Page 29 of Warded By His Wolf

“I didn’t know what I was building.”

“You built it anyway.” His thumb traced a small circle at the base of my skull. “That’s not nothing, Ivy. That might be the strongest thing I’ve ever watched anyone do.”

I leaned back into his hand and let myself feel (fully, without rationing it) what it was to be believed.

The afternoon slid toward evening, and the storm that was supposed to bury us for three days began, impossibly, to thin. I sent the completed record to Tara’s channel and stood at the window. The tree line was coming back into existence through the falling-off snow. The bond carried Maddox’s alertness to me from the perimeter like a second skin, the wolf watchful, the man reading the weather with narrowed eyes.

He came in at dusk with snow melting in his dark hair. “Storm’s breaking early. Forecast said three days. It’s giving us one.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“Both. The road opens for Noah and the agency.” His jaw set. “It also opens for them.”

Then headlights appeared on the access road.

He was at the window before I’d finished registering the light. He read everything at once, angle, speed, the way the vehicle handled the snow-pack. The tension in his shoulders eased one degree.

“Noah. Earlier than expected.”

Noah came up the porch steps with his weather-worn economy. When he stepped inside, his glance moved from my face to Maddox and back, and something shifted in his expression. Not quite a smile. In that direction. Whatever the mark told other wolves, it had apparently just told him.

“Storm’s clearing,” he said to Maddox. “Road’s passable if you know where to turn.”

“Jace?”

“Running the south perimeter in fur. East ridge is clear.” He shrugged off his coat, hung it by the door, and then his expression changed, the warmth giving way to something sharper. “There’s something else.”

He drew a sealed evidence bag from his coat and set it on the table between us. “Jace found it on the south trail. You need to see it before Gideon does.”

Inside was a small object, compact, arcane. The kind of thing that would mean nothing to someone who didn’t know what they were looking at.

I knew.

The vision-resonance hit me before I could name it, recognition arriving in my body first, the way everything true always had. My skin went cold. Through the bond, Maddox felt it land. His hand came to the mark at my shoulder, warm and immediate, before either of us decided it should.

“What is it?” My voice held. Barely.

“Arcane marker,” he said. “Different signature than the last one. This isn’t a tracking device.”

“Then what is it?”

His jaw tightened. “A message. Positioned, not dropped. Whoever left it wanted us to find it.”

I stared at the object and felt the resonance pulse again. It was a frequency I knew from the scattered images I’d been trying to translate for days. Not the building. Not the staging positions.

Something else. Somewhere older.

“I’ve seen this before,” I said. “In the visions. The ones I kept trying to confirm before I spoke.”

Maddox’s hand pressed against the mark, and through the bond his focus sharpened to a blade. “Which visions?”

I met his eyes.

“The ones with Miriam.”

Chapter 10

Seven Months