Her eyes scan the room the way they scan supply ledgers—counting everything, trusting nothing.
"Nell stopped by earlier." Maren keeps her voice light. The lightness is a technique. "I saw her leave."
"She brought a scarf. For the shoulder." I give her exactly what she already knows and nothing past it.
"That's a generous thank-you for a man who's been here two weeks." Her head tilts, slow, deliberate. "Most people get a handshake."
"Most people didn't pull her children from a river." I hold her gaze and let the silence decide whether she pushes or lets it rest.
"Fair point." She taps the doorframe once. "Though I'd argue most people also don't hide handmade gifts under their pillow when someone knocks."
My jaw tightens. She saw. Of course she saw—Maren sees everything short of her own blind spots, and I'm not convinced she has those either.
"Eat the food, Rhys." She straightens off the frame, mouth twitching at one corner. "Whatever you're turning over at ten o'clock—stop. It'll still be there in the morning."
The door closes. The plate goes cold.
Father’s letter sits in my coat—delivered this morning by a pack’s postman who didn't know what he carried. I break the fold again, though I've read it enough to recite from memory. The handwriting hasn't changed since I was a boy—precise, controlled, each stroke a small performance of authority.
Produce results. A fortnight. Or I handle retrieval myself.
Retrieval. The word he uses for property, for resources—things that belong to the Adler bloodline the way furniture belongs to a room. His grandchildren reduced to inventory by a man who has never learned their names.
I pull stationery forward and uncap the pen. The first lie I wrote him came easier than breathing—a sighting in the western hills, vague enough to be plausible, precise enough to send scouts in the wrong direction.
The second took longer. The third required a drink I didn't finish.
This is the fourth.
Father—a reliable sighting near Greymoor, east of the border markets. A woman matching her description purchased supplies at a trader's stall two days past. I am moving to intercept.
A town that exists. A sighting that doesn't.
Two hundred miles from the compound where the woman I was sent to destroy knits scarves for the man sent to destroy her. Neither fact has reached her yet, and the gap between what she knows and what is true grows wider with every letter I seal.
I sign the letter and seal it. Set it beside the cooling plate, the coat where the green scarf presses against the envelope—her scent threaded through wool and cedar, fading but present, the way old certainties fade but refuse to fully disappear.
She was a ghost in the Adler house. I watched it happen—the voice shrinking, the posture folding, the woman turning herself into furniture so Callum's fists found the wall instead. Three years of vanishing, and the pack called it grace.
The woman who handed me blue wool tonight is not that ghost. She finishes sentences now, holds eye contact long enough to pin a man in place.
She laughed at something Sable said, and the sound crossed the yard and arrived somewhere behind my ribs where it had no business landing.
This is still the mission. The lies buy time, and time buys options.
My thumb crosses the blue stitches. Two scarves—one kept in secret for three years, one given openly because she decided I was worth the work.
The first I hid from my brother so he wouldn't punish her for the kindness. The second she placed in my hands while holding my gaze, and the difference between those moments contains something I have no category for.
My father's sealed letter sits on the desk. The fourth lie, pointed south while I sit north. Each one costs more than the last, because the currency isn't ink—it's the distance between who he built me to be and whoever is sitting in this chair holding her stitches.
Through the window, Nell's cabin light burns steady. Ash lies across her threshold—grey fur, amber eyes, aimed at my door with the patience of a creature that has already reached its verdict.
Between us, sixty paces of dark ground, two sleeping boys, and a woman who thanked me tonight for saving the children I spent my second morning here calculating how to lose.
My hands won't stop shaking.