Indigo Solmyr has spent her entire life standing between teeth and fear.

Not because she’s fearless. She isn’t.

Fear is natural in Solmyr. Wolves tear into deer flesh. Coyotes drag fawns from dens. Mountain lions leave blood in the snow and bones beneath pine roots. Predator and prey — that is the order of the Wilds. The balance. The ugly little truth every child in the clan is raised on before they’re even old enough to walk steadily.

Her father taught her that truth early.

Her mother ignored it entirely.

Indigo still remembers the winter you were found. Half-dead thing curled beneath frostbitten brush at the edge of Solmyr territory, all ribs and fur and snapping teeth. Too young to survive alone. Too young to understand why you’d been abandoned in the first place.

The council wanted you gone immediately.

Of course they did.

A wolf pup grows into a wolf eventually.

But her mother had looked at you — trembling, starving, terrified — and saw a child before she saw a predator. That was always her fatal flaw. Mercy. It leaked out of her like blood from an open wound.

And Indigo… Indigo inherited it.

So while the rest of the clan looked at your teeth, Indigo learned the difference between your growls. Learned how you slept curled tightly against walls like you expected to be attacked at any moment. Learned how loneliness looked stretched across another living creature.

One day you were simply there. In her home. In her life. Sleeping tangled beside her during storms because thunder made you restless. Following her through the woods with narrowed eyes while pretending you weren’t doing exactly that.

And somewhere along the way, Indigo stopped understanding why everyone feared you so much.

Maybe because she’d never once feared you herself.

Not even now.

Not even with blood dripping from your hands.

The lantern outside your den sways softly in the mountain wind, throwing fractured gold across the snow while Indigo paces holes into the frozen earth. Arms crossed tightly. Jaw clenched hard enough to ache.

You were supposed to return hours ago.

The hunters came back before sunset—exhausted and shaken. But you hadn’t returned with them.

No one would tell Indigo anything directly, but she heard enough.

The coyotes fought harder than expected.

Someone got separated.

The wolf went after them.

Of course you did.

Of course you ran headfirst into danger without thinking about what it would do to the people waiting for you afterward.

The sound of approaching footsteps snaps her attention upward immediately.

Then she sees you.

Blood first.

There’s so much of it staining your hands. The scent hits her a second later.

Not yours.

Relief crashes into her so violently it almost makes her knees weak.

“You went without permission again,” Indigo snaps before she can stop herself. But the anger lands unevenly with something far uglier beneath it. Fear. “Do you have any idea what they’re saying about you right now?”

You look exhausted.

Not physically—though you clearly are that too—but something deeper than exhaustion. Something hollowed-out. Like you left pieces of yourself out there near the river with the dead.

And Indigo hates it immediately.

Her anger dissolves almost as quickly as it came.

“What happened?” she asks softer this time, already moving toward you before her pride can stop her. Her hands close around yours despite the blood coating them. “Where are the others?”

The realization settles heavy between her ribs while her eyes trace every injury she can find — the torn skin near your side, claw marks across your shoulder.

Indigo feels sick looking at it.

“You’re unbelievable,” she mutters, though the words come out far weaker than intended. Fond in the most miserable way possible. “What if something happened to you?”

The thought alone makes her stomach turn.

Because the truth is horrifyingly simple: Indigo cannot imagine a life where you don’t come back to her.

“We need to get you to my mother,” she says after a moment. “Those cuts need stitching before they get infected.”