Page 26 of Warded By His Wolf

When she pulled back, the bond blazed between us. Steady. Present. Ours.

“Okay,” she said. “Gideon. The moment the signal’s back.”

I kissed her forehead (a gesture I’d never given anyone, that my wolf apparently required) and stood. “I’m checking the perimeter. Physical check. I need eyes on the east tree line.”

“How long?”

“Twenty minutes. Thirty.”

Through the bond I felt her settle into the couch, her resolve to stay awake until I came back, the warmth of knowing she’d be waiting. It had been eleven years since I had been waited on. I pulled on my jacket before the meaning of that could reach me.

At the door, I stopped. “Ivy.”

She looked up.

“If anything changes in what you feel from me through the bond, anything that isn’t steady, you go to the interior room and you don’t open a door.”

“Understood.”

One more second of her eyes. Then I stepped into the storm.

The cold hit sharp and clarifying, wind driving snow sideways. The tree line was a suggestion of darkness at the property’s edge. I moved toward the east approach with my wolf fully awake beneath my skin.

He was out here. Not close enough to engage. Watching.

At the east marker I crouched and read the snow. Nothing fresh: the storm was erasing tracks faster than they could be made. But the silence was wrong. Too complete. The absence of small-animal sound that means something large moved through recently.

My wolf pressed hard against my control, wanting the shift, wanting to run this perimeter in his own body and find exactly where Elias Thorne had stood at four a.m. looking at a house with my mate inside it.

I held it. Barely.

The radio crackled, Jace, degraded by storm but functional. “East ridge is clear. He pulled back to the north boundary. I’m tracking, but the storm’s covering him.”

“Copy. Maintain position. Do not engage without support.”

“If he moves on the house⁠⁠⁠—”

“He meets me. Stay on tracking. I need his approach vector.”

Static. Then: “Copy.”

I stood in the snow and looked back at the safe house, lights off, the fire a dim orange glow through the kitchen window, Ivy inside, waiting for me.

The bond pulsed warm against everything cold.

She chose you, my wolf said. Now keep her.

I turned back toward the house. The storm pushed at my back. Somewhere in the dark trees, Elias Thorne was calculating his next move.

So was I.

Chapter 9

The Ones with Miriam

IVY

I woke in the narrow bed to grey storm-light and the unfamiliar feeling of having actually slept.