Read Chapter 14: Hidden Verdicts

The cow’s flank was hot beneath Iona’s gloved fingers, the hide slick with sweat and something worse—a weeping, greenish discharge that matted the black-and-white fur into ugly clumps. The animal lowed, a miserable, throaty sound, and shifted its weight against the crush gate.

“Three days ago she was fine,” the farmer said, a wiry man named Calder who smelled of peat smoke and worried sweat. “Now look at her. Eating less every day. The milk’s gone thin.”

Iona pressed her stethoscope to the cow’s barrel chest and listened. The heart rate was elevated, the lungs clear, but the skin around the wound had an angry, swollen heat that didn’t match any ordinary mastitis or abscess she’d treated in Glasgow. She peeled back a crusted edge of the discharge and swabbed it into a sterile vial.

“I’ll run this through the lab,” she said, keeping her voice calm for the farmer’s sake. “It might be a bacterial infection, something in the pasture. Have you changed grazing land recently?”

Calder shook his head. “Same field we’ve always used. But the deer have been acting strange. Found one dead last week, torn up something fierce. Thought it was foxes at first, but foxes don’t pull a stag apart like that.”

Iona’s stomach tightened. She capped the vial and stripped off her gloves, dropping them into her bag. “Keep her inside for a few days. I’ll have results by tomorrow evening.”

The drive back to the clinic was short, but the whole way she kept glancing at the vial in the passenger seat. Something about that smell, that sickly-sweet bacterial reek, itched at the back of her brain. She’d smelled it before. Recently.

She unlocked the clinic’s back door and went straight to the small utility room they used as a makeshift lab. Gareth had gone home hours ago, and the fluorescent lights hummed in the silence as she smeared a sample onto a slide, stained it, and bent to the microscope.

The bacteria bloomed under the lens like a dark garden, gram-positive rods with an odd spiral twist at the tips. She’d seen that shape before. She pulled up her phone and scrolled through photos from her first week in the village—the Labrador that had come in with deep, parallel lacerations on its flank, supposedly from a barbed-wire fence. She’d cleaned and stitched it, but she’d noted the infection afterward, an unusual presentation that had taken two rounds of antibiotics to clear.

She zoomed in on the wound culture photo she’d taken then, compared it to the slide.

Same shape. Same spiral.

A dog that had been torn up by something—she’d assumed a fence, or maybe another dog, though the wounds hadn’t matched a canine bite pattern. And a cow with an infection in the same bacteria, from a field the farmer had used for years without issue.

She sank back in her chair, the phone cold in her hand. The wounds on that dog had been deep and slashing, parallel, like claws.

She didn’t notice she’d been sitting there in the dark until her phone buzzed in her coat pocket. Lachlan’s name lit the screen.

“Iona.” His voice was tight, clipped. “Are you at the clinic?”

“Yes. I just got back from Calder’s farm. His cow has an infection I’ve seen before.” She paused, her mouth dry. “On the dog from my first week here. The one with the claw wounds.”

A long silence. “I’m coming over.”

He was there in four minutes, the Land Rover’s engine cutting out in the gravel lot. He let himself in through the back door—she’d left it unlocked—and stood in the doorway of the lab, filling the frame with his height and rain-damp coat. The tattoo was hidden under his sleeve now, but she couldn’t look at him without thinking of the chamber, the wolf on the chain, the raw fear in his eyes as he’d locked himself inside.

“Show me,” he said.

She slid the microscope toward him. He bent, adjusting the focus with steady hands that told her he’d used one before. For a long moment he was silent, then he straightened.

“Coignmòr,” he said quietly. The word was Gaelic, and he spoke it like a curse.

“What is it?”

“It’s a bacteria that lives in the saliva of something that isn’t quite wolf and isn’t quite man.” He met her eyes. “The rogue. It’s been in the hills for months. Killing stock, tearing apart deer, leaving wounds that fester if they’re not treated properly.” His jaw tightened. “I’ve been calling the deaths accidents. Bad weather. Mountain lions that don’t exist. But I knew. I’ve known.”

“And you didn’t tell anyone?” The words came out sharper than she intended. “You let Calder think his cow ate something bad. You let the village think it was natural causes.”

“What would you have me say?” His voice was low, almost pleading. “That a creature not of my blood is hunting their land? That it’s not mine, and I can’t control it, and I don’t know how to stop it?” He ran a hand through his hair, messing the dark strands. “Morag didn’t know either. It killed her before she could tell us what it was.”

Iona’s anger cooled to something harder. “But you have a theory.”

He looked at her for a long moment, and she saw the calculation in his eyes—how much to give her, how much to hold back. “The Blackwoods have been the only pack in these hills for two hundred years,” he said finally. “That’s what I was taught. We’re the guardians, the ones who keep the boundary. But there were others once. Families who shared the blood but not the honor.”

“What happened to them?”

The silence stretched. “We destroyed them.”

The words landed like stones in a still pool. Iona felt the ripple from them, cold and deep. “You killed them?”

“My great-great-grandfather and his brothers.” Lachlan’s eyes were flat, but she saw the shame beneath them. “There was a war. The families were hunting each other, turning on villagers, losing control. The Blackwoods decided it had to end. They didn’t leave survivors except one line that swore fealty and bound itself to us.” He paused. “Duncan’s corruption isn’t an accident. The rogue that bit him carries the blood of the old enemy. It knows who we are. It’s been waiting for us to weaken.”

Iona looked at the vial on the counter. The bacteria swam inside it, a silent verdict on something she hadn’t wanted to be real. She didn’t have many certainties left—her father was dead, the family she’d fled was gone, and the ground she walked on turned out to be a floor over a cave full of wolves. But she did have these: her hands, her training, her oath to heal.

“You want me to help you track it,” she said.

“The rogue is killing indiscriminately now,” Lachlan said. “It’s moved beyond the moor. It’s coming for the village, or worse, for the pack. With your medicine, you might find a weakness. A trail. A way to break it before it breaks us.”

“Then I will.” She met his gaze and held it. “But I want the truth. All of it, this time. You said there was a reason the Blackwoods are the only pack. I want to know what it is you’re not telling me about your family, and about what that thing wants.”

He held her gaze, and something in his expression shifted—a crack in the careful stone of his composure. “My family’s secret isn’t just that we turn,” he said slowly. “It’s what the turning costs. Every Blackwood who lives past thirty starts to hear the other one. Not the wolf. The old blood. The enemy we thought we destroyed.”

The fluorescent light hummed between them.

“It’s not a memory,” he said. “It’s a call.”