Page 60 of Warded By His Wolf

“I know.” I pulled him down. “I’m in it too.”

When he finally moved inside me it was with the whole of himself, no held-back fraction, no leash, nothing kept in reserve for control’s sake. I met him the same way, and the bond sang between us like a struck bell that did not stop ringing. He said my name like scripture. I said his like a claim, again, because he asked, because every time I said it the current surged and neither of us could breathe for a moment.

It built slow and broke enormous. When I came apart he was three seconds behind me, his forehead pressed to the mark, his whole body shaking. Through the level line I felt his release and mine braided into a single thing with no seam in it anywhere.

After, we lay tangled in the dark, his heartbeat slowing under my ear.

I took his hands (both of them, steady as bedrock) and pressed them flat over my heart anyway.

“They’re not shaking,” he murmured.

“I know.” I held them there. “This time it’s not first aid. It’s just where they live now.”

I felt the words move through him, through the bond, through the man. All the way down to wherever the boy who’d spent eleven years holding other people’s doors had been waiting. He gathered me in and pressed his mouth to my hair, and we slept the way you sleep when every door in you is finally closed from the inside.

Tara arrived the next morning at nine-fifteen, not by secure channel but physically, her dark coat immaculate despite the mountain road. She set a leather folio on the kitchen table with the air of a woman delivering something she had been building toward for weeks, nodded at Noah at the counter, and sat.

She looked at me for one extra half-second. Whatever had shifted between us overnight, Tara read it from across the kitchen, filed it, and declined to comment, which was Tara’s version of congratulations.

She opened the folio. “This is the completed seer-line documentation. Your full bloodline record, reconstructed from archive cross-references and my own pattern analysis. The structural mapping of your third-tier gift. And what I am calling, for lack of a more elegant term, a training framework.”

Twelve pages. I turned them slowly, aware of Maddox at the counter making coffee. He had the studied attention of a man absolutely listening to every word who had decided not to be visible about it.

“Your gift is undertrained,” Tara said. “Not damaged. Not malfunctioning. Undertrained. The resonance signals that made you trackable to Elias and flaggable to the faction’s informant chain are not flaws in the gift. They’re symptoms of an undirected one.”

“Symptoms.”

“You’ve been generating high-frequency seer output for years with no idea there was a way to govern the broadcast. Think of it as—” She paused, choosing. “You’ve been running a radio tower without knowing there was a dial. Everything you saw went out at maximum volume to anyone listening.”

“And Elias was listening.”

“Elias was listening. Miriam was listening. The faction’s monitoring network was listening.” Her voice stayed level, with the edge underneath. “With structured work over months, the broadcast can be governed. Directed. You generate the intelligence without lighting the beacon.”

I turned another page, her exact annotations, agency case references, two academic texts I’d never heard of. “This is months of work.”

“Yes.”

“And it’s not therapy.”

Tara looked at me directly. “It is not therapy. It is a discipline. I am not here to help you feel better about your gift. I am here to teach you how to use it.”

The distinction landed harder than it should have. Three years of professional voices suggesting support, suggesting resources, suggesting I might benefit from talking to someone about my anxiety. None of them had ever said the word discipline. None of them had ever treated what I saw as something to be honed rather than soothed.

I set the folio down and asked the question that mattered. “Can I do this from here?”

Tara’s expression shifted by half a degree, the closest thing to surprise she owned. “That’s actually what I came to discuss.”

The consultation offer, she explained, was not a city-office position. The agency ran distributed and mobile. A seer consultant with my documented range was most useful in a safe house adjacent to environment with secure infrastructure, not in a glass-walled building where my resonance would ping every sensitive in the metropolitan radius.

“This location qualifies,” she said. “The mountain property. Noah’s perimeter systems. The infrastructure Maddox has spent the past week reinforcing.” A pause. “More than qualifies. In my assessment, it is optimal.”

At the counter, Maddox went very still. Not stillness, containment. Through the settled bond I felt it whole now, undamped. The held breath of a man who wanted something with everything in him and would not say it aloud until I had decided for myself.

I kept my eyes on the folio and asked Tara three questions in succession. Compensation structure. Operational scope and reporting chain. Access to the full intelligence archive for cross-referencing my visions against historical case data.

She answered all three without hesitation.

“Caleb anticipated those. He wanted you to know the offer is not conditional on geography. And that if you choose to stay here, the agency supports it fully.”