Page 19 of One-Track Pride

I almost laugh. "That's exactly what it is."

I catch Evander watching me, torchlight carving his face into planes and shadows. He's not looking at me the way he did in the shelter, all heat and hunger. This is something quieter and, honestly, more terrifying. He's staring like I'm the thing standing between his whole world and the people trying to bury it.

"What?" I ask.

"Nothing." He shakes his head slowly. "I just realized I stopped being afraid of you knowing our secret. Now I'm afraid of what happens to these people if you weren't here." He crouches beside me, close but not touching, letting me choose. "My whole life has been about being the one who holds the line. I don't know what to do with watching someone else do it better."

"You say thank you," I tell him, gentler than I mean to. "And then you hand me the crimpers, because we've got a long night and a lot of people counting on us."

He hands me the crimpers. And since the mountain came down, I believe we might actually win.

14

EVANDER

It's nearing late morning when Owen's voice comes back through the little speaker, thinner now, the storm still gnawing at the signal. Tobias hunches over the radio to nurse the connection while I stand behind Camille and try to keep my breathing even. I already know what he's going to say. My whole body has known since she asked him to plot the parcels.

"Got your map, Ms. Dyer." Paper rustles on his end. "Northstar's buys don't make a blob, they make a line. Like a corridor, running up out of the valley toward the high ground. And there's a gap right in the middle. One parcel they never got their hands on."

"Let me guess." Camille's pencil is already moving across her own sketch. "Thousands of acres, held in trust."

"Shaw Family. Sitting square across the route they'd need." A crackle. "Whatever they're building toward, your friend's mountain is the wall stopping them."

I feel Tobias glance at me. Camille doesn't turn around, but her shoulders go still, and I know she's waiting to see whether I'll dodge her again like I did in the diner, likeI've dodged every soul who ever got this close.

"Owen, thank you. Keep pulling the older records if you can." Camille kills the mic and swivels on the stool to face me. "So, same mountain, again. I'm going to keep landing on it until you tell me why, and I'd rather you just tell me."

"Toby." I don't take my eyes off her. "Give us a minute."

He's already rising, hands up, that easy grin flickering. "Say no more. I'll go stare meaningfully at the antenna." He grabs a lantern and vanishes into the back room, and I hear him start whistling something tuneless just to prove he isn't listening.

I pull the other stool close and sit, so we're level, so I'm not looming over her. My father used to say a lion who has to stand tall to be heard has already lost the room.

"The mountain is the den," I tell her. "Not near it, it is it. The whole ridge is hollow underneath, chambers our family has used for generations. When one needs to shift and there's no wilderness safe enough, when a cub is born, when an elder dies, that's where it happens. It's the one place on earth we stop pretending."

She just studies me, with that sharp focus turned all the way up. "That's why your family won't sell, not sentiment. You're guarding a door."

"We're guarding everyone who's ever walked through it." My throat tightens. "You understand what you're holding now. Not just what I am, where the rest sleep."

"I understand." Her voice gentles, though she doesn't reach for me yet. "Show me."

"Camille…"

"Not the deep part. I'm not asking you to hand me the keys." She sets the pencil down. "But you keep saying you trust me, and trust isn't a just word, Evander. It's a thing you do or don't do. I need to see t what we're fighting for, or I'm building a case blind."

She's right, and the animal in me goes quiet under the plain sense of it. So I take her. We suit up and I lead her out into the tail of the storm, off the maintenance route, along a seam in the rock only pride feet have worn. The wind screams down the pass, and I keep her in the lee of my body without making a show of it. Where the ridge folds against itself, there's a cleft that reads as shadow unless you already know it's a mouth. I stop us at the threshold.

"This far and no farther, tonight," I say. "Not because I don't trust you, because there are people asleep below who never agreed to be seen, and their say matters more than my feelings."

"That's the most reasonable thing you've said since I met you." A breath of a laugh puffs white between us. She peers into the dark, at the worn stone, the old iron ring set into the rock, the char of a hundred years of small fires. "How many humans have stood exactly here?"

"Before you? My mother's sister married one, forty years ago. Him, that's it."

"Okay," she says quietly. "Okay. That's… I won't be careless with that." Then the engineer surfaces again, because it always does, and I love that it does. "Let me see the Northstar geo records. The old ones, from the terminal at the wreck. I copied them before we left."

She pulls the ruggedized drive from an inner pocket and we crouch in the cleft's shelter, her tablet glowing between us. She scrolls, and her expression changes by degrees, going from focused to grim.

"There." She taps. "Subsurface survey, filed under a subsidiary. Look at the assay column."