Page 10 of Warded By His Wolf

He was at the stove when I lifted my head. Broad back. Dark hair. That stillness I’d already learned belonged only to him. A man who could stand at a stovetop and make it look like a checkpoint.

He didn’t turn. “Eggs are almost done.”

Then he crossed the kitchen and set a mug in front of me. Coffee. Pale with milk, one sugar. Fixed exactly the way I’d fixed my own second cup last night, standing at the counter while he checked the windows.

I stared at it.

He’d watched. Once. And remembered.

Nobody makes your coffee the way you doctor it because you’re an intelligence asset. I wrapped both hands around the mug. I didn’t say thank you for the blanket or the coffee. He’d built both gestures small on purpose, and honoring that felt more accurate than gratitude.

“How long was I asleep?”

He turned then, and the morning light caught something red-gold at the edge of his dark eyes before it settled. “Three hours. Enough.”

I pulled the blanket tighter and thought about last night, vague pieces of it, sleep-fogged: Maddox’s voice low near the window sometime before dawn, the tablet’s glow against his jaw. Whatever he’d read out there, he was carrying it differently than he had been the night before. Quieter. I was beginning to understand that quiet as the thing that happened inside him before he acted.

He set a plate in front of me and sat across the table with his own coffee. Didn’t eat. His attention stayed on the tree line through the window.

I ate, because eating was the one thing he couldn’t do for me, and he’d already done everything else.

The eggs were good. Simple, seasoned right. The coffee cut through the fog of three hours of sleep stacked on three years of suppressed terror. I drank half of it before I trusted my voice.

“The second trail. What does it mean?”

“It means he has support. Coordination, not coincidence.” His gaze didn’t leave the window. “Jace is running it down.”

I thought about what coordination meant for a man who tracked seers. What support looked like when the objective was a person.

“Will they come here?”

“Not while we hold the perimeter.” He finally looked at me, and whatever calculation ran behind those steady eyes, I couldn’t read it. “You’re safe inside these walls.”

I wanted to believe that. The way I’d wanted to believe every reassurance I’d ever been handed. That the visions were stress, imagination, something sleep and professional distance could manage into silence.

But Maddox hadn’t given me a reassurance. He’d given me a condition.

Conditions I could work with.

Tara Quinn arrived at ten-seventeen.

I heard the car before I saw it, tires on gravel, the engine cutting clean. Maddox was at the door before footsteps hit the porch, his posture shifting into readiness without alarm. He stepped back to let her in.

Dark-haired. Sharp-eyed. A wool coat still carrying the cold of the mountain road. Her bag was open before she reached the table. No preamble. No checking-in. None of the careful warmth I recognized from colleagues about to deliver bad news.

She sat down across from me, opened a leather case and a tablet, and assessed me without pretending to do anything else.

“Your visions have a structural pattern consistent with third-tier seer classification. You’re not malfunctioning. You’re undertrained.”

The word hit like a door opening in a wall I’d thought was solid.

Undertrained.

Not broken. Not oversensitive. Not in need of additional professional support for my overactive stress response. The only thing wrong with me was the absence of instruction.

I sat with that for exactly four seconds. Then I excused myself, walked to the bathroom, and closed the door.

Six minutes.