HAVEN

I grew up in Seattle, surrounded by glass towers, endless rain, and a life my parents had carefully built.

I was never like them. I preferred gardens, quiet places, and the wild things that didn't ask me to be anything other than myself.

Then Roman Voss came into our home.

A dangerous man. A powerful man. A man my father owed everything.

He gave my family three days to pay his debt or he would kill my mother and take me as payment.

So we ran.

With nothing but an old truck and the few pieces of our old life we could carry, we fled north to my father's childhood home in the remote lands of the Southeast.

I thought we were running from Roman.

I didn't know we were running toward something else.

Something ancient.

Something waiting in the forests.

And then I met Waya.

Wolf.

He was eighteen, quiet, guarded, and as wild as the mountains surrounding us.

Neither of us understood why meeting each other felt like the world had shifted beneath our feet.

This isn't a story about falling in love quickly.

It's about two strangers learning each other slowly

like rivers carving stone,

like winter becoming spring,

like the moon teaching the darkness how to glow.