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“That’s not helpful.”

“It’s accurate. You want permission to care about her, or you want someone to give you a reason not to, because caring about her means forgiving what she did to Caitlynn, and you’re not sure you can.”

Chris said nothing. The patrol wolf circled back, closer this time, pausing at the far post before disappearing into the trees.

“For what it’s worth,” Damian said, “I think Caitlynn’s already ahead of you on that. She trusts the magic. She built the ritual.”

“Caitlynn trusts everyone.”

“Caitlynn trusts selectively and forgives deliberately. Those aren’t the same thing, and you know it.” Damian picked up his mug again. Drained it. “Go to bed, Chris. Or don’t. But stop pretending you have a choice about this. The bond doesn’t care what you’ve decided.”

Chris stayed on the bench after Damian went inside. He sat with his elbows on his knees, his hands loosely clasped, staring at the spot where the patrol wolf had vanished.

The bond hummed. Sloane, finally asleep, her presence settling into the low rhythm he’d started recognizing as her version of calm. Not peace. Calm. The difference mattered.

He went back to the quarters. He didn’t sleep.

***

The pattern showed itself on paper.

Chris had pulled patrol logs going back six weeks. He’d cross-referenced every recorded breach, every alarm, every reported sighting. He’d mapped them on a timeline, color-coded by location, marked the outcomes. Most of it was noise. The south gate probes were distractions. The northwest incursion was reconnaissance. But threaded through the noise, spaced at irregular intervals, were the real events: Garrett inside the wards. The note under Sloane’s door. The claw mark on the frame. The sighting near the residential block that the patrol had dismissed as a deer.

He’d laid them all on the table in the briefing room, alone, at six in the morning. The coffee was cold beside him. Viktor’s map was still pinned to the wall, the patrol routes in blue, the ward anchors in green.

He drew a second line. Weather.

The compound kept meteorological records because the patrols needed them. Wind speed, barometric pressure, precipitation, humidity. Chris pulled the log book from the shelf behind Viktor’s desk. Ran his finger down the dates. Checked each breach against the corresponding weather entry.

The first breach: low-pressure system, heavy rain, barometric reading at 992 millibars.

The second: storm front moving through, pressure dropping, humidity at ninety-one percent.

The third: fog. Dense, lasting, the kind that sat in the valley for hours. Pressure low. Humidity high.

He sat back. Looked at the timeline. Every confirmed breach coincided with a pressure drop below 1000 millibars. Every single one.

He found Caitlynn in the garden at half seven. She was sitting on the stone bench with Elianna on her hip, a cup of ginger tea steaming in her free hand. The morning light caught the auburn in her hair. She looked up when he came through the gate, and her expression shifted from relaxed to alert in less than a second.

“What’s wrong?”

“I need to ask you about the wards.”

She adjusted Elianna on her hip. The baby grabbed a fistful of her mother’s sweater, babbling incomprehensibly. “Sit down.”

He sat. “The ward matrix you built with the Alpha bond. How does it respond to changes in atmospheric pressure?”

Caitlynn’s tea paused halfway to her mouth. “Why?”

“Because every time Garrett has breached the perimeter, the barometric pressure has been below a thousand millibars.”

She set the tea down on the bench. Elianna reached for it. Caitlynn moved it further away without looking.

“Show me.”

He pulled the folded timeline from his back pocket. Spread it across the bench between them, holding one corner down with his thumb. Caitlynn leaned over it, her eyes moving across the dates, the weather data, the breach markers.

“Here,” he said, pointing. “And here. And here. Low pressure, every time. Rain or fog or both.”