Barn. You’re going to the barn.
The barn is south.
I turn around. Jessie is standing at the edge of the training field with her hands on her hips, watching me.
She’s seen it before. Not this specific thing, but the edge of it. Yesterday at lunch. Today twice. Jessie keeps her own internal records, and the file on me has been getting thicker since Conner walked.
I cross to the training field because avoiding her is a worse tell than going to her.
“Jessie.”
“Alpha.” Her tone has a question she’s not quite voicing. “South group’s ready for close-quarters. You want to run them?”
Normally, I would. Today, the idea of close physical proximity to six sweating wolves makes my skin want to come off. Every scent is too sharp. My wolf is refusing contact with anyone who isn’t her, and standing this close to Jessie is already costing me.
“You run it.”
“Okay.” She doesn’t move.
“Was there something else?”
She looks at me. Not the respectful up-nod of a ranked wolf to her alpha. The straight, level look of a woman asking a man a question.
“Garrett. Are you all right?”
Nobody asks me that. The alpha doesn’t get asked if he’s all right. The alpha is the one who holds the frame.
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine. You keep walking toward the north gate.”
“I’m checking the perimeter.”
“The perimeter is south, east, and west. North runs into open range.” A beat. “There’s nothing up there.”
There’s a woman three hundred miles up there with my bite on her neck.
“I’m fine, Jessie.”
She watches me a beat longer. Then she nods — not the correct ranked nod, the other one — and walks back to her group.
Later, she corners me at the barn.
Not literally, she’s smarter than that. She waits until I’m in Ridley’s stall, checking the mare’s hooves, a task that keeps my hands busy and my head down. She leans on the stall door and folds her arms.
“I need to talk to you,” she says.
“So talk.”
“Not here.”
I set Ridley’s hoof down and straighten up. Jessie is thirty, give or take. She’s been training the younger fighters since she was twenty-two. Patient, precise, the kind of teacher who makes you better by making you hate being bad. I’ve trusted her with the pack’s next generation for five years. She’s earned the right to corner me in a barn.
“Walk,” I say.
We walk the south fence line. The repair section that the work crew will reach this afternoon. Jessie matches my pace. She doesn’t rush into it. She’s building up to something, and the building is deliberate.
“People are talking,” she says.