People moved through the morning like they had somewhere urgent to be. Coffee, meetings, overdue rent, small betrayals—humans carried their anxieties in paper cups and rumpled coats. I moved through that river of ordinary worries like a ghost in a borrowed life: polite smile, refill the coffee pot, bus the table, apologize for the wait. It was functional. It was a role. It didn't mean I belonged.
I had worked at the diner for seven months now—long enough for the regulars to know my name, for the owner to ask after my "weekend plans" when I wasn't scheduled, for the night crew to joke that I never stopped sulking. They thought I was quiet because I preferred it. I let them keep the fantasy. It made them comfortable, and comfortable humans were predictable humans.
"Silver, can you run the bus? Table five needs their pie and I need to breathe," Tina called, wiping a counter with the kind of practiced motion that said she'd scrubbed this same tile a thousand times and would scrub it a thousand more.
"Coming," I answered, and moved. Plate balanced, I threaded through a maze of knees and small talk, set the slice down and forced a smile. The man at table five—driver's jacket, hands like calluses—looked up and gave me a nod. "Thanks, kid."
"You got it," I said, and left them with their temporary joys. Small human life. Small human happiness. Temporary but necessary.
After my shift, when my feet ached and the city smelled like diesel and wet paper, I walked. Movement helped. Thinking in motion helped. I kept the jacket collar up despite the warm spring air; anonymity was a useful thing. The framed photo in my apartment would wait. The one that mattered was in my head—the crooked grin, his stupid hair, that time we laughed so hard we nearly missed a hunter's ambush. Memory was a weapon and a wound. I carried it everywhere.
It started as a small thing: the sensation of being glanced at from the corner of my eye. Everyone gets that sometimes—the tickle on the back of your neck that's there because a streetlight flickered or a train went by. But then the glances added up. A pause in conversation outside a storefront when I passed. Someone crossing the street deliberately to step into my path, then slowing and matching my pace. A man at the laundromat who pretended to fold his shirt but watched me while he did it.
I told myself it was the city. The city watched everyone. The city cataloged movement and made patterns. But instinct isn't something you can argue with. It keeps you alive for reasons you forget until it's sharp.
At the bookshop on Ninth, the owner—an earnest woman named Ruth with glasses that slid down her nose—smiled when I came in and asked about the latest murder mystery. I picked up the least dramatic paperback on the shelf and pretended to be interested. It was nice to feel normal, to pick a book for trivial reasons rather than tactical ones.
"New in?" she asked. "You like mysteries, huh?"
"Guilty," I said, letting the smile work its way across my face like a practiced mask. "Helps with tip conversation."
We chatted about nothing for a few minutes. Her voice was warm and steady, and the world felt like it could be—if not safe—then at least tolerable. At the doorway, I paused and scanned the street. The feeling returned: a pair of eyes on me from across the block. Just one pair. Slow. Patient. Not deer-like startled—more like a predator watching the habits of its prey.
I left with the cheap paperback pressed under my arm like contraband and walked faster. I didn't go home. I never went straight home anymore. Patterns were dangerous. Predictable footsteps get you cornered.
In a narrow park between a laundromat and an anonymous office building, I perched on a bench and flipped the first pages of the book without really reading. People jogged, two dogs wagged themselves into a frenzy, and a mother chased a toddler. Normal life. Tiny orchestra of small catastrophes and petty joys. I let it wash over me to keep the panic from turning my hands to ice.
"Hey there, you okay?" a woman on the next bench asked. She looked tired and too young to be that tired. "You look like you haven't slept."
"Work's a joy," I said, which in diner-speak translated to: I will sleep when I'm dead. She laughed politely and offered a small smile that said she'd accepted my answer.
I was halfway through a sentence that wasn't in the book when a shadow crossed the grass like a glitch. I looked up instinctively. A dog? A cat? The movement was too fluid for either. The breeze carried a scent that wasn't human—wet fur, cold earth, the tang of predator. The hairs at the back of my neck rose again.
The wolf, the same dark shape I'd seen in the alley, was pacing the far edge of the park, half-hidden behind a line of ornamental bushes. It didn't move with the randomness of a stray animal. It threaded the space with purpose, head high, eyes scanning the route I'd take if I left now.
The jogger, oblivious, jogged past where the wolf loped behind a tree. The woman on the bench didn't notice. Only I did. Which was the cruel joke of the night: the world spun ignorant and safe while predators tracked me in plain sight.
My heartbeat calmed, strangely even. Not because I was no longer scared—fear had settled into a cold, sensible hum—but because the presence felt less like threat and more like appraisal. The animal watched, turned its head, and for a moment its eyes seemed almost—calm. Not hunger exactly; more curiosity. Interest. Recognition.
Like the wolf was taking attendance.
I stayed long enough to watch it disappear down a side street, its silhouette swallowed by the city's noise. A small part of me—one that a year ago would have been reckless and angry—wanted to follow, to demand explanation. The rest of me knew better. Curiosity with a predator tends to be mutual and short-lived.
Instead, I walked home under a sky smeared with city lights. The apartment welcomed me with the same cheap warmth: the lamp that always burned too bright, the framed photo by the bed, the notebook where Travis's handwriting sat like a relic. I made tea I didn't really want, then picked up the pen and wrote in the space between pages where I kept my own notes.
I wrote about the wolf. I wrote about the glances. I wrote about the way the city's ordinary faces had started to look like masks worn by hunters who'd learned to be patient. My script was messy, anger bleeding into the loops of letters.
One year. You'd laugh at the pathetic mess I've become, I scribbled. Or make fun of my soup skills. Or tell me to stop sitting still and go jump a bridge like a moron. Why did you ever help me?
I read my words and felt them like an echo. Helped me? He used to say I had the survival instincts of a cat and the luck of someone who pissed off fate. His voice came back in fragments—his bad jokes, a melody hummed off-key. Loss is loud in the quiet places.
It was nearly midnight when the sounds began—heavy, deliberate, three sets of boots padding down the hallway below. I froze, hand on the pen.
Hunters didn't make the kind of routine noise ordinary people did. They moved with purpose. Even this high up, even in a building whose occupants were mostly indifferent to each other, their approach carried a signature.
Someone had called in a lead. Someone had decided the city's new visitor was a prize to be taken.
I stood and went to the window. The street was a ribbon of reflected light and puddles. Three figures moved beneath it, wearing dark coats and faces half-hidden in shadow. Crossbows slung like instruments gone deadly.
My chest tightened. My hands were calm, efficient. Old habits rose like muscle memory. I was not the same terrified thing I'd been a year ago. I had lost love; I had not lost teeth.
I tucked the notebook into my jacket and reached for the knife I never left far from. The wolf's silhouette ghosted across the far roofline like a promise. It paused, looked down, and then its head lifted to the sky, letting out a single low sound—more a statement than a howl. It carried, for a moment, above the city's hum and into the narrow room where I stood.
What the sound meant I did not know. Whether it was a warning, a claim, or an invitation—something shifted in the air.
Below, the hunters stopped beneath my building and looked up, as if sensing something odd. One of them raised a hand and shaded his eyes, scanning windows. He paused, scanning my window, and although he couldn't see me, for the first time that night, I felt seen.
We both held our breath. The city exhaled.
And then the hunter spoke into his radio, voice low and flat: "Target's here. Third-floor. Move."
My pulse finally jumped. The wolf's low note had cut the night like a bell. When doors start to lock and plans start to change, it's never good for the prey.