Page 20 of Warded By His Wolf

The morning after Gideon’s call, I woke to the smell of coffee and the sound of nothing at all.

I woke alone, which told me as much as anything Maddox could have said out loud.

He’d carried me to my room sometime before dawn. I had a vague memory of his arms, his voice low in my hair: Sleep. I’ve got the perimeter. Then he’d gone back to work, because that was who he was. The fire from hours ago hadn’t gone anywhere. It had just learned to sit quietly under everything else that needed doing today.

Not true silence: the safe house had its own language by now, and I’d learned to read it. Porch boards creaking meant Maddox on perimeter. A certain rhythm of footsteps in the kitchen meant Noah. The absence of Jace’s restless energy meant he was running the tree line in fur, which he preferred to any conversation longer than three sentences.

But this morning, the house held its breath.

I sat up and reached for my vision journal on the nightstand, a reflex now. Three years of recording what I saw had trained my hands to find paper before my mind fully surfaced. The index cards Tara and I had organized were still spread across the desk by the window. Geographic coordinates. Timeline markers. The architecture of something I’d been building without knowing I was building it.

Gideon’s voice from last night: The operational window opens in four days.

Which made it three now.

I pulled on two sweaters against the mountain cold, gathered my cards, and padded to the kitchen.

Maddox stood at the counter with his back to the doorway, and I knew from the quality of his stillness that he’d been awake for hours. Maybe all night. The security tablet glowed beside an empty mug, and the tension in his shoulders was visible before he turned.

“Coffee’s fresh.” He didn’t look up. His voice carried the rough edge of too little sleep and too much calculation.

I slid into my chair at the table: the one that had become mine in three days flat, without either of us acknowledging it. The wood was warm from the stove.

“How long have you been up?”

“Long enough.” He poured a mug (milk, one sugar, my way, without asking) and brought it to me, and his hand brushed mine in the transfer. Not accidental. Neither of us pretended it was. The heat went up my wrist and had nothing to do with the ceramic. “Operational meeting at eight. Everyone present.”

I glanced at the window. Gray pre-dawn light. “What time is it?”

“Five-forty.”

So he’d been running scenarios in the dark the way I ran vision sequences, the way I’d spent three years calculating probabilities alone at kitchen tables while the world slept. The difference was that his math involved sensor arrays and weapon inventories. Mine had involved translating what I saw into language that didn’t get me referred to another specialist.

“Three days,” I said, because someone needed to say it out loud.

He sat across from me, thumb moving along the rim of his mug: the gesture I’d learned meant thinking. “Gideon needs your completed index a full day before the window opens to build the counter-pattern. Which gives us two.”

“Two days to finish three years of translation.”

“The math is tight.” His dark eyes met mine, steady. “Every decision between now and then is load-bearing.”

I understood what he wasn’t saying. The marker he’d found on the south perimeter. The second trail that meant Elias wasn’t alone. The window that meant we were running out of time before we’d properly started.

“Have you held safe houses in worse conditions?”

Something shifted in his face, not quite a smile, but close. “Less cover. Fewer allies. Worse terrain.”

“But you held them.”

“Every one that mattered.”

The way he said it made me set down my mug. There was weight under the words, something he wasn’t telling me yet. I thought about the seer he’d told me about on my first night here. The woman whose visions were documented and filed and not acted on. Who died inside a window just like this one.

I didn’t ask. He’d tell me when the telling served a purpose. Right now the purpose was preparation.

“Walk me through the meeting,” I said instead. “What do you need from me?”

His eyes went to my stack of cards, and something in his expression eased. Just slightly. Just enough that I noticed.