Page 51 of Warded By His Wolf

He stopped. Through the bond, his attention shifted to me, not surprised. Curious.

“You’re making the floorboards nervous,” I said.

He pulled out the chair across from me and sat. The table was covered with index cards, but his eyes stayed on my face.

“The afternoon is too quiet. He isn’t moving. That means he’s thinking.”

“I know.” I set down my pen. “I’ve been thinking too.”

“About?”

“What happens after.”

His hands, resting flat on the table, went very still. “After Elias?”

“After all of it. The testimony’s delivered. The informant chain is severed. Miriam’s burned.” I paused. “The operation that brought me here ends. What happens then?”

He didn’t answer immediately. Through the bond I felt him weighing, not the answer, which I suspected he’d had for days, but the shape of how to say it. Whether he was allowed to.

“What do you want to happen?” he asked finally.

I looked at the cards. My handwriting on every surface. Three years of being told I was imagining things, and here was the proof, organized and believed.

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I’m not going back to the apartment.”

His hands flexed once. The tell.

“The plants are probably dead anyway,” I added.

“Ella won’t water them.”

“Ella kills everything she touches.”

The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Something better: the warmth of shared understanding, a joke that only worked because he’d read my life closely enough to know who Ella was.

“Gideon will offer a consultation arrangement,” he said. “Tara mentioned it. The agency’s seer-intelligence capacity is thin, and your documentation is already producing operational value.”

“I know. Caleb said they’d been looking for someone who could see what I see for two years. I’d been trying to report it for three.”

“I remember.”

Of course he remembered. He’d been in the doorframe when Caleb said it, and the bond had carried the weight of it into both of us.

“Whatever you decide,” Maddox said, “that’s what happens after. I’m not going to tell you what the right choice is.”

“But you have an opinion.”

“I always have an opinion.”

“Tell me.”

He looked at me across the table, the wolf present, red-gold bleeding through the dark. “I think you spent three years being managed by people who didn’t believe what you saw. I think you deserve to be somewhere that uses your gift instead of containing it.” A pause. “I think you should stay.”

The word landed in my chest like a key finding its tooth. Stay.

Not as a protected civilian. Not as an asset in a safehouse. Stay as a choice, made with both eyes open, in a place where the people believed me.

I stood up from the table. He watched me come around it, tracking my path the way he tracked everything that mattered to him, and when I stopped in front of his chair he looked up at me with the attention that always made my skin feel too warm for the room.