Page 1 of Hunted By the Wolves
Chapter One
Riley Quinn had learnedthe difference between hiding and being safe.
Hiding was something you did to survive.
Being safe was something you eventually stop believing in.
Hiding was leaving the city you had lived and worked in for the last ten years and telling no one.It was finding an apartment you could pay for in cash, living on whatever you could make in cash, never looking anyone in the eye, and desperately trying to fade into the background so no one would see you.Safety was the illusion she chased—the fragile hope that if every lock was thrown and every light was off, the world might forget she existed.
She lay on her mattress on the floor, staring at the cracked plaster on the ceiling, counting her breaths because it gave her something to control.In through her nose.Out through her mouth.Slow enough to keep the panic from climbing into her throat.
It wasn’t working tonight.
She rolled onto her side and reached for her phone, checking the time without turning the screen fully on.12:04 AM.She had been trying to sleep before her shift started, but tonight sleep was proving elusive.You couldn’t sleep when your body had decided that rest was a luxury it could no longer afford.
Riley pushed herself up and crossed the apartment barefoot, wincing as the floorboards creaked under her weight.She froze, listening.
Nothing.
Still, she waited a full thirty seconds before moving again.
The deadbolt was engaged.The chain was hooked.The cheap wooden chair she’d wedged under the doorknob was still braced in place.The windows were locked, duct-taped where the frames didn’t quite meet.She checked them anyway.Always checked them.
People who survived learned rituals that helped to keep them alive.
She pressed her forehead briefly against the cool glass of the window and forced herself to breathe again.The city outside was washed in sodium light and shadow, Brooklyn stretched out in uneasy layers of brick and concrete and people pretending not to see each other.Somewhere down the block, a siren wailed and cut off abruptly.Somewhere else, laughter spilled out of a bar doorway and died just as quickly.
Riley flinched at both.
She pulled back and wrapped her arms around herself, ribs sharp under her skin.She’d lost weight.Too much of it.Her jeans hung loose on her hips, and the sweatshirts she lived in swallowed her whole.She’d stopped looking at herself in mirrors weeks ago.It was easier not to see how small she was becoming.
The apartment wasn’t home.It was a holding pattern.A place she slept—sometimes—and hid when the exhaustion got bad enough that she started making mistakes.She’d moved twice already since everything went wrong, choosing buildings where no one asked questions and landlords didn’t care as long as the rent came in cash.
This one would do.For now.
She moved into the kitchen and got herself a glass of water from the tap, letting it run until the metallic taste faded.She drank slowly, eyes tracking the dark reflection in the window, half-expecting to see movement behind her.
Nothing.
Her heart didn’t slow.
It never did.
As a medic, Riley had spent most of her adult life in places where fear was logical—disaster zones, triage tents, cities torn apart by things people pretended weren’t wars.Fear had been situational then.You assessed, adapted, treated the wounded, and moved on.
This was different.
This was personal.
She knew exactly when it had started.
She just wished she didn’t.She had been working in a clinic when an emergency transport had been rerouted at the last minute due to weather, a man brought in half-dead with injuries no human or shifter body should have survived.
She’d treated him anyway.
That was the job.
His bones had shifted under her hands when she set them, muscle and sinew moving in ways that made no anatomical sense.This movement didn’t fit any known shifter physiology she knew or had studied.She’d told herself it was shock.Adrenaline.Her imagination filling in gaps it had no business filling.
