Snowy crown snaps to rapt attention as I catch movement outside the place I have decided to keep as my own for the year abroad. I do not know much of the pack, nor it's new coming wolves, but he smells almost familiar. I shake the thought as I stare at him, his eyes finding my white form in the darkness. Unblinking, black flecked jade gaze meets him levelly, there is no fear within my form. I am made more perfect than such things, I need not fear what I can and will understand. There is no moment where I delude myself into thinking that he might not be able to fit through the mouth of the den, but I know too that I am fast and smart enough to outmaneuver him and slip away.

My ears flick in annoyance as the tension grows stale in the air, as if it is a huge weight being cast like a net over us. Would you like for me to etch my likeness in stone, or are you going to tell me why you look at me in such a manner? My tone is impatient, sharp and commanding in subtle ways. I cannot help the bit of my grandmother that slips through the cracks, no matter how perfectly porcelain my face may be. I do not move, knowing that to do so with a stranger could mean attack and certain death. How this knowledge comes to me, I am not quite sure, but I know. I have not blinked, and my eyes are starting to sting, but my lids refuse my command to shut.

To blink is to lose sight of a potential threat. His smell carried home, but that did not mean he was a willing inhabitant. I am no dull-witted girl, my family made me better than that, and my purpose here would prove the perfection Ava sought had been achieved in me.