Page 4 of Warded By His Wolf

I picked it up.

Four words.

I see you too.

The cold hit me so hard my vision went white at the edges. I read it again. Again. Until I understood (with the bone-deep certainty I brought to every vision) that Elias Thorne wasn’t reacting to my call.

He’d been watching before I ever picked up the phone.

Close enough to see my light turn on at ten p.m. Close enough to count the minutes it took me to report him.

He hadn’t found me tonight.

He’d already been there.

“Maddox.” My voice came out flatter than I expected, the way it does when the fear finally has somewhere real to go. “You need to see this.”

He was in the doorway before I finished the sentence, not rushing, exactly, but there, the way weather arrives rather than travels. He read the screen over my shoulder without touching the phone, and I felt him go still in a different register this time. Not predator-still. Something colder.

“He’s not reacting,” Maddox said quietly. “He’s confirming he already knew.”

“That’s what I thought too.”

His jaw worked once. Whatever moved behind his eyes, he put it away before I could read it, the same way he had in the doorway ten minutes ago. Some instinct in him had opinions about this text message that had nothing to do with tactics.

“We’re leaving now,” he said. “Not in an hour. Now.”

I pocketed the phone, grabbed my bag, and walked out to meet the man I’d let into my apartment: because right now, he was the only thing standing between me and whatever was already outside my window.

The only question was whether he was ready for what was coming.

Looking at him, at the way he’d gone absolutely still the moment he saw my face⁠⁠⁠—

I was starting to think he’d been ready before I called.

Chapter 2

I See You Too

IVY

The phone sat face-down on my thigh because I couldn’t look at the screen again yet.

Four words. I see you too.

Maddox hadn’t said a word since he’d read the message over my shoulder. At the first stop sign outside my neighborhood, I finally looked over at him, watching his face in the dashboard glow. His jaw tightened, not the way people tighten their jaws in movies. Just a compression. A response that happened before thought could filter it.

He photographed my screen without asking. Then he made one call. “Jace. New contact on Ivy’s phone, unfamiliar number, four words: I see you too. Move the timeline up.” Three sentences, clipped and factual, done before we’d cleared the intersection. Then both hands came back to the wheel, and we kept moving.

He didn’t ask if I was sure the number was unfamiliar. Didn’t suggest I might have misread the context. Didn’t offer any of the soft professional hedging I’d learned to expect from people who were supposed to help.

He treated the message as evidence.

The absence of doubt sat strangely in my chest, taking up the space where doubt had always lived.

Two hours, he’d said. The safe house was two hours out, on roads that stopped being marked after the first forty minutes. Thirty minutes in, I gave up pretending I wasn’t watching him.

Adrenaline. That was the word I kept reaching for. A textbook stress response to a credible threat, compounded by an unreasonable amount of man in an enclosed vehicle. His shoulders took up more than their share of the car. His hands on the wheel were large and unhurried.