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He turns and walks back into the trees.

His wolves follow.

Nash moves like he’s going to chase after them, but I grab his hand, holding him here with me. My heart slams against my ribs. It’s four against two. And even though I’d like to think I could put Ramsey in the dirt all by myself, now’s not the time.

Not with Lena lying in the leaves.

Instead, we watch them go until the forest swallows them like they were never there.

14

MIA

For a long moment, neither Nash nor I move. The hollow is quiet. The morning light continues its cold, indifferent march across the ground. Lena Voss is still at the base of her tree and still dead, and none of the conversation changed that.

Echo climbs slowly up my leg to my shoulder and sits there. For once, his little klepto hands are empty.

“He’s going to use it,” I say. My voice sounds like mine again. Just barely. “What he just saw. You and me. He’s going to use it.”

“How?” Nash asks.

“I don’t know. But he’ll find a way to hurt one of us with it. Or someone else.”

“I don’t doubt he’ll try.”

“Which means you’re a target now.”

“I was already a target. I said no to him first, remember?”

I shake my head. “It’s not the same. Now, you’re a way to hurt me.”

He turns to look at me. “Mia⁠—”

“We need to call Grey.” I reach for my phone. Hands steady. Mind already moving into the next thing and the next thing because that’s the only way any of this is survivable. “We need to report the body. And discuss the leak. It can’t be Lena. She left before we did, which means she can’t have known we’d be here. We need⁠—”

“Mia.”

“—to pack up camp and⁠—”

“Mia.” He says my name loud and sharp. I stop talking. “Look at me.”

I look at him.

“What happened to Lena wasn’t your fault,” he says quietly.

The words find the exact crack I’ve been mortaring over for the last twenty minutes.

I look at Lena.

I look at Nash.

“I know,” I say.

Which is not the same as believing it. And he knows that too. But he doesn’t push it. He just nods once and reaches out and puts his hand briefly over mine—warm and solid and gone again before I can decide what to do with it.

We photograph everything first. Lena, the tree, the buttons, the disturbed leaves, the tracks around her body. Then Nash shifts, and I watch as he does the hard work of digging a grave, knowing I should probably help but unable to make myself move. Echo sits on my shoulder in the cold morning light, and somewhere in the trees, Ramsey is walking away on his own terms again, and the day has barely started, and it already weighs a thousand pounds.

We reach the car around midmorning. I shift, dress, and get in the driver’s seat. Nash doesn’t argue. He loads the packs into the back, circles to the passenger side, and folds himself in. Echo scurries into the backseat just before Nash shuts the door.