Four days.

He had been counting backward for weeks — from the moment the documentation timeline had been established, he had been tracking the days with the specific attention of someone managing a deadline. But he noticed, this morning, that the counting had changed direction without his deciding to change it. He was no longer counting down to a departure point. He was counting toward something.

He lay in front of the door in the early morning and turned this observation over carefully.

The difference was not small. Counting down to departure was the arithmetic of someone who knew what they were leaving and was not certain what came next. Counting toward something required a destination — not necessarily a geographic one, but a destination in some sense, a thing you were moving toward rather than simply away from. He had not had that kind of destination in a long time. He had had objectives. Objectives were different.

He was still examining this when the mail arrived.

Evelyn sorted through it at the counter with the quick efficiency she brought to administrative tasks, setting aside the bills and the catalogues and the ordinary correspondence of a running business. She stopped at one envelope — he saw her stop, saw the small recalibration of her expression — and opened it carefully.

She read it twice.

Then she crossed to where he was lying and crouched down.

"Someone I know in Ferndale," she said. Her voice was level — the working level, the one she used when she was managing something. "They've heard about the search. They wanted to warn me." A pause. "The description they've heard is specific. Silver hair, heterochromatic eyes, old shoulder scar, last seen in the border territories approximately one month ago." Another pause. "They're saying the reward is significant."

Significant rewards changed the nature of the search. They brought in people who were not otherwise involved — opportunists, informants, people who would not normally take the risk of involvement with Church business but for whom significant money altered the calculation. The net widened in ways that were harder to predict and harder to manage.

He stood up.

He went to the reading table and wrote: *We need the documentation today, not in four days. Can you go to Westholt this morning?*

She read it.

She looked at him.

She said: "Yes."

No hesitation. No assessment period. Just yes, which was, he had come to understand, what trust looked like when it was operational rather than theoretical — not the warm feeling of it but the actual mechanics, the moment when you acted on someone else's judgment without requiring additional justification.

She was already moving toward the back room to get her coat.

"I'll be back before dark," she said. "Don't let anyone linger."

At the door she stopped.

She turned back and looked at him — the direct look she had been giving him more frequently since the night of the papers on the floor, the look that did not use the fiction of the wolf as a buffer. She said: "When I get back. We need to talk. Really talk. Not through paper."

He held her gaze.

"I think it's time," she said.

Then she left.

He stood in the middle of the empty shop and thought about what she had said — *really talk, not through paper* — and felt the specific weight of it. The papers had been, in many ways, a form of protection for both of them. The distance of writing, the time it allowed, the ability to choose words with care before they arrived. A real conversation meant none of those protections. It meant her face and his face and the words happening in real time, which was an entirely different kind of exposure.

He thought about whether he was ready for that.

He thought about what he was afraid of, specifically, in that exposure.

The answer arrived with the clarity that answers sometimes had when you stopped defending yourself against them: he was not afraid of her knowing. She already knew most of it — the wound, the history, the things he had written on the papers in the dark. What he was afraid of was something more immediate. He was afraid that knowing him through paper, at a distance, with time and care and the specific remove of written language, was different from knowing him in person, and that the person, seen directly, would be less than what the paper had suggested.

He had been, in his life, many things. He had been a commander and a prince and a weapon and a liability and a currency in other people's calculations. He had not, until six weeks ago, been simply a person that someone chose to know.

He was not certain he knew how to be that person when directly observed.

The morning passed. Two customers came and went. He managed both with the practiced stillness of a wolf who was simply a bookshop dog, and they left without incident, and he spent the intervals between customers thinking about the conversation and the night and the specific quality of what was coming.

The fourth stranger arrived at noon.

This one was different from the others. He came in with the casual ease of someone who had been in the shop before, though he had not — Fenrir would have remembered — and he browsed with the specific pattern of someone who was not browsing. His eyes went to the counter, to the back room door, to the window, to Fenrir.

He looked at Fenrir for a beat longer than people looked at dogs.

Fenrir held still with the complete, practiced stillness of something that was simply there, simply occupying space, with no internal life worth considering. He had learned this stillness in campaigns — the ability to be present in a space without being registered as significant. He deployed it now with full attention.

The man's gaze moved on.

He asked about books on northern trade routes. Evelyn was not there, which meant Fenrir could not observe her navigate the question, which was its own form of exposure — he was alone in the shop with a person who was, he was fairly certain, conducting an assessment, and the only tool he had available was the fiction of being a dog.

The man bought a small map of the regional roads.

He left.

Fenrir stood at the window and watched him go and thought: the fiction is getting thin.

Evelyn came back at half past five, earlier than he had expected, with a flat envelope under her arm and the specific expression of someone who had moved fast and was processing the aftermath of moving fast. She set the envelope on the counter and looked at him.

"It's done," she said. "The documentation is complete."

She opened the envelope and took out the papers — two sets, he could see from across the room, two separate packets of documentation bound with ribbon. She looked at the second packet for a moment.

"F. Vale," she said. She looked up at him. "That's what I put on the papers. It was the name I could give without — " She stopped. Reconsidered. "It was the name I had. I wanted you to know I made it up. And I wanted you to know why I chose those particular letters."

He looked at her.

"F for — " she said, and then stopped again, and he understood that she was not going to finish the sentence, that the sentence did not need finishing, that they both knew what F stood for and she had chosen it deliberately and she was telling him that she had chosen it deliberately.

He looked at the packet of papers with his name on it.

F. Vale.

He thought about having a name that someone had chosen for him — not assigned, not inherited, not imposed by rank or title or necessity, but chosen, carefully, by someone who had been paying attention.

He did not know what to do with the feeling that produced.

Evening came. She made dinner. They moved through the closing routine in the way they had developed it together, the shared choreography of a space managed by two people who had learned each other's rhythms. She banked the fire. He checked the locks. She set the documentation packets in the bag she was already packing.

At nine she came and sat on the floor in front of him.

Not the reading table. Not the chair. The floor, directly in front of him, cross-legged, at his level.

"I think it's time," she said again, the same words as this morning, and she was looking at him with the expression that had no buffer in it, no performed neutrality, just her face and whatever was in it.

He looked back at her.

And he felt, in the specific way he had come to feel things that were true without being planned, that she was right.

And he felt the trăng tròn beginning.

He watched her understand, from his expression, what was happening — watched her face move through the recognition and the decision — and before she could say anything he saw her settle. Not tense. Settle. The specific quality of someone deciding to stay.

*Of course,* he thought. *Of course she would stay.*

He let the transformation come.