She didn't sleep well that night, which she blamed on the new apartment, a studio above a laundromat that hummed until eleven and started again at five, and not at all on the gold flash she kept replaying every time she closed her eyes.

By her second morning, she'd built herself a story that made sense. Colored contacts. A trick of fluorescent light bouncing off wet eyes. Stress hallucination, hers, not his, brought on by hearing her father's name out of a stranger's mouth for the first time in years. Any of those was more reasonable than the alternative, so she picked the contacts theory and held onto it like a life raft.

The locker room was louder that morning, actual music playing, actual trash talk, and she told herself that was proof she'd imagined the tension the day before too. New job nerves. That was all.

"You survived the owner," said a voice at her elbow. She turned to find a woman about her own age, dark hair scraped into a bun, wearing a lanyard that read TEAM PR in block letters. "I'm Iris. I do communications, which mostly means I keep reporters away from things they shouldn't see."

"Marlowe. Athletic trainer."

"I know who you are." Iris's smile was friendly, but her eyes did the same flicker Rhys's had, the specific attention of someone deciding how much to say. "Simon Hale's kid, right? He used to interview me for quotes back when I was an intern here."

"You knew my dad?"

"Everybody who's been here more than five years knew your dad." Iris said it lightly, but there was a weight underneath it, the careful weight of someone picking each word. "He was good at his job. Too good, some people thought."

"What does that mean?"

Iris glanced toward the door, toward the hallway Marlowe had wandered into yesterday, and her smile went a little brittle. "Nothing. Bad joke. Look, I've got a scrum in ten, but if you want the real tour sometime, not the HR one, find me. This building's got history nobody puts on the plaque."

She was gone before Marlowe could ask what she meant by that, which seemed to be the house style around here: say something loaded, then vanish before the follow-up question landed.

Marlowe spent the morning taping ankles and telling herself she wasn't going to go looking for that hallway again. She lasted until lunch.

The keypad door was unlocked this time, propped open a few inches by someone's careless equipment bag left half in the doorway, and the cold air she'd felt yesterday rolled out stronger now, carrying a mineral smell underneath it, like a cave, like wet stone.

She should have walked past it. She thought about her father's name coming up more than it should have and pushed the door open instead.

The stairwell beyond it was concrete, unfinished, lit by bare bulbs strung along one wall, and it went down farther than the arena's foundation should have allowed. She counted turns instead of steps, telling herself she'd go one more flight and then stop, one more flight, one more, until she came out into a space that made her stop counting altogether.

It looked like a training facility built for something other than hockey. Padded walls scored with claw marks too deep for any glove. A circular room with a domed skylight cut straight up through solid concrete, currently shuttered, that had to be for moonlight, there was no other reason to build it that way. And along one wall, a row of steel doors like bank vaults, each one stamped with a name.

CALLAHAN, W.

She was still staring at that name, Wes Callahan, the brother, when she heard the growl.

It came from behind her, low and layered, more than one throat, and when she spun around there were two men in the doorway she'd come through, except they weren't standing quite like men anymore, shoulders hunched wrong, hands curling into something that wasn't hands, eyes gone the same molten gold she'd seen in Rhys's the day before, except these didn't blink back to normal.

"You shouldn't be down here," one of them said, and his voice came out wrong too, gravel dragged through a throat that wasn't built for human words anymore.

Marlowe backed up until the steel door at her spine stopped her, heart slamming so hard she could feel it in her teeth, and every rational explanation she'd built for herself over the last twenty-four hours collapsed at once, contacts and fluorescent lights and stress hallucinations, gone, because there was nothing rational about what was standing eight feet away from her showing teeth that had definitely not been that long a minute ago.

The nearer one took a step forward. The steel door behind her rattled, some automated lock system engaging with a heavy clunk that she felt more than heard, sealing her into the room with both of them, and the last thing she registered before her vision started to gray out at the edges was that the lights along the domed ceiling had started to pulse, slow and rhythmic, like the whole room was breathing.

She didn't faint, which she would be proud of later, but she came close enough that her knees buckled and the only thing that kept her upright was the steel door digging into her spine.

