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up into my face.
    I got into the car, turned up the heater to full blast, and pulled away.
    I shivered most of the way home.
     

 
    Chapter 9
     
    The white dress dragged behind me, heavy as wet cement. 
    I sucked in cold air, pushing my legs to move faster. I ran past the trees, ghostlike in the darkness. I sank into thickets of deep snow, stumbling.
    A fierce wind whipped my bare arms, turning them a raw pink. Fat flakes fell from the black sky, gathering in my hair and on my dress, weighing me down even more.  
    But I knew I had to keep running.
    I let out ragged, heavy breaths. There didn’t seem to be enough air in the entire woods to fill my heaving lungs.  
    The dress’ train caught on something sharp. I pulled at it, ripping it and leaving behind a wide swath of the white satin on the gnarly branches of a bush.
    I kept going, my heart pounding hard with a mad fear.
    I could hear its paws crunching in the snow behind me, growing louder with each step. Gaining on me.  
    Then, it was on me.
    The wolf’s teeth ripped into my leg.
    I screamed.
    ***
     
    When I opened my eyes, the first rays of sharp winter sunshine were stealing across my bedroom floor. The smell of freshly brewed coffee was in the air.
    I sat up in bed, rubbed my eyes, and glanced at the alarm clock.
    It was blinking a default 12:00 red.
    The alarm hadn’t gone off. The power must have gone out at some point in the night.
    I glanced at my phone. It was just after 8 a.m.
    I had planned on getting to the pie shop right about now. Chrissy was working the early morning shift, but I wanted to get there early to get a head start on what promised to be another very busy day. If this last week had been any indication of the season up ahead, it meant that things were going to be pretty hectic around the shop.
    I lay back down and threw the comforter over my head, groaning at the soreness in my muscles.
    Chrissy could hold the fort down until I got there later that morning, I decided. I was tired. Tired to my very bones. And what was the point of owning your own business if you couldn’t sleep in every now and again?
    It had felt like a long, lonely drive back home from the airport earlier that morning. When I’d gotten home, I was so deeply chilled that I had to take a hot shower to warm up. Then I threw myself under the thick folds of my comforter, and fell back asleep.
    But it hadn’t been a restful sleep by any means.  
    It was the same recurring dream I’d been having for weeks now. In it, I was always running through a patch of dark, unfamiliar forest in my wedding dress. There was a wolf chasing me. A wolf that always got me at the end of the dream.
    I was always too slow.
    I knew that the recurring dreams were just a case of pre-wedding jitters, and that they were nothing to worry about.
    But still, I disliked the heavy, unsettled feeling they left me with.
    These dreams always made me feel that something bad might happen. Like something was waiting for us, just up around the bend.
    Or maybe it was just a simple nightmare that meant nothing at all.
    I sat up in bed.
    The light streaming through the glass was hitting my partially-open closet, illuminating the crystal details on my mother’s old wedding dress, wrapped up in plastic.
    I would have been perfectly happy wearing that dress. But when I had told Warren about my plans, he wasn’t going to hear any of it.
    He wanted to buy me a new dress. A special, fancy, rhinestone-encrusted one from Bethany’s Bridal downtown. I let him do it, even though I told him I didn’t want him to. But he gave me that old pish-posh line, and told me that he wouldn’t see his granddaughter walk down the aisle in a dress that had almost four decades on it.
    I, myself, wouldn’t have minded. At least with my mother’s wedding gown, I wouldn’t have had to go on a 500-calorie diet that made me cranky and ravenous. 
    Just then, my phone buzzed. I reached for it and glanced down at the text message from