Callum's blood is spreading across the kitchen tile in a pattern that looks almost deliberate. My hand is still raised, fingers curled around nothing, and the knife handle sticks out of his chest at an angle that seems too casual—like it landed there by accident.
The heat in my belly drains out. What it leaves behind is cold and sharp and impossibly clear.
I drop to my knees beside him. My hands find his neck, pressing where a pulse should be, and my fingers shake so badly I can't tell if the flutter is his heartbeat or my own trembling feeding me a lie.
His eyes are open. Not the way eyes are open when someone is looking at you. Open the way a window is open after the person who left it forgot to come back.
I just killed the Adler pack's golden firstborn. The man whose funeral will fill the pack hall with genuine tears from wolves who never once looked at the dent in the hallway plaster and wondered what made it.
Three years of bruises under long sleeves and careful angles—none of it exists in the version of Callum this pack will mourn. He is dead on the kitchen floor with his mate's fingerprints on the weapon, and the story writes itself without anyone asking me for a single word.
My legs move before the rest of me agrees. I step over him—over the blood, the shattered plates, the butter dish with flowers on the lid—and my hands won't stop shaking. I ball them into fists so tight my nails cut crescents into both palms.
Think. Think. You have minutes, not hours. Someone always comes when Callum makes noise and then goes quiet, and tonight the quiet will last forever.
The coat is on the hook. Cash sewn into the lining, skimmed from grocery money over months by a woman who started planning her rescue the first time her husband put his fist through a wall and told her she was the reason it broke.
The zipper takes three tries because my thumb keeps slipping off the metal. Bedroom. Shoebox under the bed—my ID, a few photographs, nothing worth dying for. I shove them into the coat and stand in the hallway facing the kitchen.
The air smells like copper and something final, and every cell in my legs says no. I force myself through without looking down. The pregnancy test is still on the bathroom sink, two pink lines in an apartment with a dead man, and every nerve in my body screams to go back for it.
I don't. My hands leave red smears on the kitchen towel and I watch the fabric turn brown and think: this is real. This happened. You did this. I drop the towel because if I hold it any longer I will stand here until someone finds me.
The door clicks shut behind me. Quietest sound this apartment has ever made. Hood up, head down, teeth clicking together hard enough that I hear it inside my own skull.
I count blocks like a prayer—one past the bakery, two past the pharmacy, three where the streetlight's been dead for months. At block six my legs quit, mid-stride, and I go down against a brick wall behind a row of darkened shops.
Cold ground, cold air, and I curl over my knees trying to remember what breathing felt like before tonight. Footsteps—fast, close, from the alley mouth. I try to stand and my body refuses, so I dig my shoulders into the brick and wait.
Sable rounds the corner at a dead run and skids to a halt. If it were anyone else—a patrol, a neighbor—I'd be finished. But it's Sable, and she has never once needed a reason to show up.
She looks at my face, the blood on my sleeves, the way I'm trembling. Doesn't ask a single question. Just crouches in front of me. "Which direction?"
"Sable, I can't—" The words start and end in my throat, a sentence I can't finish, because I truly don't know.
"Not what I asked." She holds up one hand. "I don't need the what. I don't need the why. Which direction are we going?"
"Away." The word scrapes out raw. "Just—away." She grabs my arm and hauls me upright. "Can you walk?"
"I can't feel my legs." My voice sounds like it belongs to someone standing very far behind me.
"You don't need to feel them, you need to move them." She hooks my arm over her shoulder and steers us toward the street. "Two blocks east. You're going to fall apart in the passenger seat like a civilized person."
"There's blood on your coat," she says, checking behind us with a quick, sharp glance—and I realize she's been doing it every few steps. "Take it off when we get to the car."
"I know." I croak, because judging from her expression, she knows it's not mine. And she has a damn good guess who it belongs to—and still, she's here.
"Sable." My voice breaks on her name. "He's dead. Callum is dead and I did it and the whole pack is going to—"
"I know." The performance drops. Her voice goes quiet and steady. "I know, Nell. I also know what I saw every time you showed up to the market with your sleeves down in July."
"They'll come for me." A sob escapes my lips and I try to push it down, as far as I can. Not the time, nor the place.
"Then they'll have to get through me, and I am incredibly annoying to get through." She nods toward the end of the block. "There. Still ugly, still running, still the finest stolen vehicle money can buy."
The hatchback sits under a dead streetlight. She folds me into the passenger seat, drops the blanket in my lap. I pull my knees up while she starts the engine.
Headlights stay off until we clear the residential blocks. Apartments thin into houses, houses into hedgerows, hedgerows into dark fields toward a horizon I can't see.
"Here's what's going to happen." Her eyes don't leave the road. "We drive. You breathe. When you're ready, you tell me what we're working with."
"You don't even know what happened." I want to laugh, but it sounds so wet and miserable that I stop immediately.
"Don't need to. You're alive and you're in my car." She checks the mirrors. "Everything else is details."
"They won't find us tonight." She says it like she's stating the weather. "Tonight we drive. Tomorrow we figure out where. The night after that, we figure out how to stay. Three-step plan. I'm practically a strategist."
"And yet here I am, the only one between us with a car and a sense of direction." She squeezes my knee once, brief and firm. "We're going to be okay, Nell. I don't know how, but we are."
My hand finds my stomach. It's the only part of me that still holds warmth—a low hum beneath my pulse, patient and constant, like a second heartbeat that doesn't care about the wreckage above it. A secret I haven't told Sable. A secret that changes everything about what running means.
Behind us, the Adler pack sleeps, not yet knowing that their golden son's quiet wife grew teeth in the night. Ahead, the territory line and something I haven't had in three years. And beneath my palm—the reason I can never, ever stop.