Territory of Teeth

I smelled him before I saw him.

Cedar, gunpowder, and something electric — like the air before a lightning strike. My wolf slammed against my ribs so hard I stumbled on the ridge trail, catching myself on a birch trunk. In six years as Ironridge's chief enforcer, I had never lost my footing. Not once.

Then he stepped out of the tree line on the Ashford side, and my entire world rearranged itself.

No. No, no, no.

"You've got to be kidding me," said Rhys Calloway, Ashford's enforcer, standing twenty feet away with the same horrified expression I was wearing.

The mate bond hit us both like a freight train — I could feel it, a golden thread yanking itself taut between my chest and his, vibrating with a resonance that my wolf recognized instantly and my brain rejected completely.

"This isn't happening," I said.

"Agreed," he said. "This is a border dispute. I'm here to make sure your pack doesn't poach from our eastern hunting grounds. That's it."

"You're on our side of the creek."

"The creek shifted after the spring floods. The border is the old waterline."

"The border is the current waterline. You know that. Your alpha knows that."

We glared at each other across the disputed twelve feet of muddy ground that our packs had been snarling over for three years. The mate bond hummed between us like a phone on vibrate, insistent and deeply inconvenient.

Rhys Calloway was everything I was supposed to hate. Ashford wolves were brash, territorial, and bred for aggression. He was tall — taller than me, which was annoying — with dark eyes and a jaw that looked like it had been designed specifically to clench in disapproval. He was also, according to the bond currently trying to rewire my nervous system, my perfect genetic and spiritual match.

The Moon Goddess had a sick sense of humor.

"We ignore it," I said firmly.

"Obviously."

"It's a biological glitch. Pheromone overlap. It'll fade."

"Absolutely." He crossed his arms. His scent hit me again and my wolf whined. I locked her down. "So. The border."

"The border," I repeated. "Stay on your side."

"I am on my side."

We established our positions fifty feet apart and settled in for the longest patrol shift of our lives.

---

It did not fade.

Three weeks of shared border patrol — mandated by both alphas as a "de-escalation measure" — and the bond was stronger than ever. I learned things about Rhys I didn't want to know. That he hummed old folk songs when he thought no one was listening. That he left pieces of dried elk jerky on the rocks for the ravens. That his wolf was a deep charcoal gray with a silver blaze across the chest, and when he shifted to run the ridge at dawn, he moved like water finding its way downhill.

I hated that I noticed. I hated that my wolf tracked his every movement with the devoted attention of a compass needle pointing north.

He was having the same problem. I could tell by the way he aggressively avoided eye contact, and by the way his scent spiked with something warm and aching every time I got too close during our overlapping patrols.

On the eighteenth day, it rained. Hard. A late-summer storm that turned the disputed creek into a torrent and flooded the patrol trail. I was checking the eastern traps when the hillside gave way — a mudslide that swept me off the ridge and slammed me into a ravine thirty feet below. I felt my ankle snap. Then my ribs. Then the cold.

I shifted instinctively, my wolf's body better equipped to survive the damage, but I couldn't climb. The ravine walls were sheer mud, and the water was rising fast.

Rhys was there in four minutes. I knew because I counted every second through the haze of pain.

He slid down the ravine wall on his belly, shifted mid-fall, and caught me by the scruff before the water could pull me under. His wolf was enormous — bigger than mine, which I would never admit out loud — and he hauled me up the slope with a determination that had nothing to do with inter-pack diplomacy.

He didn't let go until we were under the overhang of a granite shelf, out of the rain. Then he shifted back and so did I, and we sat there, soaked and bleeding, breathing hard, while the bond between us roared like the flooded creek below.

"You're an idiot," he said. His voice was shaking. "You patrol a flood-risk ridge alone in a storm? What kind of enforcer—"

"The kind who doesn't need rescue from an Ashford wolf."

"You literally just needed rescue from an Ashford wolf."

I looked at him. Rain ran down his face. There was mud in his hair and blood on his hands — my blood — and his eyes were wild with something I recognized because I felt it too.