"Stand down."

The voice cracked through the room like a physical thing, and both wolves, because that was what they were, there was no other word for eyes like that and hands like that, dropped their heads and their shoulders in the same instant, some instinct older than choice folding them in half.

Rhys stood in the doorway they'd come through, and she understood in one glance why the room had reacted to him the way it had. He wasn't shifted, not the way they were, but something about him filled the space differently, heavier, like gravity worked harder around him.

"She's Hale's daughter," one of the wolves said, human-voiced again now, apologetic. "She wandered down, we didn't know how much she'd already seen-"

"Enough," Rhys said, and it wasn't loud, but it landed like a slammed door. "Both of you, out. We'll talk later."

They went without another word, folding past him into the stairwell, and then it was just the two of them in a room with claw-scored walls and a domed skylight built for the moon, and Marlowe's legs finally gave out entirely. She slid down the steel door until she was sitting on cold concrete, and she was distantly aware that she should probably be more afraid than she was, except mostly what she felt was a strange, furious clarity, like a lens finally clicking into focus.

"You're wolves," she said. "All of you. The whole team."

Rhys crossed the room slowly, the way you'd approach something you didn't want to startle, and crouched down so they were closer to eye level. This close, she could see his eyes weren't fully human right now either, banked gold at the center, controlled but present.

"Yes," he said.

No hedging, no gaslighting her about what she'd seen, and something in her chest loosened slightly at that, the relief of not being told she'd imagined it. "The whole roster?"

"Most of it. Some are human, brought in for skill we can't fake. But the core of this franchise has been wolves for four generations." He said it like a fact he'd recited before, tired around the edges. "This building was built for us before it was built for hockey. The ice came second."

"And my father knew that."

Something shifted in his face, guarded again. "Your father found the edge of it. I don't know how much more."

"And that's why he's dead." She hadn't meant to say it that flatly, but once it was out she couldn't take it back, and she watched it land on him like a physical blow.

"I don't know that," Rhys said, low. "I've spent eight years not knowing that, one way or the other, and I'd like to keep it that way, because the alternative is that this pack killed a good man for getting too close to the truth, and I have to look my brother in the eye every day already knowing what this place has cost him."

"Wes." The name on the vault door. "What happened to him?"

Rhys's jaw worked once. "Not tonight," he said, and there was something almost pleading under the flat authority of it. "You've had enough for one night. Let me get you out of here before the rest of the pack finishes their circuit, and we'll talk. Properly. Not in a room built for containment."

He held out a hand to help her up, and she took it before she could think better of it, and his skin was too warm, fever warm, the way it had been yesterday, except now she understood why.

He walked her out through a different stairwell, one that came up inside a maintenance closet off the main concourse instead of the tunnel she'd come down through, and he didn't let go of her hand until they were standing under ordinary fluorescent light with ordinary human noise drifting in from the concourse beyond, popcorn machines and cleaning crews, the whole mundane world still turning like nothing had happened.

"You can't tell anyone," he said, and for the first time since she'd met him there was something almost desperate in it. "Not because I don't trust you. Because if the Council decides you're a liability instead of an accident, there's nothing I can do to stop what happens next."

"The Council."

"Later," he said again, and this time it sounded like a promise instead of a dodge. "Go home. Lock your door. I'll have someone drive by tonight, not to watch you, to keep anyone else from getting the idea."

She should have argued. She should have demanded answers right there in the concourse, should have marched straight to her car and never come back, should have done a dozen things that weren't standing in a hallway memorizing the exact shade of gold banked in a stranger's eyes and feeling, underneath all the fear, something that felt uncomfortably close to being drawn toward it instead of away.

She went home. She locked her door.

At eleven that night, a folded piece of paper slid under it, no sound of footsteps before or after, like whoever left it had simply appeared and vanished.

She unfolded it with shaking hands.

Leave Blackwood Harbor before the next full moon. This is the only warning you get.

There was no signature. She didn't need one to know it hadn't come from Rhys Callahan, and that whatever protection he thought he could offer her, somebody else in this town had already decided she was already too far in to walk away clean.