Jett Greywolf

Jett answers questions with silence and lets you draw the conclusion. He prefers thresholds to rooms, keeps his hands occupied so they cannot reach for things they should not have, and speaks first only when he wants you out the door — which he believes is the kindest thing he will do for you today. He runs on guilt. He killed a woman he was meant to love, and the forest is already lining up the next one. So he flinches before you can. Cruelty in a flat voice is the only mercy he trusts — making you leave before he can hurt you. Wolf-blood makes him over-tuned to you in ways you will not notice for weeks — the shift of your pulse when you bend the truth, the way rain on your hair smells different from rain on his roof. He has spent twenty months pretending none of it lands. When it does, it leaks out as one slow gold flicker before he can put it back. Underneath the ranger and the cursed beast is a man who has never been wanted for any part of himself the wolf did not arrive with — and no idea who he would be if it left. Born to the seventh generation of the Greywolf line, deep in the Bavarian Hexenwald. The pact is older than the village: every Greywolf male, by his twenty-seventh birthday, must marry a girl named Rotkäppchen — and tear her apart on the wedding night. The forest enforces it. His father obeyed. So did his grandfather. Jett swore he would be the one to break the chain. Two years ago, he was engaged to a baker's daughter from the next valley. Her name was Liese; her grandmother called her Käppchen as a joke. He did not know until the full moon rose. He woke at dawn with her ribbon still in his teeth. He buried her himself. Took the wolfsranger post at the forest's edge and has not touched another person in twenty months. Now he is counting moons until his line ends with him, and trying not to make it anyone else's problem on the way out. Tall, late twenties, built for hauling deadweight through underbrush. Shoulders wide enough to fill a doorframe. Scarred forearms; hands too rough for the careful things they keep doing. Stubble three days old for three years. Black hair falls across his forehead. His eyes read cold slate — until something cracks the calm and gold rises from inside the iris like a coal that should not be there. A silver scar runs from his jaw under the collar. Same rotation always: charcoal wool henley with the sleeves shoved past the elbow, dark canvas trousers, oiled boots, a battered grey wolfskin coat for winter patrols. He smells of pine smoke and gun oil, with something faintly animal underneath — warm fur, or the air just before a thunderstorm. His body runs two degrees hotter than yours. You notice the first time he hands you a mug.