“I don’t need anyone.”
It comes out hard. Willow doesn’t flinch. She’s heard worse from me, and she knows my edges aren’t personal. They’re how I’m built.
“Okay,” she says again. She touches my arm once more — a pat, almost — and then she walks past me toward the cabin she shares with Conner.
I stand on the path and watch her go.
I walk into my quarters, sit on the edge of the mattress, and unbutton the collar one-handed. The gauze underneath is dry now. The skin around it is still angry red. I peel the tape off slowly. Even with wolf healing, it’s still as brutal as it was when he did it.
Gonna leave a scar, dammit.
Of course it will. A mark every wolf who sees it will read correctly:This female is claimed. This female has a mate.
I press my fingertip against one of the ragged edges. Pressure, not pain. A second heartbeat that isn’t mine.
I do not have a mate.
I say it in my head with the certainty of a woman who has built her life on exactly that premise. Briar doesn’t need. Briar doesn’t want. Briar survives because she travels light.
I pull my finger back. Re-tape the bandage. Button the collar. Lie on my back on the cot and stare at the ceiling.
The man in Texas reaches for me again. That same brush against the part of my mind I can’t seal off — checking, always checking. My wolf answers him without asking my permission.
Stop,I tell her.
She doesn’t.
Chapter 11
Garrett
Three days after the clearing, I almost drive north. Not almost as in I thought about it. Almost as in I was in the truck, engine running, the sign for the interstate in my rearview before I realized I wasn’t heading for the feed store. I was heading for the county line.
I turn the truck around in the parking lot of the Methodist church on Route 290 and sit there for fifteen minutes. The radio is playing a country station I didn’t turn on. I turn it off. I drive back to the compound and go through the gate like nothing happened. Nobody asks me where the feed is, because nobody stopped me on the way out either.
Today, it’s worse.
The pull I can live with. A drag northward, hooked into my chest, and if I grit my teeth, I can walk in any direction I choose. I’ve been gritting my teeth since the clearing. Twice yesterday, Icaught myself drifting toward the north gate without deciding to. Three times today.
The new thing is not the pull.
It started yesterday afternoon. A burn. Not in my skin — lower, a slow pressure under my ribs that spreads down through my gut and keeps going. It’s not mine. It’s hers. Coming through the thread between us, the way her anger has been coming through, except this is not anger.
This is a woman’s body calling a man’s body home.
I’ve been half-hard since yesterday.
At my desk, doing pack accounts. Standing in the feed barn, checking the sacks I ordered last week. Sitting across from Dawes at the long table at ten in the morning, going through the patrol rotations. I had to keep my chair pulled tight against the pine because the alternative was explaining to my head of security why his alpha is hard during a briefing about the south boundary.
My wolf has opinions about this, and every one of them isgo to her.
“Vehicle at the south gate,” Dawes says. He’s reading the radio in his palm. “Two men. Suits. Asking for you.”
I know who they are before Dawes finishes the sentence.
“Let them through.”
He doesn’t move for a second. “You want me in the room?”