Page 7 of Warded By His Wolf

Then Noah pulled Maddox into the hallway.

The shift in their bodies was casual in the way that means the opposite of casual. Their voices dropped into the register men use when a conversation isn’t supposed to carry. Below a whisper without quite being one.

I wasn’t trying to listen. But mountain houses are quiet, and the kitchen was eight feet from the hallway, and I caught exactly one phrase.

The trail is newer than the agency thought.

I set down my mug.

Newer. Which meant Elias Thorne hadn’t started moving when I called the tip line. He’d already been moving. The four words on my phone hadn’t come from a man who’d just found me.

And if the trail was newer than the agency thought, then two hours of unmarked road wasn’t a head start.

It was a countdown.

Chapter 3

Twelve Miles Out

MADDOX

The safe house went dark at midnight. I hadn’t moved from the couch in two hours.

Every light off. The hallway door visible in the thin glow of the security tablet. Mountain silence at two a.m., timber settling, the tick of cooling metal from the wood stove, nothing else.

Twenty-two hours without sleep. My wolf didn’t care.

It sat pressed against the inside of my chest, a low, continuous pressure that wasn’t aggression and wasn’t patience either. It was the insistence of an animal that had identified something irreversible and was waiting for the man to catch up.

The name of the irreversible thing was asleep in the room at the end of the hall.

I knew where she was in the house with an accuracy that had nothing to do with training. She’d shifted twice in the last hour, restless sleep, the kind that comes with dreams you don’t want to be having. Each movement went through me like a tuning fork struck against bone. I’d stopped pretending I didn’t know why.

The mate-recognition had locked in during the first three seconds outside her apartment door. One breath of the air between us, and my wolf had already decided something my mind hadn’t caught up to yet, a fact, not a feeling. I’d been holding that fact down with both hands ever since.

I ran the perimeter feed for the third time in two hours.

Eastern approach: clear. Northern sensor array: holding. South trail camera: tree trunks and shadow at fifteen-second intervals. The road access Noah monitored: dark and still.

None of it changed what I already knew.

Elias Thorne’s trail was twelve miles out and moving with the patience of a man confirming rather than approaching. Noah’s read was worse than the agency briefing, too clean, too controlled. The signature of someone who already knew where she was and was waiting for the right operational window.

The phrase Ivy had caught in the hallway (the trail is newer than the agency thought) wasn’t something I could walk back. She’d heard it. Her face when she set down the mug told me she’d already done the math.

I flexed my hands once, twice, working the tension out of my knuckles before it could become something visible.

My wolf wanted the full perimeter in shift form. Wanted it badly, red-gold pressure building behind my eyes every time the wind moved through the eastern tree line. The animal knew this property better on four legs than two. Running the trees at speed would tell me things the cameras couldn’t.

I denied it.

Proximity to my mate in a state of heightened animal awareness was not an experiment I was running tonight. Not when she didn’t know what I was. Not when she was sleeping thirty feet away and my wolf had been memorizing her since the beginning: the warmth of her hair, the difference between her asleep and her pretending, the way she stopped herself mid-sentence like she was testing whether the words were worth the cost.

I texted Noah: North approach, two-hour intervals. Flag anything that reads confirmation-pattern instead of approach-pattern.

Forty seconds later: Copy.

I texted Jace: Trail holding at twelve miles?