The first time Jaxon showed up at the agency, I was on the phone with a client.

Freya knocked twice on my office door—our signal—and mouthed his name through the glass. I held up one finger. Finished the call. Saved the file. Then I walked to the front room where she was standing with her arms crossed, blocking the doorway like a very polite wall.

Jaxon was on the other side of the threshold. He looked like he hadn't slept. Good.

He was holding flowers. A massive bouquet, the kind you see in hotel lobbies. Pale pink peonies and white roses, wrapped in cream paper with a silk ribbon.

"Gianna," he said. Just my name. Like it was a whole sentence.

I looked at Freya. She looked back at me, one eyebrow raised a fraction of an inch. *Your call.*

"You can leave those with Freya," I said. "I have a meeting in ten minutes."

"I just want five—"

"You don't have five." My voice came out flat. Not angry. Not hurt. Just factual, like I was reading him a train schedule. "You can leave the flowers or you can leave. That's it."

He set the bouquet on the reception desk. His hand lingered on the paper for a second, like he was going to say something else. Then he turned and walked out.

Freya waited until the elevator doors closed. Then she picked up the bouquet, carried it to the window, and studied it in the light.

"These are Raven's favorites," she said.

I blinked. "What?"

"Peonies and white roses. She posted about them last spring. Some charity gala. She said they were her favorite flowers and tagged the florist." Freya set the bouquet down and pulled out her phone. Scrolled for ten seconds. Turned the screen toward me.

There it was. Raven in a red dress, holding an identical arrangement, smiling at the camera. The caption: *My favorite blooms for my favorite night.*

I stared at the photo. Then at the flowers on the desk. Then at Freya.

"He Googled 'flowers for apology,'" I said slowly. "And he picked hers."

Freya's mouth tightened. "Yeah."

I didn't say anything else. I walked back to my office and closed the door and sat at my desk and pressed my fingertips to the scar on my neck until the urge to scream passed.

***

The next morning, there were different flowers outside the agency door. Yellow tulips and lavender. My actual favorites. The ones I used to grow in pots on the Ironveil pack house balcony, back when I thought making a home there mattered.

Freya brought them inside and set them on my desk without a word.

I looked at them for a long time. Then I looked at her.

"He Googled it," I said.

"Yep."

"He didn't know."

She sat down across from me. "No. He didn't."

I touched one of the tulip petals. Soft. Perfect. Bought with the careful research of a man studying a stranger.

Five years. Five years of morning coffee and shared meals and a mark on my neck that was supposed to mean he knew me down to my bones. And he had to Google my favorite flower after I left.

I pushed the vase to the corner of my desk and opened my laptop.

***

The letters started arriving on day four.

Long ones. Handwritten on thick paper, delivered in cream envelopes with my name in his neat, slanted script. Freya brought them to me one at a time, and I read them because I needed to know if he was escalating into something dangerous.

He wasn't. He was worse.

The first letter referenced a dinner we'd had at some Italian place downtown. He described the candlelight, the wine, the way I'd laughed at something the waiter said. He wrote about it like it was sacred. Like he'd been carrying it with him all this time.

I read it twice. Then I called Freya.

"Do you remember me ever going to an Italian restaurant downtown with Jaxon?"

A pause. "No. But I remember Raven posting about one. Like two years ago. She said Jaxon took her after some pack emergency and it was the best carbonara she'd ever had."

I set the letter down. Picked it up. Read it again.

He wasn't lying. That was the thing. He genuinely remembered this dinner as ours. Somewhere in his head, the file marked *Gianna* and the file marked *Raven* had merged into one blurry archive, and he was pulling from both without noticing the seams.

The second letter mentioned a song. *Our song,* he called it. I had never heard it in my life.

The third letter described an evening on the Ironveil balcony—the stars, the silence, the way I'd leaned into him and said I felt safe. I had no memory of it. None. But I knew, with the cold certainty of someone who has learned to read between lines, that Raven had probably said those exact words to him at some point, and he had filed them under my name.

I folded the last letter in half. Then in half again. I put it in the bottom drawer of my desk and I did not open that drawer again.

***

My birthday fell on a Tuesday.

Freya made pancakes. We ate them on her couch and watched some terrible reality show and didn't talk about the fact that I was turning twenty-seven in a city four hours from the pack I'd called home for five years.

At noon, Freya's phone buzzed. She looked at the screen. Then at me.

"There's something outside your building."

"What kind of something?"

"The kind you're going to want to see for yourself."

We walked the six blocks to my apartment. I saw it from half a block away.

A wolf-dog hybrid. Massive. Easily a hundred and twenty pounds, all muscle and fur and teeth. It was tied to the railing outside my building, and it was *snarling*—lips pulled back, teeth bared, a low continuous growl rolling out of its chest.

There was a man holding the leash. Older. Uncomfortable. He looked up when we got close.

"You Gianna Morrison?"

"Who's asking?"

"I'm supposed to deliver this to you. Paid in full. Comes with papers, vet records, the whole deal. Name's Brutus." He held out a folder. "Happy birthday."

I looked at the animal. It looked back at me. Its eyes were pale, almost white. Its growl got louder.

And something inside me *cracked*.

Not my heart. Lower. Deeper. In the place where my wolf had been silent my entire life.

My hands started shaking. I couldn't stop them. The scars on my arms—the ones from the feral dog when I was seven, the ones I usually forgot about—started to burn. Not phantom pain. Real pain, sharp and hot, like the teeth were in me again.

I took a step back. The wolf-dog lunged. The man yanked the leash. It kept snarling.

And my wolf—my wolf that had never spoken, never moved, never *existed*—surged up through my chest like a fist punching through ice. I felt it in my ribs. In my throat. A snarl that wasn't mine, protective and sharp and *furious*, vibrating through my bones.

I stood there on the sidewalk, shaking, staring at the snarling animal Jaxon had gift-wrapped for my birthday, and I understood.

He had never seen me. Not once. Not in five years. He had memorized Raven's breed preferences—she'd posted about wanting a wolf-dog hybrid last summer, I remembered now, some off-hand comment about how majestic they were—and he had reached for that memory when he wanted to comfort his mate.

He didn't know about the mauling. He didn't know about the scars. He didn't know that I couldn't be in the same room as a large dog without my pulse spiking and my vision narrowing and every instinct I had screaming *run*.

Because he had never asked.

I turned around. Walked back toward Freya's apartment. My legs were steady. My hands had stopped shaking. Behind me, I heard Freya's voice, calm and professional.

"I'm calling animal control. You can tell whoever paid you that the recipient declined the gift."

I didn't look back.

I walked six blocks in the cold and I climbed the stairs to Freya's apartment and I sat down on her couch and I pressed my fingertips to the scar on my neck.

It didn't hurt. It didn't ache. It didn't feel like anything at all.

And somewhere deep under my ribs, my wolf was still growling.