Nobody’s asked me that before. Not in those words. Garrett assigned the role. I filled it. The question of choosing it never came up.
“Both, I guess. After Maren died, I needed something to do with….” I tap my chest. “With all of this. The anger. The grief. Being an enforcer gave me a way to use it. Protect the territory. Make sure what happened to her doesn’t happen to anyone else.”
“So the job is the grief.”
The observation surprises me. I feel my wolf stir, not defensive but raw, the animal responding to a truth the man doesn’t want to acknowledge.
“That’s one way to put it,” I say.
“What’s another way?”
“That I’m good at reading terrain, I can track a wolf across dry rock, and I hit hard enough to end most fights in one move. Not everything has to be psychological, Willow.”
“Sure.” She’s almost smiling. “And the grief has nothing to do with it.”
“You always this much of a pain in the ass?”
“Only with people I like.”
The admission—casual, thrown away like it doesn’t matter—makes my wolf surge so close to the surface that I feel the heat bloom across my shoulders. The shift wants to start. My knuckles ache, the bones trying to reshape, and I grip the steering wheel until the impulse passes.
She’s watching my hands. I don’t know if she can see the tension in them or if she’s just looking, but something in her expression shifts, a flicker of awareness, quickly suppressed.
We reach the dead oak. I turn left onto the track, the truck bouncing over exposed rock. The trees close in on both sides, branches scraping the mirrors.
“Here.” I park in the shade of a massive live oak. We get out, and I lead her down the creek bed. It’s dry this time of year, the rock smooth underfoot. The air smells different down here: damp stone, moss, the fresh tang of spring water.
“Watch the drop,” I say at the gap in the rock shelf. The limestone steps down about ten feet into the basin. I go first, picking the route by memory. She follows… sure-footed, fast, reading the terrain without hesitation.
The pool opens below us. Thirty feet across, fed by a spring that seeps through the rock in a steady flow. The water is so clear the bottom looks painted on—pale stone, dark green moss, the dart and flicker of perch. Ancient trees ring the basin, their canopy filtering the light into shifting patterns. The sound is the spring, a low, constant murmur that fills the canyon.
She stops at the edge. Doesn’t speak.
“So?” I say.
“Conner.” She’s staring at the water. “This is… magical.” She looks at me.
“I know.” I nod, watching her face as she takes it all in.
“The light on the bottom. It looks like—”
“Like the water’s breathing. Yeah. It does that in the morning when the sun’s at the right angle.”
“How did you find this place?”
“Maren found it. She was twelve. Came home soaking wet and wouldn’t tell anyone where she’d been for three hours.” I sit on the rock ledge, legs over the edge. “She brought me the next day.Made me swear not to tell Garrett because she said he’d turn it into a training exercise. She was probably right.”
Willow sits beside me, our shoulders an inch apart. The heat of her is a line down my left side that my wolf tracks with unusual focus.
“She sounds like she was something,” Willow says.
“She was a pain in the ass. Fearless. Faster than me, which she never let me forget. She wanted to see everything, go everywhere, know everyone.” I pick up a piece of loose rock and turn it in my fingers. “She’d have been hell on wheels if she’d grown up.”
“You miss her.”
“Every goddamn day.”
Willow is quiet for a moment. Then: “I had someone like that. A cousin. He’s… he’s still alive. But for a while, I didn’t know if he would be. He was taken from us. Hurt badly. When we got him back, he was different. The kid he’d been was gone.” She frowns as she focuses on a point in the distance.