23
CASSIDY
Consciousness returns in pieces, and none of them are pleasant.
The first thing I'm aware of is the smell — woodsmoke, old grease, something damp beneath both of those, the quality of a structure that's been closed up between hunting seasons and opened again without airing properly.
The second thing is the dull, heavy weight at the back of my skull, the kind that comes with chemical exposure rather than a blow.
Chloroform. Fast-acting, unpleasant residue, and a headache that will last for hours.
The third thing is that my wrists are tied to the back of a wooden chair.
I open my eyes slowly and give myself thirty seconds to do nothing but assess, because rushing movement with this much sedative still in my system is how you end up on the floor.
The ceiling is rough-hewn timber. The walls are log construction, older build, the chinking between the logs gone gray with age. A fireplace on the east wall, stone-faced, with alow fire burning in it that gives the room its only light beyond the single lamp on a table in the corner.
Gun rack on the north wall, deer head above the fireplace, glass eyes catching the firelight. Three more on the adjacent wall, alongside a mounted set of elk antlers and what looks like a black bear pelt stretched and nailed flat.
Hunting cabin. Private use. The layout is too cramped and too personal for that. Someone's place.
My wrists are tied with paracord, looped twice and knotted at the back of the chair. I test the tension carefully without making it obvious. Tight, and getting tighter every time I struggle. No way I can get out on my own.
That's when I see the maps.
They're pinned directly to the wall above the ammunition crates. I recognize the terrain immediately. The eastern ridge, the patrol corridors, the boundary markers along the Blackmoore property line. And in the lower right corner of each map, stamped in blue ink so familiar I could identify it in my sleep at this point:
Gideon Rourke's authorization seal.
I've been staring at that stamp for two weeks, and seeing it pinned to a wall in a hunting cabin that smells like old ammunition and deliberate secrecy makes something cold settle in my chest.
Kieran is pacing near the window on the far wall, and based on how long he's been at it, I suspect he started before I woke up.
He's twenty-two and built like someone who spent his adolescence training for exactly this—lean but substantial, dark hair falling across his forehead, his wolf form a sable shadow in the back of my memory from the ridge.
Right now, he's wearing his frustration like a second skin, jaw set, shoulders tight, moving the way people move when they're trying to convince themselves of something.
He notices I'm awake without me saying anything—his head turns at the change in my breathing, which is the kind of small tell I keep forgetting these people are capable of reading.
"Good," he says, stopping his pacing. "You're going to listen to me."
"I'm tied to a chair," I say. My voice comes out rougher than I'd like, throat dry from the chemical exposure. "You've got a captive audience, which, given the circumstances, I'm going to guess is not a metaphor you meant ironically."
His expression tightens and he crosses the room toward me, stopping six feet away with his arms folded. Up close, there's something in his face that I'd almost call conflict if I didn't know better—he has his father's determined set to the jaw, but his eyes carry something Gideon's never have. Doubt.
Kieran Rourke is not entirely comfortable with what he's doing. Maybe that’s my opening.
"Alden's bond with you will destroy this pack," he says. The words come out with the cadence of something rehearsed. "You understand that, right? You're not a shifter. You can't defend yourself the way a mate is supposed to, you can't run patrols or hold territory or produce a line that continues pack leadership. You are a liability, and the fact Alden can't see past whatever the bond does to his judgment means he's already compromised."
"That's a lot of words for 'I think women should be useful or invisible,'" I say.
"This isn't about—" He stops, jaw tightening. "This isn't about you personally. It's about the pack."
"Everything's always about the pack," I say. "Has anyone ever asked what the pack thinks, or just what the men in charge want the pack to think?"
"Stop talking like that." He takes a step toward me, voice rising slightly. "I'm trying to explain to you why this matters. You're sitting here like I'm being unreasonable when I'm theonly one who sees clearly what Alden is throwing away. A strong Alpha with a strong mate — a shifter mate, someone born to this — could lead this pack for another generation. Instead, he marked a human biologist who stumbled onto our land because she was chasing a wildlife investigation, and now the whole pack is fracturing over it while a rogue runs loose and hunters set up camp on the boundary."
I let him finish. Then I look at the wall again.