Page 44 of Warded By His Wolf

“I didn’t know it wasn’t.” A ghost of a smile. “Nobody’s told me what I can’t do in days.”

The fury drained out of me and left something larger in its place. I took her face in both hands (carefully, because of the blood on mine) and pressed my forehead to hers and just breathed her in, alive and stubborn and right.

Then the work. There was always the work first.

Noah was at the north door with a folded cloth pressed to his forearm, blood seeping through. The operative who’d come through was unconscious behind him: zip-tied, neutralized, alive only because Noah had decided to leave him that way.

“Knife,” Noah said when I reached him, flat in the way he got when he was annoyed at his own body. “Shallow. Could’ve been worse.”

I took the cloth and applied pressure with both hands (the same hands that had just run a man down in the dark) and Noah exhaled and stopped holding himself rigid.

“The other two?”

“Jace has them at the south tree line. Both down. Extraction’s forty minutes out.”

I dressed the wound from the kit he kept at the door. Checked his pupils, his grip, his color. He let me, which was Noah’s version of gratitude.

“She’s still on the porch,” he said, quiet.

“I know.”

“You going to talk to her?”

“I’m going to finish this first.”

Noah looked at me a long moment. “Good man.”

I went back out. Ivy sat on the top step now, arms around her knees, face turned toward the tree line. I didn’t stand over her. I crouched on the step below, almost level, so she could see exactly what I was when I said what needed saying.

The wolf was still in my eyes. I didn’t push him down. She’d seen it. She had the right to it now.

“I will never be the safest thing you know.” Quieter than I expected. Rougher than I intended. “I need you to know that and stay anyway.”

She looked at me, really looked, over the blood on my hands, the wolf-light that hadn’t fully faded from my eyes. She didn’t flinch.

“I know exactly what you are,” she said. “I’m staying.”

Inside, the house was intact. Jace washed his hands at the sink with the economy of a man who’d found the work adequate. Noah took the north window, bandaged, posture announcing he was done being fussed over. Tara’s voice was on the channel, clipped, building the record for Gideon before dawn.

Every door had held.

Ivy stood in the middle of the kitchen and looked at the people who had kept her alive, the man who’d taken a knife to hold a door, the tracker who’d run the dark, the analyst already turning tonight into evidence. Through the bond came something that wasn’t words. I have you. I’m not leaving. Every promise five days had built.

Then Tara’s voice changed. Still professional. Careful underneath.

“Gideon moves on Miriam tonight. He needs confirmation on one detail first.” A pause. “It’s about the student. The one who was hurt three years ago.”

Ivy went very still beside me. Not fear. The bracing of someone who already knew the shape of what was coming.

“Miriam’s file shows she had seven weeks’ specific warning about that student before the incident.” Tara’s voice was exact. Clinical. And absolutely furious underneath the control. “Not from you, Ivy. From Elias.”

The silence that followed had weight.

Seven weeks. Miriam had known for seven weeks before Ivy ever walked into her office carrying the warning. Known because Elias told her. The whole thing coordinated (a boy’s injury scheduled, a young counselor’s credibility spent against it) an operation designed to teach Ivy she couldn’t trust herself, run at the exact moment her gift was becoming dangerous.

She hadn’t failed to save that student. She’d been built to fail: carefully, professionally, by a woman she trusted and a network that had been managing her from the start.

The wound she’d constructed her whole life around (the day she decided her knowing couldn’t be trusted) had never been her failure at all.