Page 67 of Warded By His Wolf

Whatever was in this file was not the end of something.

It was the beginning of a question I had not thought to ask yet.

Maddox’s hand found the back of my neck, over the mark, warm, certain. I leaned into the contact before I’d decided to, my body making the choice my mind was still processing.

“Whatever it is,” he said quietly, “we handle it together.”

I turned the file over in my hands. Sealed. Physical. The kind of document someone hands you when they want you to have time before the contents become real.

“I know. I’m just not sure I’m ready to read it yet.”

“Then don’t.” His thumb traced a slow line across the mark, and the tension I hadn’t realized I was holding eased by half. “It’ll wait. The questions will still be there when you’re ready to ask them.”

I looked up at him. The red-gold warmth behind his dark eyes, the steady presence that had become the ground I stood on across sixteen days of running and fighting and choosing. I made a decision.

“Tonight. I’ll read it tonight. After we get home.”

Home. The word landed between us with a gravity I hadn’t planned, and Maddox’s expression shifted into something I could only describe as settled. Not surprised. Confirmed.

“After we get home,” he agreed.

I put the file in my bag. We walked out of agency headquarters together, into the afternoon light. The car would carry us back to the mountain, the tree line, the porch where I had chosen to stay.

The questions would be there when I was ready.

For now, I had everything I needed.

Chapter 24

The Third Result

MADDOX

The drive back to the safe house took three hours on mountain roads that had become familiar over the past weeks. I spent most of it watching Ivy in my peripheral vision while keeping my hands steady on the wheel.

She had Gideon’s sealed file in her lap: physical paper, not digital, which meant he considered the contents significant enough for the old protocols. She hadn’t opened it. Her fingers rested on the edge of the envelope while she watched the tree line slide past, her expression thoughtful rather than anxious.

The bond carried her presence as a warm, settled frequency in my chest. Not the sharp urgency of the first days. Not the desperate pitch of the siege. Something quieter. Something that had found its shape.

“You said tonight,” I said. “You don’t have to read it now.”

“I know.” She turned her head, and I caught the edge of her smile. “I’m deciding whether I’m ready now instead.”

I didn’t push. That was the thing about Ivy: she processed at her own pace, and the pace was always chosen. She’d spent three years being told her instincts were unreliable. Now that she’d stopped believing it, she moved through information the way she moved through everything: with intention.

The second hour passed in comfortable silence. The afternoon light came through the windshield at the angle that turns everything gold at the edges. My wolf was quiet, present, unpressed: content in a way that had nothing to do with territory and everything to do with the woman in the passenger seat.

Somewhere past the last unmarked turn, she opened the file.

I kept my eyes on the road. The bond told me she was present, careful, not alarmed. I drove and let her read.

When she finished, she didn’t speak for a moment. Then, without preamble: “The second bloodline signature is my maternal grandmother.”

I absorbed that. “Deceased?”

“Yes. Her vision history runs through a different suppressed line, decades of medical records documenting anxiety she didn’t have. An ‘overactive imagination,’ written into her chart across thirty years.” Her voice stayed steady, but the weight of it moved through the bond like a stone through water. “She spent her whole life being treated for a gift that had no name in any room she ever occupied.”

I didn’t reach for resolution. The information was what it was: three generations of women who saw things they weren’t supposed to see, and a system that learned to make them invisible to themselves.