Page 32 of Warded By His Wolf

“What happens next isn’t a reaction to what they did,” she said. “It’s a choice about what we do. And the choice is ours.”

“Ours,” I agreed, and meant it all the way down.

But underneath my palms her heart kept its rhythm. Underneath my ribs my wolf kept his own counsel, patient now, the way I’d taught him to be. He was holding one item on a list that had nothing to do with agency protocol.

Somewhere out there was a woman who had spent seven months building a cage. My mate had lived in it for three years.

When this was over, she and I were going to talk.

Chapter 11

The Emergency Flag

IVY

I did not sleep after Gideon’s call.

The kitchen held the same shape it had held for four days, table, chairs, the window over the sink where the tree line showed black against a sky that wasn’t quite dark. But Gideon’s words had rearranged everything inside those walls.

Seven months before the student incident. Seven months before I ever walked into Miriam Vale’s office with my voice already softened for palatability. Someone had flagged my bloodline. Someone had known what I was before I reported a single vision to anyone.

Maddox stood at the window with his back to me, shoulders carrying the stillness that meant his wolf was fully present. He was watching the tree line, not me, and the difference was enormous. He was giving me room to hold what I knew without being observed while I held it.

I reached into my cardigan and pulled out my vision journal. Not the index cards. The journal, the one I’d kept for three years and never shown another living person. The spine was soft from use. I opened it to the entry dated two weeks before the student incident. My own handwriting looked foreign and familiar at once, the way a photograph looks from a time you remember being frightened.

Saw the student again. Clear this time, clearer than last week. Something is wrong with the way he moves in the halls. Not wrong-wrong. Wrong like he’s already hurt and doesn’t know it yet. Like the injury exists somewhere ahead of him in time and his body is just waiting to catch up.

I read it twice. That woman had been right. Urgent, exact, right, and two days from watching it happen anyway.

I turned to the entry from the week Miriam suggested the reduced caseload.

She says I’m carrying too much. That the visions are probably stress-related, that my sensitivity is making me read patterns that aren’t there. She said it so kindly. She said it the way you say things to people you’re trying to help. I think she might be right. I think I might need to stop trusting myself so much.

My stomach turned over. I could see it now: the exact page where the sabotage took. Not a dramatic moment. A kind one. That was the genius of it. She’d never once told me I was wrong. She’d taught me to say it for her.

And here was the part that made my hands go cold around the journal. With four days of distance and a counselor’s training turned in a direction I’d never aimed it before, I could finally see it: I knew these techniques. I used these techniques. Reflective listening. Gentle reframing. Validating the feeling while redirecting the belief. It sounds like this is weighing on you: what do you think that’s about? Tools I’d spent ten years using to help frightened kids find their own ground.

Miriam had used my own toolkit on me. Every method I’d trained in to build people up, she’d run in reverse. With perfect fluency, in the correct clinical order, she took a woman apart so gradually she’d mistake it for support. She hadn’t just betrayed me. She’d betrayed the entire language I’d built my life on. She’d done it to a practitioner, knowing I’d recognize the shape of care and never think to check its direction.

That was how good she was. That was how long they’d planned.

I turned one more page, further back, and found the thing I hadn’t let myself look at in two years: the gap.

Six weeks, the autumn after the student incident, where the entries simply stopped. No visions recorded. I remembered those weeks: I’d had them, I’d had the visions, waking with images pressing behind my eyes.

I’d lain in the dark and breathed them down and refused to write them, because writing them made them real. Miriam had taught me that real was the thing I couldn’t afford to be. Six weeks of blank paper. That was her masterpiece. Not the entries she poisoned.

The ones she prevented.

I sat with the journal open under the low light and felt something I hadn’t let myself feel in four days of revelations. Not grief: I’d had the grief. This was underneath the grief.

I wanted to reach back through the pages and hold the woman who wrote them. The one apologizing to her own diary. The one being dismantled a sentence at a time by someone she brought coffee to, and thanking her for it.

And then, arriving late and entirely mine, came the anger.

Not Maddox’s anger, which I’d been feeling through the bond all night like a banked fire. Mine. Three years of it, uncompressed all at once, for the boy who got hurt on schedule, for the six blank weeks, for every two a.m. I’d spent believing my own mind was the enemy. It went through me hot and clean. I didn’t soften it, didn’t breathe it down, didn’t schedule a follow-up to discuss how I was processing it.

I let it burn. It felt like circulation returning to a limb.