Dale came back twenty minutes later to find her still sitting there, and from his face, she gathered this wasn't normal.

"He say you're hired?" Dale asked.

"He said that, yes."

"Then you're hired." Dale scratched at his jaw like he wanted to say more and thought better of it. "HR'll walk you through paperwork. Sign the NDA carefully. It's longer than the ones I've seen at other franchises."

"How long is longer?"

"Forty pages." He handed her a folder, thick, the Iron Wolves crest embossed on the front. "Welcome to the team, Ms. Cole."

The HR office was small and beige and staffed by a woman named Priya who moved through the paperwork with the brisk efficiency of someone who'd done this a hundred times. Sienna signed where she was told, initialed clauses about confidentiality and "team culture" and something called a "residency requirement during postseason" that she made a mental note to ask about later, and near the bottom of the stack, Priya pulled a single sheet free and frowned at it.

"That's odd," Priya said. "This shouldn't be in your intake packet."

"What is it?"

Priya turned the sheet around. It was a photocopy, old, the edges soft with handling, a black-and-white photograph of a family standing in front of a farmhouse: a man, a woman, two young girls. The taller girl looked maybe eight, dark-haired, solemn. The younger one, maybe four, had her hand raised to the camera like she was waving, and on her raised wrist, faint but visible even in the grainy copy, was a mark.

A crescent inside a circle. The exact same mark that had been on Sienna's own wrist since birth, the one doctors had always called a birthmark and never had a better explanation for.

"Can I keep this?" Sienna's voice came out strange to her own ears.

"It's not supposed to be in there. I'll have to pull it and log it as misfiled." Priya was already reaching for it.

Sienna's hand closed over the photo before she'd decided to move. "Please. I think it might be family. I don't have any pictures of my birth family. If I could just get a copy-"

Priya hesitated, glanced toward the door, then back at Sienna's face, and something there must have looked desperate enough to matter, because she sighed. "I'll copy it for you. But the original goes back in whatever file it came from, and I need you to not mention where you got it. This building has opinions about paperwork getting where it isn't supposed to go."

"I won't say a word."

While Priya ran the copy, Sienna turned the photo over. On the back, in faded pencil, someone had written a single word: Ashgrove, and beneath it, a date, fourteen years old almost to the month.

She didn't know the word. She'd never heard it in her life. But looking at that little girl's raised wrist, at the mark that matched her own down to the angle of the crescent, she felt something she hadn't let herself feel in a long time, not since she was small enough to still ask questions about her parents before she learned that asking only made the silence worse.

Hope, and underneath it, something colder. Fear that she was finally about to get an answer, and that the answer might be worse than not knowing at all.

Priya handed back a fresh copy and took the original, sliding it into a different folder that she then tucked, pointedly, out of sight. "Good luck with the team, Ms. Cole. Killian doesn't sit in on interviews. Whatever you did in there, you must have made an impression."

"I really don't know what I did."

"Well." Priya's smile had an edge Sienna couldn't place. "Watch yourself anyway. Whatever it was."

Sienna found the residential wing that evening, a converted set of apartments attached to the practice facility, the "residency requirement" apparently meaning she'd be living on-site during any home stretch of games, which explained the eye-watering salary a little better. Her new apartment was small but clean, one bedroom, a window that looked out over the parking structure instead of the rink, and she sat on the edge of the unfamiliar bed with the photocopy in her hands, staring at the word on the back until it stopped looking like a word at all.

Ashgrove.

Her phone buzzed. Milo, a text: how'd it go?? did u get it??

She typed back: Got it. Don't worry about the surgery money anymore. I've got it handled.

ur the best sis alive, he wrote, and then, because he was sixteen and constitutionally incapable of leaving well enough alone, did u see any hot hockey players

One, she typed, before she could stop herself, and then deleted it and wrote instead: Focus on your PT exercises. I'll call you tomorrow.

She set the phone down and looked at the photo again. The little girl's raised hand. The crescent mark. The farmhouse behind them, burned into the photo's grain like something already half a ghost.

A knock came at her door, sharp, and she nearly dropped her phone.

"Who is it?"

"Killian Frost." A pause. "I said I'd find you."

She stood, smoothed her shirt down out of habit, and told herself the sudden pulse in her throat was about the day's stress and not about the fact that his voice alone had done something to the air in the room.

She opened the door, and there he was, out of whatever meeting had pulled him away, tie loosened, looking like a man who'd spent the last three hours holding something together with his bare hands.

"You wanted to talk to me about something," she said. "Earlier. Before you got called away."

"I did." He glanced past her into the apartment, then back at her face, and something in his jaw tightened like he was fighting himself over a decision. "Can I come in?"

"That depends what you're planning to say."

"Ms. Cole." His eyes, in the hallway light, looked almost gold. "I'm going to ask you something, and I need you to actually consider it before you decide I'm insane."

Her heart was pounding now, loud enough she was sure he could hear it, which was a strange thought to have, except a small, buried part of her had been having strange thoughts like that all day.

"Ask," she said.

"Have you ever, even once in your life," he said slowly, "felt like you weren't entirely human?"

The photocopy was still in her hand. She didn't answer. She didn't have to. His eyes dropped to it, to the edge of the image visible between her fingers, to the little girl's raised wrist, and whatever color remained in his face drained out of it completely.

"Where," he said, very quietly, "did you get that photograph?"

He didn't wait for her to invite him in a second time. He stepped past her, into the small apartment, and stood in the middle of it like he'd forgotten how his own legs worked, staring at the photocopy in her hand.

"Killian." She used his first name without meaning to, the formality of the interview gone somewhere in the last five minutes. "You're scaring me a little."

