I sit on the cot. The rubber ball is in my right hand. I turn it over and squeeze it. Feel the give of rubber under my fingers and the residual warmth of a child’s palm.
Through the wall, I can hear the compound settling into evening. Voices. A dog barking. The clang of something metal from the kitchen. Ordinary sounds. The sounds of wolves living their lives in a place that took them in when the world tried to eat them.
I lie back on the cot. My ribs complain. I hold the ball against my chest, and I close my eyes. I think about Briar’s hand brushing her stomach and my wolf’s stillness and the word that’s forming in a part of my brain I haven’t visited before.
Not mate. I’ve known that word for weeks. This is a different word. A bigger one. A word that has weight and responsibility and terror in it and that I’m not ready to say even inside my own head.
But my wolf knows it. And the ball is warm in my hand. And somewhere in this compound, a woman is carrying the word whether she’s ready for it or not.
I close my eyes. And I hold the ball.
Chapter 32
Briar
He’s been at Ravenclaw for three days when I find him in the barn. I’m not looking for him. I’m getting a halter for one of the mares that slipped her fence, and he’s in the back stall with a pitchfork, mucking out bedding like he’s been doing it his whole life. Which he has. Forrester wolves are ranch wolves. Their compound runs cattle and horses, and the alpha grew up shoveling shit before he grew up making decisions that destroyed people’s lives.
He’s shirtless. The bruising across his ribs has gone from purple to pale yellow-green, the healing accelerating the way Sable predicted. The cuts on his chest are closed, pink lines that’ll fade to nothing within a week. The scars on his forearms — mine, from the cabin — are silver and permanent. Five lines on each arm that he hasn’t tried to hide since he arrived.
He hasn’t tried to hide anything since he arrived.
That’s the part I’m having trouble with. The Garrett Forrester in my head — the one I hunted down — that man was a wall. Alpha mask. Controlled. Every gesture calculated, every word filtered through whatever frame he was building around the truth.
This man is mucking a stall. He’s been doing it every morning since Sable cleared him for physical work yesterday. Nobody asked him to. He got up before dawn, found the barn, found the tools, and started cleaning stalls like it was the most natural thing in the world. Dane told me about it at breakfast, one eyebrow raised, the closest Dane gets to commentary.
“Briar.” He’s seen me. He leans the pitchfork against the wall and wipes his forehead with his arm. The movement pulls the muscle across his ribs, and I watch it happen, and my wolf makes a sound I pretend not to hear. Even broken, he’s beautiful.
“I need the halter on the third hook,” I say.
“This one?” He reaches for it. His body extends — the stretch, the reach, the way the healing bruises shift across his torso — and I look at the halter and not at his body because I am a disciplined woman and a disciplined woman does not stare at the abdominal muscles of a man she’s supposed to hate.
“That one.”
He brings it to me. Our fingers brush on the leather. The contact is brief, and my wolf throws herself toward it like it’s water in a desert. I take the halter and step back.
“The gray mare got out again,” I say. “South fence.”
“I can fix that fence.”
“You’re not fixing our fences, Garrett.”
“Why not? I know fences. I’ve been fixing fences since I was twelve.”
“Because you’re a guest here. Guests don’t fix fences.”
“Am I a guest?” He asks it without edge. Genuine question. The brown eyes — both open now, the swelling gone — hold mine with that expression I keep seeing. The one without performance. “Because I’m not sure what I am here. Nobody’s told me, and I haven’t wanted to ask. The wolves in this compound look at me the way you’d look at a rattlesnake in your kitchen. Nobody quite sure whether to kill it or leave it alone.”
“Give it time.”
“How much time?”
“However much it takes.”
He nods. Accepts it. Picks up the pitchfork and goes back to work.
I should leave. I’ve got the halter. The mare is waiting. There’s no reason to stand in this barn watching a man shovel dirty straw.
“Martin won’t look at me,” he says, not looking up. Working the fork through the bedding with the steady rhythm of someone who finds physical work easier than conversation. “The man with the— The lean one. His wife and children were in the facility.”