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PROLOGUE

DEACON

Mississippi River Delta

Five Years Ago

The bayous of Louisiana stink of rot and secrets. The air here doesn’t just hang—it clings. Hot, wet, and thick enough to chew. It coats your skin and crawls into your lungs, until you can’t tell where the swamp ends and you begin.

I’ve been out here three days, tracking a bail skip who thinks the bayou makes him invisible. It doesn’t. Nothing does. Not from me. He barely made it ten miles off-grid before he started slipping up—empty beer cans, disturbed mud, a fishhook dropped near a campfire that hadn’t burned out yet.

I’m two hundred yards out from him, rifle balanced on a moss-covered log, crosshairs steady. I could take the shot. Could end this whole thing right now and still have time to finish the shitty gas station coffee in my thermos.

But I don’t. Because I’m not alone anymore.

I knew he was coming before I heard the truck. There’s a stillness that breaks when another predator enters the woods—too clean, too sure of itself. The birds go quiet. The atmospherethickens. I feel it in my gut, that exaggerated sense of awareness I’ve never been able to explain but never questioned either.

Then comes the sound—the tires crunching over crushed shells, the faint grind of gears, and the unmistakable scent of motor oil mixed with something sharper. Arrogance, maybe. Confidence too loud for a place that lives in whispers. Whoever it is, they don’t belong here. And they sure as hell aren’t sneaking up on anybody.

My finger tightens slightly on the trigger as I swing the rifle around, sights locking on the newcomer. He’s not even trying to sneak. Just walking through the trees like he owns the place. Cowboy boots, dark jeans, t-shirt tight across a chest that says ex-military, still dangerous. A man like that doesn’t carry fear. He carries intent.

"Who are you?" I ask, voice low, rifle steady. But even as I speak, I’m already drawing in a breath through my nose, tasting the air.

There’s a thread of something wild in it—leather, steel, storm. He’s not just another man crashing through the swamp. He’s something more. Something like me. Not human. Not fully. Shifter. Probably wolf. My own instincts bristle in recognition, a low pulse of acknowledgment humming under my skin. Territory meeting territory. Alpha to alpha.

He raises his hands just enough to show he’s not armed and not worried. "Name’s Zane Rushton. But my friends call me Rush."

"We’re not friends."

"Yet."

Smartass.

I turn back toward the target I’d been tracking, but I don’t lose awareness of the man behind me. “Whatever you want, you’re wasting your time, Rushton.”

“Funny,” he says, casual like this is a damn social call. “I figured you were the one wasting yours.”

I almost laugh. Almost. Instead, I exhale, squeeze the trigger, and drop the skip I’d been tracking—a petty arms runner with more ego than sense. Headshot. No suffering.

Normally, I'd just wound the bastard and drag him back to jail. But in his 'bid for freedom,' he'd slit an innocent old man's throat—a swamp-shifter who was just trying to live out the rest of his life in peace and harmony. The bail skip's body collapses in a heap behind the cypress roots. I lower the rifle and let the silence and the swamp swallow him whole.

Rushton lets out a low whistle.

“You come out here to recruit me for something or admire my shooting?” I ask, wiping down my rifle and slipping it into its case.

“Why not both?”

The son of a bitch grins like this is going exactly the way he planned.

I don’t ask any more questions. Not yet. Because everything about him—his scent, his posture, his calm—tells me this isn’t about the fugitive rotting two hundred yards from us. That was just the opening act. A test.

Rush hasn’t come to chase criminals through the swamp. He’s come to find a hunter willing to track something colder, smarter, and more dangerous than any bail skip. Someone like me. Someone with nothing left to lose.

He’s not here for the fugitive. That bastard was just the price of admission. I suspect Rushton came for something deeper—something with teeth. He’s here for the part of me that doesn’t quit, the part that runs on instinct and fury, the part that can still imagine the last scream my sister ever made. He’s here for the wolf who doesn’t run. The one who hunts back.

We walk back to his truck in silence. Not the awkward kind. The kind where two men already understand more than they’re letting on. The moss underfoot muffles our steps, but every sound—every breath—is heavy with something unspoken.

I don’t ask where we’re going. Because part of me already knows. Wherever it is, it’s going to drag me closer to the thing I’ve been hunting in the dark corners of my soul since the day they zipped up Verity’s body bag.