Page 5 of Warded By His Wolf

I told myself adrenaline three times.

The third time, the word fell apart.

Adrenaline runs hot and jittery. Fight-or-flight makes everything sharper and more urgent. This wasn’t that. This was proximity to a fire: my skin registering it before my thoughts caught up, an instinct that made me want to lean closer instead of pull away.

I stopped trying to name it and watched his hands instead.

He never gripped the wheel hard. That surprised me. A man who’d packed me out of my apartment in under eight minutes should have had white knuckles. Instead his grip was loose. Steady. He drove like driving was something his body handled on its own so the rest of him could hunt.

“Who is Elias Thorne?”

The question came out before I’d fully decided to ask it. Maddox didn’t startle, didn’t glance over. He just answered.

“Human-passing arcane tracker. Patient. Methodical. He works for the faction I told you about, the one buried inside the Veil Council. Most of the Council doesn’t know it’s carrying them.”

“How do you find out about a faction hidden inside your own government?”

“You don’t. Not officially.”

The road narrowed. The forest pressed closer on both sides, branches meeting overhead, and the shift in light gave his words a weight they wouldn’t have had in my apartment.

“The faction locates people whose gifts give them access to things they need kept invisible,” he continued. Both hands stayed on the wheel. “Three seers in four years. None of them reported it twice.”

The delivery wasn’t cold. It was respect: the respect of a man who didn’t believe you needed the truth softened in order to survive it. I’d spent three years with Dr. Miriam Vale’s voice in my head, gentle and patient, suggesting I consider other explanations. Suggesting it was stress. Suggesting, always suggesting, that I might be wrong.

Maddox wasn’t suggesting anything. He was stating facts.

“The agency tracks their movement through confirmed sightings,” he said. “Your vision of Thorne is the third confirmed in fourteen months. The first two were scattered. Yours puts him inside the same radius as the last one, and the gap between sightings is closing.”

Third confirmed. Not a delusion. Not stress. An intelligence report that matched what I’d seen inside my own skull tonight.

“I wasn’t the first person to see him.” It wasn’t a question.

“No.” The road curved hard. His hands moved on the wheel, unhurried, and we cleared the turn without slowing more than necessary. “But you’re the first who called it in while you could still be reached safely.”

The sentence landed somewhere below my sternum and stayed there. While you could still be reached safely. The others hadn’t called at all. Or they’d called too late. Or they’d called and no one had come.

“What makes me a seer?”

“I don’t know enough about your gift to answer that.” He paused at a junction I never would have noticed, no sign, no marker, just a gap in the trees that became a road when he turned into it. “Tara Quinn will. She’s meeting us at the house.”

Not deflection. Honesty about the limits of what he knew, with no pretending otherwise. I set it beside the way he’d written down my vision without pausing, the way he’d photographed my phone, the way his jaw had tightened by exactly one degree when he read those four words.

He was building a case. Treating everything I gave him like it mattered.

I didn’t know what to do with that.

The signal died fifteen minutes later. No bars where bars should be. No backup plan. No calling for help if help became necessary. Just the road and the trees and the man in the driver’s seat, checking the rearview mirror with the thoroughness of someone who understood exactly what could come up from behind.

Not anxious. That was the thing. No white knuckles, no compulsive checking. Just thorough, the same unhurried competence he’d given the steering wheel, given now to the darkness behind us.

Once, on a long straightaway, he cracked his window two inches and breathed in the cold air moving past. Not for the air. He was reading it. Then the window went back up and he said nothing, and I didn’t ask: because some part of me already understood the answer wasn’t for my comfort.

I’d spent three years being reassured. I’m sure it’s nothing, Ivy. Why don’t we schedule a follow-up?

I’d never once been watched over by someone who already knew what to look for.

The property appeared at the end of a road that required knowing where to turn. The turn wasn’t marked. Intentional, not neglected. Someone had decided the unmarked turn was safer than the alternative.