The "Hunter’s Feast" at the cottage had taught me two things:
Caleb Thorne was definitely a wolf.
If I stayed isolated in the woods, I was playing by his rules.
I was a guest in his territory. A mouse in a lion’s den. To survive—and to protect Leo—I needed my own ground. I needed a demilitarized zone.
I found it in the center of town: The Silver Spoon Diner.
It was a rotting corpse of a building. The windows were boarded up with grey plywood, and the neon "S" dangled by a rusted wire. Locals walked past it quickly, heads down.
"It’s been closed since the eighties," Maya had warned me. "Silas likes us hungry. A hungry wolf is a disciplined wolf. Opening that place is... a statement."
I didn't care about statements. I cared about the six-burner commercial range I could see thro
