Page 3 of Fated, Allegedly

"Loose. Two hundred yards minimum, downwind, no shifting inside the survey grid. He tracks her routes and reports twice a day. You take nights near the rental cabin."

"You want a rotation on a woman who's been here two days."

"I want to know who else is watching her."

He studies me, he's my Beta and my oldest friend and he can smell a lie through a closed door. After a moment he stands and knocks his knuckles twice on the desk, which is Caleb for I'll ask later.

"Isla's going to have opinions," he says on the way out.

"Isla always has opinions."

"Yeah, but this time she's going to be right."

Two o'clock, Wyatt's voice comes over the radio with the studied calm of a twenty-eight-year-old having the time of his life. She's off the west transect. She's walking the drainage line straight toward the hollow where nine of my wolves are bedded down after a long night.

I cut across the ridge on foot and come down onto the deer path ahead of her, and she's got her head bent over a handheld receiver, following a ping that isn't going to lead anywhere good.

"Dr. Lawson."

She jumps about a foot and then covers it by planting her hands on her hips. "Do you own this forest or do you just haunt it?"

"You're outside your permitted grid."

"I'm two hundred meters outside my permitted grid, and I have a mortality signal from collar four-one-seven, which has been dead since March and just started pinging at eleven-forty this morning." She holds up the receiver like a badge. "Which means either the battery resurrected or somebody moved that collar. Guess which one I believe."

"Give me the frequency. I'll pull it and log it."

"Absolutely not."

"It's my jurisdiction."

"It's part of my survey." She steps around me and I move with her, casual, blocking the drainage without looking like I'm blocking anything, but she notices. "Okay. Explain something to me. You've got a basin-wide collapse in your predator population and a state biologist standing here with funding and equipment, and our conversations end with you telling me where I can't go."

"I've told you three places you can't go. There's four hundred square miles you can."

"You've told me the three interesting ones." She pushes a loose piece of hair off her cheek with the back of her wrist. "How do you manage this basin? Actually. Not the brochure."

"Carefully."

"That's not management, that's a personality."

"Fine." I lean against a birch and cross my arms. "I don't move animals unless they're going to die where they are. I don't cull. I don't feed. I don't relocate a bear because somebody left a cooler out. I let the system carry its own weight."

"And when the system is bleeding out? You've lost your apex predators, Warden. That's not equilibrium, that's a wound. Intervention isn't arrogance, it's triage."

"Every intervention I've watched in twenty years was somebody deciding they understood a thing they'd studied for eighteen months."

"Ouch."

"You asked for it straight."

Her mouth curves, reluctant and real, and I feel it under my sternum. "You're not wrong. I've seen exactly that. Wolf reintroduction in a valley with no prey base, nine animals starved, everybody got a photo op." She shakes her head. "But you're also standing here defending a hands-off philosophy while somebody is very obviously putting their hands all over your lake."

There's no good answer to that. There's a true one, and she can't have it yet.

"Come on," I say, turning us both back toward the west. "I'll walk you out. I'll even carry something."

"I don't need⁠—"