Alden is watching from the outer ring with his arms folded his eyes following me, half lidded, like he’s imagining me somewhere else. When I look at him he uncrosses his arms and walks toward me.
"You said you never had any doubts," I say, when he reaches me.
"I didn't," he says.
"You had some doubts," I say.
He considers this for a moment. "I had concerns about external factors outside my control, but I never doubted you, or that we were meant to be," he says, cupping my hands between his palms.
I look at him. "That's a very careful answer."
"I practiced it," he says, winking.
Sunset comes earlier now, and the patrol rotation shifts to account for it. I walk with Alden to the outskirts of the mansion grounds where the tree line begins, which has become its own kind of ritual over the past week—his injuries healed enough for field work, the patrols resuming their normal cadence, and me walking him to the threshold each time without being asked.
The patrol team assembles at the tree line, six wolves in human form who will shift once they're inside the cover of thetrees. Alden stops just short of the cleared ground and turns to face me.
"I’ll be back in three hours," he says.
"I know the rotation," I say.
For a moment, his eyes stayed fixed on me with some annoyance bright in his eyes, annoyance at being parted from me. Then he tips his head slightly and presses his lips to my forehead, and turns toward the trees.
The shift happens fast. At the tree line, his wolf looks back at me, and holds the look long enough for the other wolves to disappear into the trees, which is all the goodbye this version of him can give, and then he turns and moves into the forest.
The patrol follows, and the forest becomes quiet.
40
ALDEN
The forest at dawn is a different place than it is at any other hour.
The light comes in low and sideways through the pines, catching frost on the ground cover in brief flashes.
I know every sound this mountain makes at this hour. I know the difference between a deer moving and a human moving, between a bird flushing from a bush because something startled it and a bird flushing because it chose to. I have run these patrol routes since I was fifteen years old and my father first brought me out to learn them, and I know them the way I know my own heartbeat—without thinking, without effort, just present.
Cassidy keeps pace on my left.
She moves through the terrain the way she has since the first. She doesn't talk on patrol, which is one of the things I noticed early and appreciated without having words for it. She understands that patrol is observation, and observation requires quiet, and she's been doing this long enough now that the pack members who run adjacent routes have stopped treating her presence as unusual and started treating it as fixed.
I stay in wolf form. She doesn't need a guide—she has the GPS overlay on the tablet in her vest and she's walked these routes as many times as most of my junior enforcers—but I run close enough that our proximity is apparent to anything watching, a wordless confirmation of my allegiance.
The southern corridor is clear. The boot prints and vehicle tracks from the hunter incursion have been absorbed into the ground in the weeks since, erased by rain and the natural traffic of the mountain. No new markings. No disturbed soil at the trap positions. No staged kills anywhere on the southern or eastern reaches.
The contested boundary along the county road—the section Gideon's patrol alterations left perpetually undermanned—reads quiet for the fourth week in a row.
I stop at the creek crossing and look at the muddy shoulder where the generator flatbed sank its wheel into the soft ground. The rut is still there, compressed and dried into a permanent record of one bad night that ended better than it started.
Cassidy stops beside me and looks at the same thing without comment.
We move on.
Ciaran meets us at the north ridge junction, shifting to human form when we approach, his breath visible in the cold air and his ice-blue eyes doing the rapid read they always do—terrain, my condition, Cassidy's, the general quality of the morning.
"The southern and eastern boundaries are clean," he says. "Western is holding. The camera network logged two deer, one black bear, and a county road maintenance vehicle at oh-four-hundred that stopped, looked at the cameras, and drove on." He pauses. "No anomalous activity. No coordinated approach patterns. No outside vehicles. It's quiet, Alden."
I shift to human beside the creek.