I don’t answer him. I’m learning I can’t out-argue him. He doesn’t use arguments. He uses facts. Her skin against mine. Her voice when she—
Stop.
I grip the reins tighter. Ridley feels it and slows, and I make myself loosen up.
The compound comes through the mesquite. First, the sodium lights over the equipment yard, then the porch lamp at the big house. I take Ridley south, along the fence line, past the hay shed. The barn’s dark. Good. The guys on watch tonight — Miller, probably Chase — they’ll be up at the main gate, eyes on the county road.
Nobody sees me. Thank fuck. Because even being alpha won’t stop the questions when I ride in buck naked in the middle of the night.
I swing down inside the barn, close the door behind me with my hip, and stand there a second in the dark, letting my eyes find the shapes. Row of stalls. Wheelbarrow. The feed bin with theloose lid. Home. My hand remembers the light switch without looking. I don’t turn it on.
Ridley walks herself into her stall. She’s done this long enough to know there’ll be fresh hay waiting. I pull the saddle. Blanket. Bridle. Hang each one where it lives. My body does it. The rest of me is… elsewhere. Watching the body from six feet off like a spotter on a ridge.
I rub Ridley down. Check her feet. There’s a pebble wedged in her near hind. I work it out with the hoof pick.
“Good girl.” I stroke the flat of her forehead, up between her eyes. “Good girl. Thank you.”
She blinks at me, slow.
I lean my forehead against hers for maybe ten seconds. She lets me. She’s let me do that since the first day I put a saddle on her and decided she was my new partner.
Horses are better than people. I have held this opinion consistently.
In the tack room, I find jeans on the shelf where I keep them, a flannel, and a pair of socks. The flannel goes on over the claw marks and sticks immediately. I don’t button it. Jeans on. Boots on — spare boots, the old ones with the broken-in ankles. I cross the yard. Gravel under my boots. The dogs in the kennel don’t bark — they know my step. One of them whines, a low, interested sound, as I pass.
The house is dark. Pop’s chair on the porch is empty, the cushion flattened in his shape. Ma’s window upstairs is shuttered. The kitchen smells of the onions she cooked at six and the coffee she made at seven, and under that, the lemon oil she uses on the sideboard every Sunday. My whole life has smelled like this for as long as I can remember.
The third stair creaks. The seventh creaks. The one at the top landing creaks if you step in the middle and stays quiet if you step on the edge, and I step on the edge now.
I reach my room. My door.
I close the door behind me and stand inside it.
My bed. The quilt I’ve had for over a decade. The reading chair with the lamp. The window over the desk that looks east, toward the ridge I just came off of.
The room fits the way a shoe fits when your foot’s swollen. The shape is the same. You’re the thing that changed.
I sit on the edge of the bed. The mattress takes my weight the way it’s taken my weight every night for — I don’t even want to do the math. I rest my elbows on my knees and let my head hang.
North. Still north. She’s stopped.
Her anger has changed. Still present, still aimed at me, but set. Decided. She has made a decision about me, and it is not a decision in my favor.
But under it, her wolf is lying down. Curled. Content. I swear to God I can feel the other animal’s chin on its paws.
And something in my chest — the man part, not the wolf — leans toward that warm, curled thing.
My wolf chose a magic-blooded female. I’ve tried to figure that out and haven’t managed it. The woman who sat across from me with a knife and a dead child’s rabbit, who cut my flesh and didn’t flinch… she carries the blood I spent a decade clearing off my land. My wolf doesn’t care. He’s been pulling toward her since the clearing without once asking what that means for the rest of it. I don’t have an answer. I just have the pull.
I close my hand around a fistful of the quilt and hold on.
“No.” I say it out loud, to the empty room. “No.”
Yes,my wolf says.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes until I see sparks. I breathe out through my nose, long and slow. I don’t have time for more complications right now, goddammit.
Conner is gone.