Page 36 of Warded By His Wolf

“The safe house coordinates,” he said quietly. “The marker on the south trail. The contact on the east perimeter. Elias’s approach was too clean for cold tracking. I kept running the breach and finding nothing: because the breach wasn’t in my systems. It was in your history. She fed him the route through knowledge I couldn’t have screened for, and I still⁠⁠⁠—”

“Stop.”

The word came out sharper than I intended. I let it stay sharp.

“I spent three years letting someone convince me my own mind was the problem. I am not going to sit at this table and watch you do it to yourself in a single night.” I held his eyes, red-gold, wide open, startled. “You built the perimeter around everything that could be seen. She had decades and a bloodline and a head start measured in years. That’s not a hole in your protection, Maddox. That’s the size of what we’re actually fighting.”

He didn’t look away. He didn’t deflect.

“You believed me from the first night,” I said. “You wrote my words down without pausing. Miriam spent three years teaching me to question myself, and you undid it in four days. So hear me the way you heard me then: the breach wasn’t yours. It was hers.” I leaned forward. “And we’re going to end it.”

The bond flared between us: warm, fierce, nothing to do with compulsion and everything to do with choice. His hands turned over under mine and held on.

“Ours,” he said. Rough. “We end it together.”

“Together.” I sat back, and the counselor in me (the real one, the one Miriam had tried to weaponize) reached for the thing that came next. “I want the full documentation. Every flagging notation. Every archive date. The complete chain from her first entry to the safehouse coordinates. If my dismantling has a paper trail, I want to read every page of it with my own eyes.”

The channel icon pulsed once in acknowledgment, Tara, still listening on processing-only.

“Ready by six a.m.,” her voice said.

“Good.”

The channel dimmed. The kitchen settled around us, low light, cold mugs, the index cards, the tree line black beyond the glass. The safe house that had become home in ways I hadn’t planned. The man across from me had believed what I saw before he had any reason to. His hands were still wrapped around mine like a promise with a pulse.

“She left the packs,” I said quietly. “Whatever she was walking away from, she turned it into this. Into me. Into that boy.” I shook my head slowly. “I keep trying to find the place where it makes sense.”

“It won’t.” Maddox’s voice was low. “Some people leave a thing and spend the rest of their lives punishing it for existing. You weren’t a person to her, Ivy. You were a message she was sending home.”

The truth of it went through me like cold water. I didn’t flinch from it. I was done flinching from true things.

Then his phone lit up on the table between us, Jace, one line, no greeting, no punctuation.

he moved the timeline. not waiting for the window. coming tomorrow night

The kitchen went absolutely silent.

I read it twice. Tomorrow night. Not two days. Eighteen hours.

Maddox’s hand found the back of my neck, over the mark, warm and steady. Through the bond his wolf surged forward with nothing strategic in it at all. Just the single animal fact of mate, threat, proximity.

“He knows we identified her,” I said. The calm in my own voice surprised me. The voice of a woman who had stopped qualifying her knowledge. “The moment her name went on the record, his clock changed. She would have told him it was burning.”

“Yes,” Maddox said.

Outside, the tree line stood dark and still and patient.

Inside, the countdown had begun. Eighteen hours.

Chapter 13

Containment Pace

MADDOX

Six a.m. arrived with the gray edge of a blade through winter air. I was already at the kitchen table when Ivy came out of the hallway, footsteps soft on the floorboards. Her face carried the composure of a woman who had decided somewhere in the small hours that grief and function were not mutually exclusive.

She didn’t look at me first. She looked at the documentation Tara had delivered overnight: twenty-three pages spread flat across the table. Her own vision journal was open beside them. A pen was already in her hand. The coffee was still brewing. She sat down anyway.