Page 61 of Warded By His Wolf

Noah poured himself coffee. “Still could use people who don’t leave,” he said, to no one in particular.

A callback, from a man who did not repeat himself for anyone.

Tara left at midmorning with a signed preliminary agreement in her folio, three pages on agency letterhead. My name was on the signature line in clear, unhesitating handwriting that did not look like the signature of a woman who prefaces her certainties with qualifiers.

Then I picked up my phone and called Ella.

The call was two minutes. I told her I wasn’t coming home.

She was quiet for exactly three seconds. I counted them, because I knew my best friend, knew the shape of her silences.

Then: “I know. I saw your face when you laughed at dinner.”

No argument in it. Something that wasn’t quite grief and wasn’t quite relief, the only honest response to watching someone you love become more fully themselves in a place you can’t follow. We said goodbye the way you say it when the thing ending isn’t a visit but a version. The version of Ivy who came home already apologizing. Who soft-pedaled warnings into questions. Who kept her visions in a journal she never showed anyone.

That version ended on a Tuesday morning in a mountain kitchen. The bond ran level in my chest, and my name was on an agreement that treated what I saw as an asset instead of a liability.

I set the phone down.

Maddox came in from the porch. He stood in the doorway with his hands at his sides and the wolf low and steady in his eyes: a fire that had burned long enough to settle into itself.

“I signed the agreement,” I said.

“I know.”

“I’m staying.”

The word landed differently than it had on the porch steps three nights ago, said over the aftermath of violence with blood on his hands. This was daylight. The house was quiet. No one was bleeding. I had chosen this the way I had chosen him, full information, eyes open, no adrenaline making the choice feel inevitable. Twice now. Once in the dark. Once in the light.

He crossed the kitchen and stopped at the table, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him. He looked at me the way he had since the first night: like I was the most disorienting fact he had ever encountered and he was profoundly grateful for the disorientation.

“Caleb’s going to want to accelerate the timeline,” he said.

“I know.”

“Tara’s framework starts in two weeks.”

“I know.”

Neither of us was talking about Caleb, or the timeline, or Tara’s framework.

He reached across the table and set his hand over mine, warm, certain, the claiming weight of it familiar now, and doubled, because the bond beneath it ran both ways.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said. “About the next phase. About what Gideon found last night.”

The bond shifted. What had been settled warmth became something with edges.

I looked up at his face and read what was there, not fear; Maddox didn’t carry fear in any conventional way. The gravity of a man holding information that was going to complicate the quietest morning we had ever had.

“Tell me,” I said.

Chapter 22

Officially Concluded

MADDOX

The morning that was almost quiet became something else in the space of a breath.