“Willow.”
I stop. Don’t turn.
“Get the number. Get out. Don’t linger.”
“I know.”
“I mean it. Be careful.”
I step outside. The night seems huge; the sky overhead feels like a canopy of stars.
You can do this, Willow.
The motel parking lot is empty. My truck is the only vehicle. The drive to Sycamore Road takes minutes. I drive it with the windows down, letting the cold air sharpen me, because what I’m about to do requires a woman who’s fully present and fully in control, and the child’s signal in my chest is trying to shatter both.
His house is modest. Clapboard and natural stone, set back from the road, a porch with a single light on. The kind of place a man lives alone in: clean, functional, the porch railing repaired recently, the lawn mowed by someone who does it out of habit rather than pride. His truck is in the drive.
I park behind it. Sit for a moment. The child’s signal pulses. Faint. Constant.
I get out. Walk to the porch. The door is unlocked, the way he said it would be.
I push it open. He’s standing in the hallway, barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt he pulled on in a hurry. His hair is mussed. In the dim light from the kitchen, his face is open and unguarded and so goddamn relieved to see me that my heart melts.
I bury it. The way I’ve buried everything else. Deep, fast, total.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.” He searches my face. “What’s going on? You’ve been—”
I step forward, take his face in my hands, and kiss him.
Not cold. Not calculated. The kiss is real—it has to be real, or he’ll know—and the moment my mouth touches his, the rage and the mission and the child’s pain all go quiet under the deafening roar of my body remembering what it wants. My wolf waking up.
He pulls me inside. The door closes behind us.
Chapter 19
Conner
The text comes at 1:58 a.m. I’m not sleeping. Haven’t been. My wolf won’t settle, and the thirty-seven files I pulled from the office are playing on a loop behind my eyes like a film I can’t turn off.
I’ve been lying in the dark staring at the ceiling of a house that feels emptier than it should, turning the bracelet on my wrist, thinking about a kid with a backpack and a woman whose scent went cold.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. I reach for it without expecting anything worth reaching for.
Are you awake?
Willow.
I sit up. Read it again. Read it a third time, because she’s been pulling away from me, and now, at two in the morning, she’s reaching out.
Yeah. You okay?
I watch the screen. The dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.
Can I see you?
My wolf freezes. The deep, certain quiet of an animal that’s been waiting and has just heard what it was waiting for.