"That makes two of us." He dragged a hand through his hair. "May I see it?"

She hesitated, then held it out. He took it carefully, like it might dissolve, and turned it over to the pencil writing on the back. His jaw worked.

"Ashgrove," he read aloud, and something in his voice cracked open around the word, grief wearing the shape of a name.

"You know what that means." It wasn't a question.

"I know exactly what that means." He sat down, hard, on the arm of her secondhand couch, still holding the photo like it weighed more than paper should. "Where did you get this?"

"It fell out of my intake file. HR said it wasn't supposed to be there."

"Your intake file." He laughed, short and humorless. "Of course it is. Someone in this building has been keeping tabs on you longer than today."

"Keeping tabs on me for what? I don't even know what Ashgrove is."

He looked up at her, and for the first time since she'd met him that afternoon, the calculation dropped out of his expression completely, leaving something rawer underneath. "It was a pack. A family. Fourteen years ago, they were slaughtered, every one of them we thought, in a single night. Farmhouse burned to the foundation. I was fifteen. My father took our whole pack out to help fight the fire, for all the good it did." His thumb brushed the edge of the photo, over the little girl's raised hand. "There were supposed to be no survivors."

"Pack," Sienna repeated. "As in wolves."

"As in wolves." His eyes held hers, steady, daring her to laugh, to call security, to do any of the things a sane person would do. "I'm not speaking in metaphor, Sienna. I need you to understand that before we go any further."

She should have laughed. She wanted to, badly, wanted this to be some elaborate hazing ritual for new hires, a hidden camera somewhere, Dale bursting in to explain the joke. Instead she found herself thinking about headaches on full moons, about nights she couldn't sleep and mornings she woke up with dirt on her feet and no memory of leaving the house, about a foster mother who used to lock her bedroom door from the outside once a month and never explained why, just cried when she thought Sienna wasn't watching.

"Say it's true," she said, very carefully. "Say all of that is true. What does it have to do with me?"

He held up the photo, angled it so the girl's raised wrist caught the light. "Do you have a mark like this?"

She didn't answer. She didn't have to. She pulled back her sleeve, slow, and turned her wrist over, and the crescent-in-a-circle sat there on her skin like it always had, the same mark she'd spent twenty-four years being told was just a birthmark, nothing more.

Killian made a sound low in his chest, something between a groan and a growl, and when he looked back up at her his eyes weren't quite brown anymore. They'd gone gold at the edges, bright and unmistakable and utterly inhuman, and every hair on her arms stood up at once.

"What are you," she whispered.

"The same thing you are." He stood, slow, giving her room, hands open at his sides like he was gentling something wild. "Alpha of the Frost Pack. And you, Sienna Cole, or whatever your name actually was before someone hid you in the foster system, are the last surviving daughter of the Ashgrove Pack. Which makes you," his voice roughened, "the single most hunted woman in this entire territory, and you've been walking around with no idea for fourteen years."

Her legs didn't feel steady enough to hold her, so she sat, hard, on the edge of her own coffee table, staring at the man with the gold eyes standing in her rented apartment.

"You're insane," she said, without conviction.

"I wish I were." He crouched in front of her, close enough that she could feel heat coming off him like a furnace, and his voice dropped to something that felt dangerously, unbearably gentle. "I need you to listen to me very carefully, because I'm only going to get to say this once before someone else in this building finds a way to make sure you never hear it. There are people who have spent fourteen years believing the Ashgrove line is extinct. If they find out that isn't true, the man responsible for burning that farmhouse to the ground is going to come and finish the job."

"Why would he wait fourteen years and then just - know? How would anyone know?"

His eyes dropped, briefly, unwillingly, to the pulse point at her throat, and then to her wrist again, like the gesture cost him something. "Because when I shook your hand this afternoon, every wolf in a mile radius could have scented what you are. Sienna. You're not just Ashgrove."

"Then what am I?"

He said the next words like they were being pulled out of him against his will, like some part of him had been fighting to keep them down since the moment she'd walked through the training facility door.

"You're my mate."

The words landed in the small apartment like a stone through glass. Outside, faint and far away, a phone was ringing, someone's TV murmuring through the wall, the ordinary noise of a building full of ordinary lives, and none of it touched the silence between them.

"I have a fiancée," he said, before she could speak, bitterness threading through the words. "Talia Voss. Her father runs the pack that's held the peace treaty with mine for six years, a treaty that ends the second I don't marry her like we agreed. I was engaged to her this morning. I have been for four months." His jaw flexed. "And then you walked into my facility, and every instinct I have told me the woman I'm marrying isn't the one I belong to."

"That's not my problem," Sienna said, even though her voice shook saying it. "I took a physiotherapy job. I didn't sign up to be anyone's mate, or anyone's political crisis, or the reason a treaty falls apart."

"I know." He said it like an apology, like a man already grieving something he hadn't lost yet. "I know, and I wish to every god I don't believe in that I could let you walk away and never think about any of this again."

"Can you?"

His silence was its own answer, long enough that she felt it in her chest before he finally spoke.

"No," he said. "I can't. And that's the part that terrifies me."

Somewhere below them, out past the parking structure window, a car door slammed, too sharp, too deliberate to be nothing, and Killian's head snapped toward the sound like a wire had been cut inside him. He was on his feet before she'd finished processing the noise, moving to the window, going very still in a way that made her stomach drop straight through the floor.

"Killian. What is it?"

"Get away from the window," he said, low, urgent, already reaching for her arm. "Now, Sienna. Someone's here who shouldn't know this address exists."