Page 11 of Warded By His Wolf

Cold water over my wrists. My own face in the mirror. Dark circles, hair carrying the imprint of the notebook page. The expression of a woman who’d just heard something land in a place she’d been guarding for three years.

I let it move through me. Miriam Vale’s composed face every time I’d brought her a warning and she’d suggested I consider what else might be causing it. The careful, exhausting work of making myself smaller than what I saw.

Undertrained.

I went back to the table and sat down. “What does third-tier mean?”

She explained it the way she’d delivered the first verdict, brisk, no therapeutic framing. Most seers get flashes. A feeling that something’s wrong, gone before they can pin it down. That’s tier one. Tier two gets images, blurry, more metaphor than fact. Third-tier is different. Third-tier gets faces. Locations. Timing precise enough to build a case file from. My visions weren’t impressions. They were coordinates.

And the suppression I’d taught myself for three years: the softening, the qualifying, the waiting until I was sure. It didn’t reduce the visions.

It compressed them.

“The more you confirm before you report,” Tara said, “the harder the gift overloads when it surfaces. The blood in your mouth (biting through your own cheek in your sleep) isn’t malfunction. It’s a signal being forced through a channel too small for it.”

I wrote it down. My handwriting was steadier than I expected.

Across the kitchen, Maddox leaned against the counter and watched my face through the whole exchange. Not watching to see if I’d break. Watching the way you watch something you’ve decided matters.

The afternoon shifted when Jace came back.

Footsteps on the porch, fast. Maddox was already moving. I followed without deciding to. He’d included me in every briefing since my own kitchen table, and that hadn’t changed.

Jace was dark-eyed and restless, attention never settling anywhere longer than two seconds. Built for pursuit, not patience. He gave the report with me standing in the doorway.

“Trail’s fresher. Second track runs parallel at a distance that means coordination.” His eyes cut to the tree line and back. “The second contact isn’t a tracker. They’re a spotter. Holding position.”

Then, mid-sentence, without transition, he dropped.

Not a fall. A shift.

A man became a wolf, black, huge, immediate. He hit the porch steps in motion and dissolved into the tree line before the door swung shut.

I went very still.

My hands found the porch railing. The wood was cold and solid, and I gripped it because my legs were asking questions my brain hadn’t caught up to.

Maddox turned from the door. Not to read my face, to read my hands, white-knuckled on the wood.

He stepped toward me by one pace. Stopped.

“We’re wolf shifters.” Flat. Factual. The next true thing in a sequence already decided by what was real. “The agency is made of them. I should have told you the first night.”

The red-gold heat entered his eyes as he said it.

And the stillness settled over him, not human stillness, not a man holding himself in check. It was the thing I’d been unable to name since my apartment doorway. My body had registered a fact my mind refused to categorize.

He was waiting for my reaction the way a man waits for a verdict he’s already accepted.

I looked at him. I looked at the tree line where a wolf named Jace had disappeared. I looked back at the red-gold in his eyes.

I thought about every moment I’d spent in this house noting the ways he moved wrong by human standards. The too-stillness. The attention that landed with physical weight. The heat when he crossed a room I was standing in.

I thought about the blanket.

I thought about the mug he’d put in my hands on the porch last night. And the one he’d set in front of me this morning, fixed my way.

I thought about three seconds in my apartment doorway when my body recalibrated around a fact my mind refused to name.