Prologue:Before

The sea had darkened to an ominous shade of slate, its surface restless beneath the December wind's unruly gust.From my perch on the pier,I could see the waves stretching endlessly, roiling turquoise into shadowy burgundy, their whitecaps dissolving into an ethereal mist . Salt saturated the air, thick and clinging, weaving itself into my hair, my skin, the very fabric of my being. Beneath it all, the wolf stirred, a quiet,always ceaseless pulse, cold and tempestuous like the sea's retreat as I watched it.

This pier had become my sanctuary. Here, no one pried, no voices reached me save the wind's whisper and murmur of the waves. Yet tonight, the solitude felt different—weighted, almost feral. It pressed against me like a predator circling its prey, reminding me that even peace can carry its own kind of teeth. This wasn't the soft loneliness of a quiet evening. This was a sharper beast, the kind of isolation that wraps itself around your bones and burrows deep. Not fleeting—just there. It unravels you,one piece at a time.

Somewhere in the near distance, a gull shrieked ,its cry drifted through the fog and lingered just long enough to break the quiet. The tide was going out, retreating with a reluctant hiss, its departure laying bare a shore strewn with broken shells and jagged fragments of driftwood—bits of detritus left behind. It felt metaphorical in the way everything did these days, laden with meaning I couldn't seem to shrug off.

I closed my eyes and let the wind have its way, its fingers cold and insistent as it tangled in my hair. It brought with it the familiar, feral scent of the wolf within—a presence I could neither escape nor fully embrace. Helsbruck, with its quaint shopfronts and relentlessly cheery good mornings,was meant to tame me, to stifle the wild thing clawing beneath my skin. But even here,on this pier with its rusting rails and uneven planks that creaked underfoot. It offered only the faintest echo of freedom, a ghost of wilderness too fragile to satisfy.

It wasn't the kind of place you ended up by choice. It was the kind of place you fled to when you had nowhere else to go.

I hadn't seen my family in months. They had returned to the Lunidors, abandoning me with a cool efficiency that still scraped raw against my chest. No tender goodbyes, no futile gestures of concern—just their swift retreat, like a pack shedding its weakest link,leaving me to sift through the remains of our collective grief.

Thinking of them made my breath catch, not in sorrow, but in something sharper, more corrosive. Bitterness coiled in my throat, acrid and inescapable, gnawing at the edges of what little I had left. It was the kind of ache that lingered, slow and insidious, devouring piece by piece until my wolf bristled inside me and wanted to howl.

Still I don't want to go.

I don't.

I really don't.

But he said I had a choice, and isn't that the cruelest,prettiest little lie. A choice that isn't one at all,wrapped up in a bow of small-town charm,tied so tight it cuts off the circulation.Helsbruck—quaint, picture-perfect Helsbruck—where the options are as thin as the air and about as nourishing. The illusion of freedom wrapped in a town so small it could it could fit on the tip of a knife , where life was distilled into a predictable potion: mornings of chirping pleasantries or droopy sunilt days.Afternoons bring the ritualistic shuttering of shops, the townsfolk bustling off to weekly banquets of cured meats and awkward waltzes that demanded attendance.Then there would be flowers exchanged as tokens of belonging, as if together-ness could be forced to bloom in such careful rows.

Here, everyone knew everyone. Their faces rose like the sun behind windows and doorframes, polished and smiling. They waved with flour-dusted hands from bakeries, with tools from sheds, with lavender-scented fingers from gift shops steeped in nostalgia,ground into the cobblestones. It's almost charming, in the way a polished apple is charming right before you notice the soft, rotten bruise underneath.

But look closely, and the gloss starts to crack. The sweetness curdles. The pastel-painted mouths—roselip, raspberry balm—curve just a little too sharply, like sugared fruit left to rot. Side glances dart quick as minnows; niceties crumble under the faintest pressure. The brittle underbelly of Helsbruck was there, waiting, if you dared press too hard or stand too long in the wrong light.

Villa wouldn't have stood for it. She'd have laughed, her voice a spark in the dullness, a tiny rebellion against the smothering civility. "Don't be a fruitcake," she'd say, twisting her hair into a knot with a grin that dared you to argue.

"Excuse me?" I'd reply, raising a brow, half-wounded, half-amused.

"You know. Dense, pretty to look at, but ultimately useless. Oh,did I mention dense?" And then that grin, so infectious it unraveled your sulking like a thread.And d I'd laugh too, because that was Villa—sharp as a razor, and somehow, still soft enough to cut through the noise.

But Villa wasn't here anymore. Only the echo of her voice lingered, biting and bright, circling my thoughts. It was me alone now, in Helsbruck, where the rain had its own moods—one moment drifting sideways like a sigh, the next pounding like an angry fist. The wind howled with the fury of something caged, and the damp seeped into the marrow of your bones until warmth felt like a dream you'd forgotten. And when it was hot ,you felt raw ,scoured cleanly by some arid heat.

The weather started it—or maybe it didn't. Maybe it was the promise of weather. The new anchor, grinning that wide Helsbruck smile, in the first week they had promised sun—bright skies, clean slates—but the light never came. Not that day, not the next, not in the endless stretch of gray that followed. The skies hung heavy, unmoving, and my days mirrored them—stuck, static, bleeding together like watercolors left too long in the rain.