Page 64 of Warded By His Wolf

“What time?”

Roan’s mouth didn’t quite curve, but something in his face moved in that direction. “Nine hundred. Caleb likes to start early.”

“Then I’ll be ready early.”

She picked up her pen and went back to her notes, and the briefing was over. Gideon began packing with the efficiency of a man whose assessment had produced the outcome he expected. What my wolf noted, with the attention it gave everything involving her: Ivy’s hand had stopped shaking somewhere in the middle of the conversation. Not because the stakes had gotten smaller. Because she had decided they no longer had permission to shake her.

At the door, Gideon went ahead to the vehicles. Roan didn’t.

He stopped in the kitchen doorway, and something in his posture changed. The command architecture came down, plank by plank, until what stood there was not field command. Just a man, holding something heavy with both hands.

“Miss Bennett. Before I go.” His voice was lower than briefing register. “Gideon came to see me four days ago. In person. About the identity resolution on the informant.”

Ivy set down her pen. The kitchen went very still. I stayed exactly where I was.

“Miriam Vale is my father’s cousin,” Roan said. “The Vale who left the packs before I was born. I grew up inside the hole she left in that family: a name nobody would say at tables, a door nobody would explain. I spent my whole life assuming she was a grief.” His jaw set. “She was an operation.”

He looked at Ivy directly, and he did not soften a syllable of it.

“What was done to you was done with instincts our line bred and skills our world taught her. The agency will prosecute her crimes. I wanted you to hear, from the only Vale in this organization, that the family will answer for the name.” A pause. “That’s not an apology. An apology would suggest it could be made even. It’s an accounting. You’re owed one, and I keep accounts.”

Ivy held his gaze the way she’d held it through the briefing, steady, reading everything. When she answered, her voice was the one she used for true things.

“You don’t owe me her debt, Commander. She spent it herself.” A beat. “But I’ll take the witness. That part matters.”

Roan nodded. The rare one: the second time in an hour, which as far as I knew had never happened in the history of the agency. Then he put the command architecture back on, said “Nine hundred, next week,” and walked out to his truck.

The front door closed. Engines started. Gravel crunched. The safe house settled back into its quiet.

Ivy looked up from her notes and found me watching her, my eyes still faintly red-gold from the tension of the morning.

“You’re staring,” she said.

“I know.”

“Any reason?”

I crossed to the table and put my hand on the back of her neck, over the mark, warm, certain. She leaned into it the way she had learned to lean, without bracing first.

“You’re going to be extraordinary,” I said.

She turned her head just enough to press her mouth to the inside of my wrist.

“I know,” she said.

My wolf made a sound that wasn’t a word but was unmistakably agreement. I stood there with my hand on my mate and the morning light through the window. Whatever came next (headquarters, three un-located seers, a buyer above the maps still holding her profile) we were walking into it together.

She was going to walk into a room full of wolves who should have found her three years ago. She was going to give them exactly what they failed to find.

And I was going to be there when she did it. Not because she needed protection: though she had it. Somewhere in the eight days between her apartment door and this kitchen table, watching her be exactly what she was had become the most important thing I knew how to do.

Chapter 23

The Room I Was Never Meant to Reach

IVY

The elevator doors opened onto the fourth floor of Pack Guard Agency headquarters. I knew before I cleared the threshold that I was being catalogued.