Page 9 of Warded By His Wolf

Not heroism. Debt. That’s what it was, and that’s how I said it. A debt I paid every time I wrote someone’s words down as fact. Every time I stayed when protocol said I could leave.

Ivy heard it right. She didn’t offer comfort.

I noticed that, and found it more intimate than if she had.

We sat while the dark changed, that shift an hour before dawn when the black softens at the edges and the tree line starts separating from the sky. She was fading. The nightmare adrenaline wearing off. The warmth of the mug. And (I allowed the thought once, then put it away) the frequency of my presence.

My wolf knew he calmed her. The animal had known from the first night, had felt her tension drop half a degree every time I put myself between her and a door. She didn’t have language for it yet. Maybe she never would.

But my wolf knew.

Her head went down onto her arms, the notebook still open beside her face. I watched her breathing even out, watched her shoulders let go, and my wolf went absolutely still with a satisfaction that felt dangerous.

I put a blanket over her.

Careful. No more contact than the gesture required: though my wolf registered the three inches between my hand and the back of her neck like a live wire. Her breathing didn’t change when I covered her.

She trusted me enough to stay asleep while I moved close.

I stood at the window. Dawn came slow and gray, trunks resolving out of the dark one at a time, the mountain waking in increments I’d learned over six years on this property.

My wolf watched with me. I had the conversation with him again: the patient, repeated conversation a man has with his animal when the animal is right and the timing is wrong.

Not yet. She doesn’t know what you are. She needs ground before she needs weight.

He didn’t argue. He hadn’t argued once since the first night, which should have been reassuring and was instead the opposite. A wolf that stops arguing is a wolf that has decided to wait.

Waiting isn’t yielding.

At five-forty I texted Jace: Run it again at first light. Full sweep.

At six-twelve, his answer came through on the tablet. I read it with the dawn fully up and the tree line bright and apparently clear.

Four words and a grid coordinate.

Second trail. Parallel. He wasn’t alone.

My hand tightened on the tablet. My wolf went still: the stillness that comes before action, not rest.

Thorne had come to the mountain with backup. This had never been a solo tracking operation. The faction had escalated before I ever got her out of the city. Every hour of tonight that had felt like preparation was actually the window closing.

I turned and looked at Ivy asleep at the table, blanket at her shoulders, notebook open beside her face.

And my wolf said something that wasn’t a word but landed in my chest like a decision already made.

Chapter 4

The Architecture of Doubt

IVY

I woke to the weight of unfamiliar quiet.

No city traffic bleeding through thin walls. No radiator clicking through its morning cycle. No neighbor’s television murmuring overhead. Just mountain stillness and the smell of eggs and coffee and woodsmoke, and for three disorienting seconds I had no idea where I was.

Then the blanket registered: rough wool, tucked around my shoulders with a care I hadn’t felt when it happened. My notebook was still open beside my face, the ink smeared where my cheek had pressed the page. I didn’t remember falling asleep.

I didn’t ask who covered me. Ten years of reading small kindnesses for a living had already told me. Maddox Reed had stood close enough to lay a blanket over me without waking me. Then he’d gone back to his perimeter and not made it into a moment.