Stop touching me.
He can’t hear me. But he feels the anger because he pulls back. Thirty seconds later, he reaches again.
I stand up and collect my toiletries, then walk to the shower block with a towel.
The communal bathroom is empty at this hour. I turn the water on. The solar tank hasn’t caught up to the morning, and what comes out is barely lukewarm. I stand under it and wash the Hill Country off. Dirt. Sweat. Blood. The water runs brown, then pink, then clear.
His scent does not come off.
It’s in the bite. I scrub the skin around it until the raw pink shows through, and the scent is still there, faint, under my ear, on the pad of my thumb where I touched the wound. My wolf rumbles, smug.
I want to claw my own shoulder open.
I look at the bite in the mirror above the basin. It’s vicious, the flesh mangled and torn. Nothing civilized or discreet about it.Then again, there’s nothing civilized or discreet about the male who gave it to me.
A mate mark. On my neck.
Motherfucker.
I press my forehead against the glass.
“There’s a way out of this,” I whisper. “There has to be.”
I dress in dark pants and a button-up. Fresh tape. Shirt buttoned to the throat.
I walk out.
The creek runs the south boundary of the property, and the ward line Willow set runs along it — invisible to human eyes, bright to me. The magic is solid, looped at intervals through stones and tree trunks and buried markers. I walk it slowly. My job is to check for breaches.
I stop at the first marker, a flat limestone by a cottonwood root, and put my hand on it to test the ward.
The ward reacts.
Not a breach. A recognition. The wolf-level signature Willow keyed it to — me, Briar, Merric’s scout — is still there, but something has been added. Something the ward doesn’t know. The magic flares under my palm, cool, questioning, and then settles.
I pull my hand back.
Willow is going to need to rekey this ward. Because now, underneath my signature, there’s another one. Male. Alpha. A man three hundred miles away.
I’m carrying him. The ward felt him.
Goddammit.
Inside me, the beast exhales.
“Satisfied?” I demand. “Is that what you are?”
She doesn’t answer.
I keep walking.
I check three more markers. Each one does the same thing: flares, questions, settles. The ward is adjusting to what I’ve brought home.
I make it back to the yard at ten. Training is running in the east field, I can hear the thud of bodies on the practice mats. I cross toward the cabins. Past the children’s room.
The door is open, the way Sable prefers. I slow.
Mia is on a mat on the floor, playing with her ball. Still so damned thin, so fragile, thanks to spending the majority of her life in a facility that my —