Title: Wolves In Her Ink

Astra has always drawn the things that should not exist. Wolves with eyes like distant stars, forests she has never walked, a boy's silhouette crowned with teeth and shadow. She blacks out over blank pages and wakes with her fingers stained, her sketchbook filled with scenes she cannot remember creating. The doctors call it a dissociative episode. Her father calls it proof that she is broken.
On the edge of the Olympic rainforest, the Quileute reservation calls it something else.
He has spent his whole life trying to keep the wolf inside him quiet. Son of the tide and the timberline, he grew up on stories that the modern world calls myth. Still, when he looks in the mirror during his rages, he recognizes the shape of his ancestors' monsters reflected back at him. He knows how thin the line is between protector and predator, between legend and the violence that stains his family name.
Then he sees Astra's drawings.
Buried in her gothic spirals and haunted faces are his forests, his river, his ancestral wolves. She sketches the tribal dances she has never attended, the firelit masks she has never seen, the exact pattern of scars on his shoulder. Most terrifying of all, she draws the tribe's wolves not as stories but as witnesses. Watching. Waiting. Choosing.
He was never supposed to show her the real stories. She was never supposed to see what lives beneath them. But a boy who carries a wolf in his blood cannot turn away from a girl who brings those wolves to life in ink.
Their bond begins with a shared secret. He recognizes his culture hidden inside her art, and she recognizes her own madness reflected in his quiet rage. In the hush of cedar trees and fluorescent-lit classrooms, their connection coils into something sharp and undeniable, a dark romance rooted in fear and fascination.
Astra is not just unstable.