Danger felt his body become stiffer and stiffer, freezing up until he was almost positive his limber muscles had turned into granite under the flimsy softness of his ebony canvas. The stranger hadn’t answered him right away, which only served to terrify him. He wasn’t nervous because he couldn’t see where the unknown wolf was—no, not at all. Danger knew exactly where the wolfess was hiding in the darkness of his vision, her location divined by the bare perceptible rustle of her movements in the paranoid twitch of his ears and her sweet perfume on the wind. It was unexplainable, but Danger could feel the she-wolf, her faraway presence an electric sensation on the tips of his fur. She could not surprise him by sneaking up. But her silence . . . surely she was plotting something. Surely there was a trap. She must have already seen the eerie divided globes of his eyes—utterly pale and alien—peering uselessly at the world. She thought him weak. Oh god.

He was so dead.

Increasingly anxious, Danger mentally commanded his bleeding paws to move—yet they stubbornly remained heavy and unmoving as stones. His heart thudded dully inside rock-hewn ribs. His branch of a tail did not twitch from its post behind his thighs. Even as the femme drew closer, pawsteps so light they seemed to kiss the grass, Danger found he couldn’t so much as flinch away. Dammit. It was always like this with girls. If this packwolf had been male, Danger would have been able to sprint away without a second’s thought, self-preservation overruling his tense awkwardness and launching him out into the wilderness like a black shooting star. But ladies were different. He’d been conditioned from puphood to be polite, to use his best manners, and that code of etiquette paired with visceral dread of female disapproval sent Danger into a spiral of terror. The she-wolves of his old pack had “teased” him mercilessly. He did not know how to talk to them. He didn’t understand them. They were WEIRD. And now this one was coming closer—and he couldn’t run away—!

Her voice chimed into his ears with the light burbling quality of birdsong. Threatening birdsong. Danger felt a cold sweat prickle in the pads of his feet. He gave her a curt nod—betraying absolutely none of his nervousness—and then almost died of a heart attack as what she said sunk in. Shit. Trespassing. He had trespassed? But he'd been SO SURE to avoid the border! “I’m Danger,” the brute answered eventually. It wasn’t a miracle that his voice stayed smooth and low; Danger rarely portrayed the signs of his discomfort so that he always appeared calm and stoic—not like the mess he was inside. “Won't happen again." Now to turn around and pretend like this had never happened . . . frick. More pawsteps. A masculine presence looming up like a grounded thundercloud. A thundercloud whose scent saturated the outskirts of the territory. The Alpha.

"It was an accident, Iso." Hooooly SHIT, this monarch sounded like he gargled the bones of his enemies every morning. "What is your name, sir? I am Darcia, and your greeter is Iso." There was nothing for it: Danger had to cooperate. He cleared his taut throat and spoke, tone still cool and calm and facial expression just vague enough to pass for disinterest. "Greetings, Alpha Darcia. My name is Danger. I had wanted to join a pack, but I know I've made a grave mistake. Trespassing, I mean. Not the joining part. I understand if I'm no longer welcome." That's right, Danger. Nice and succinct. Not.