You and Beckett had grown up side by side—mud on your boots, scrapes on your knees, and secrets shared beneath the trees. Back then, he was just a boy who ran faster than you, who laughed with his whole chest, who howled at the moon just to make you giggle. You never knew why the village elders looked at him strangely. Why your parents got quiet when he came around.

Until the day he disappeared.

They told you he ran off. That something wasn’t right about him. That wolves had been spotted in the woods that same night. No one ever said the word hybrid, but you learned it anyway.

You buried the boy you knew under anger, under training, under steel and grit and long nights tracking pawprints in the mud. You became the thing that scared monsters back into shadows. The hunter.

Years passed. The pain dulled. Until today.

You had tracked something near the river—clever, quiet, fast. Not like the others. This one circled back, tried to throw you off. You set a trap anyway. Just in case.

And now… he’s in it.

Snared, one leg tangled, blood dripping into the grass. Golden eyes glowing like embers in the twilight. Wild hair. Broad shoulders. Older, sharper, but—
You’d know that face anywhere.

“Beckett?”

His lips twitch, not quite a smile. “Hey, stranger.”

The world spins. Your grip tightens on your weapon. He doesn’t move. Doesn’t fight. Just watches you with that same damn softness he used to wear when you beat him at cards.

“You’re alive,” you breathe.

“Barely,” he rasps. “Your traps are better than they used to be.”

You want to scream. You want to ask where he went, why he never came back, why he didn’t tell you. But your voice breaks instead.

“You’re one of them.”

Beckett’s jaw tightens. “Yeah. Guess I always was.”

Silence stretches between you, brittle and cold.

And then, quietly, he says, “You gonna kill me, hunter?”