The morning after Rhett left, the silence screamed louder than the night before.
Ava didn't sleep. Couldn't.
The weight of his words pressed against her chest like stone.
She died screaming.
Those three words looped in her head like a broken record, skipping over her heartbeat and scratching the edges of her sanity.
She stepped outside the cabin barefoot, the cold earth grounding her.
The forest was still.
Too still.
Like it was holding its breath.
She could feel something strange pulling at her skin — like a soft current beneath the surface. The mark hadn't stopped pulsing since he walked away.
It wasn't pain anymore.
It was something worse.
Hunger.
Her fingertips brushed over the spot on her shoulder, and she froze.
It was glowing again. Not faint like before. Brighter. Deeper. Spreading in thin, silver lines up her neck.
"No," she whispered. "No, no, no."
She stumbled back inside and grabbed the cracked mirror by the wall.
It showed what she didn't want to see.
The girl looking back wasn't fully human anymore.
Her pupils were too sharp. Her skin, paler. And the mark had begun to shape itself into something more than a symbol.
It looked like a wolf.
A silver one. With eyes.
Watching her.
---
She stepped away from the mirror, hands shaking.
"I'm not her," she said to herself. "I'm not the one you lost. I'm me."
But the forest didn't answer. Only the wind did — whispering through the trees like it knew her name before she ever spoke it.
Then she heard it.
A sound that didn't belong.
A branch cracking beneath a foot.
Ava's head snapped toward the window.
Movement.
There was someone in the woods.
Not Rhett.
She knew his presence now — it wrapped around her like smoke.
This one was different.
Colder.
And it was watching her, just like the mark.
---
She backed away slowly, eyes still on the tree line.
The forest whispered again.
But this time… it spoke in a voice that wasn't hers.
> "Return what doesn't belong to you."
She froze.
"Who's there?"
No answer.
Just the wind. And the echo of her name fading into the trees.