Gabriel Shepherd washed the blood off his hands in the sink, watching the red-stained water swirl down the drain. Same as always. Same hollow numbness, same practiced indifference. He was a man with nothing to live for, which made him very good at his job. He didn’t think about whose blood it was anymore. That was probably not a healthy sign, but healthy had stopped being a priority somewhere around year three.
His cell phone vibrated on the counter. He dried his hands with deliberate care before answering. “Hey Mom.” He kept his voice easy, light — the voice he saved for her. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just wrapping up… I’ll be home late tomorrow. How’s Dad? Ryan?” He listened, and something in his chest loosened slightly at the sound of her voice rattling on about nothing important. “Great. See you then. Love you too.” He pocketed the phone and turned back to the mirror.
He looked like hell. Hollow eyes, two days of stubble, the kind of tired that sleep didn’t fix. Twenty-eight years old and he looked a decade past it. He stared at his reflection a moment longer than necessary, then looked away. There was nothing there worth studying.
He turned on the TV — not to watch, just for the noise — and dropped onto the bed. His muscles ached, his stomach was empty, and he couldn’t summon the will to do anything about either. He lay still and let his mind drift to his mother’s face. Her laughing brown eyes. The worry she tried to hide and never quite managed. It made him feel guilty, which was at least something to feel. Guilt meant he still cared about something. He held onto that.
His father was harder. His father looked at him with disappointment so familiar it had its own specific weight. “Gabe,” he’d said, more times than either of them could count, “just accept it and move on. Take up your responsibilities. I’m not going to live forever.” Gabriel never argued. There was nothing to argue. His father wasn’t wrong — he just didn’t understand that knowing the right thing and being able to do it were two entirely different problems.
And this past year had made it worse.
Ryan had come of age and found his mate within a month. A month. Chrissy was warm and funny and exactly right for his little brother, and Gabriel genuinely, desperately wanted to be happy for them. He was happy for them. It was just that watching them together — so wrapped up in each other, so complete, so utterly sure — left a specific kind of ache behind his sternum that didn’t go away when he stopped looking.
He was still alone.
Most wolves found their mates shortly after coming of age. For some it took longer. And for a rare few — it seemed the Goddess simply forgot. Gabriel had spent years searching. He’d visited every pack his work took him through, made excuses to travel further and wider, told himself each time that maybe this would be it. It never was. The emptiness had settled into something chronic, like a wound that wouldn’t close. His friends told him to let it go. Find someone, anyone, and build something out of what was available. He understood the logic. He couldn’t do it. He’d tried, once or twice, and it had felt like lying — to the woman, and to himself. He needed the one who would make the world make sense. He’d stopped believing she existed. Most days, he’d stopped believing a lot of things.
He closed his eyes and let exhaustion pull him under.
He was in a forest he didn’t recognize. Twilight. The air cool and still, the light bleeding out through the canopy above him. He stood motionless and breathed in — and caught it. Faint. Almost not there at all. Something sweet and clean, like lilacs after rain. Every hair on his arms rose at once. His wolf, usually silent and sullen these days, came suddenly, sharply awake.
He moved before he decided to, pushing through the undergrowth, chasing the scent as it thickened and faded and thickened again. Could it be? The thought was almost too dangerous to finish. Could it actually be her?
“Hello?” His voice came out rougher than he intended. “Where are you? Tell me your name.”
From somewhere far off — far enough that he couldn’t be sure he’d heard it at all — came the sound of someone crying. A girl, weeping softly in the dark, the sound fragile and lost. He pushed harder, branches catching at his arms, the scent pulling him forward. Then the wind shifted, and the sound was gone, and the scent was gone, and he was standing alone in a silent forest with nothing to follow and no way to know if any of it had been real.
He woke up hard, heart slamming against his ribs.
He lay completely still and stared at the ceiling. In eight years of searching, he had never once dreamed of her. Not once. He forced his breathing to slow and cast his senses inward, trying to identify what felt different — because something did. Something so subtle he might have imagined it. A faint pressure behind his sternum. A thread, almost weightless, pulling in a direction he couldn’t name.
He didn’t move for a long time. Outside, a car passed on the street below. The TV murmured something meaningless. The world went on exactly as it always had.
But something had changed. He could feel it.
He was almost afraid to hope.
