Page 8 of Warded By His Wolf

His answer took four minutes, which meant he was running the perimeter in fur and had to shift back to check his phone. Four words: For now. Checking south.

For now wasn’t reassurance.

I moved through the house on silent feet and ran the check I’d already run twice. Front door: locked, chained, the deadbolt solid in its housing. Back door: same, plus the drop bar. Kitchen window: latched.

The east bedroom window bothered me. Good sight line for observation. Bad for exposure. I’d already moved the dresser to break the angle, but the thought of her sleeping in a room with that much visibility made my hands want to close into fists.

My wolf tracked all of it. What he was actually tracking was the door at the end of the hall. Three inches of wood and air, and the fact that closing that distance would be the easiest thing I’d done in eleven years.

At three a.m. I was in the kitchen with reasons that were technically real. Water. The tablet. The window with the best angle on the eastern approach.

That’s where I was standing when she appeared in the doorway.

Socks. An oversized green sweater from the safehouse closet: the kind of thing a woman grabs when she wants to be warm and isn’t thinking about being seen. Her hair was loose, and my wolf paid it an attention I didn’t authorize.

Her eyes still carried the residue of a nightmare. Not the soft blur of waking. The held quality of someone who’d seen something and was still deciding whether to report it.

I didn’t ask.

Eleven years of safehouses had taught me that the wrong question at the wrong moment closes a door that’s barely open.

I put the kettle on instead.

She crossed to the table and sat, careful, half in and half out of sleep. Wrapped her arms around herself. Unwrapped them. Folded her hands on the table like she was deciding what to do with her own body.

The quiet had a texture. Two people aware of exactly how much space stood between them, and neither one filling it with noise.

I set the tea in front of her. She pulled her knees up and wrapped both hands around the mug without asking how I’d made it. Honey, no milk. I’d watched her hands around a mug in her own kitchen for all of ninety seconds, and my wolf had kept every detail since.

She didn’t speak for several minutes. I didn’t perform an ease I didn’t have.

I made myself a cup I didn’t want and leaned against the counter, giving her the table. My wolf wanted closer.

My wolf could go to hell.

“I saw the trail,” she said quietly. “In the dream. Not Elias, just, “ She stopped. Started over in that careful, pre-qualified way she used for things that mattered. “It’s probably nothing, but someone was close enough to watch my apartment from across the street. And the light I turned on when the vision woke me: it would have been visible. From that distance. If someone was watching.”

I watched her do it. The soft-pedaling. The it’s probably nothing scaffolding bracketing every real observation. Stopping herself mid-sentence the way a person stops at the edge of a drop they’ve been pushed off before.

“That’s not probably,” I said. “That’s confirmation. Write it down.”

She looked at me.

I slid the notebook across the table (the same one from her apartment, her words in my handwriting without edits or softening) and she stared at it for a moment that lasted longer than the seconds it contained.

She wrote it down.

My hands stayed flat on the counter. I was very careful not to close them. The thing happening in this kitchen at three in the morning wasn’t safe for either of us, and we both knew it the way you know a fire. Skin first. Brain later.

“Why did you believe me that first night?” She didn’t look up. Pen still moving. “Not why the agency sent you. Why you personally wrote down what I said without pausing to verify.”

The question landed somewhere I hadn’t planned on opening tonight. I was quiet long enough that she looked up, and her eyes found mine across the dim kitchen, and my wolf made a sound low in my chest that took real effort to contain.

“Seven years ago I ran a safehouse for a woman whose visions I was told to manage rather than act on.”

Her pen stopped.

“The agency trusted its protocol over her warning. She died for that. I rebuilt everything I do around one decision. I don’t make that mistake twice.”