Why didn’t you tell them?
The practical justifications come first, because they always do. I need more information. The pattern isn’t complete. A partial report is better than a premature one. I run each one out to its end, and each one fails in the same place: I had enough. I had the resting point, the circle, the timeline, the size of him. That’s everything Merric needed. I’ve called in reports on less.
So why didn’t you?
I go through it differently. He’s Forrester. He’s the alpha who ran the corridor, the man I put in a chair, the wolf whose bite is on my neck. He’s a threat to this pack. Merric needed to know where he was. I knew. I didn’t say.
I stare at the ceiling and try to make that make sense.
He came because I called him. Not deliberately. Not willingly. But my body has been broadcasting for days. He drove ten hours into hostile territory and waited for me to come to him. And I went. I stood forty feet away, and I looked at the man who is not the monster I thought he was, and I turned around and walked back down the ridge and told Merric most of what I found.
Not all.
I didn’t stop calling. That’s what I keep returning to. Even now, lying here with the compound wall between us and the herbs in my blood and every reason I have stacked against it. I haven’t stopped. The pull is still running toward the boulder field. My wolf is facing that direction. She’s not straining. She’s not fighting. She’s just oriented, quiet and certain, the way she gets when she’s already made a decision and is waiting for the rest of me to catch up.
He came because I called him. I protected his location.
I don’t know what that means, and I’m not going to examine it.
I close my eyes.
Fight it. Go to sleep. In the morning, give the full report. Let Merric handle it.
That’s the decision. Clear. Correct. The only option that makes sense for a Frostbourne scout who has a job to do and a pack to protect and no business sitting in the dark thinking about a man who bit her in a clearing.
I take another dose of the herbs. I lie down. I make the decision again, firmly, in case the first time didn’t take.
Full report at first light. Full trail. Everything.
I close my eyes.
I sleep.
I wake up outside.
The first thing I register is cold. Leaves against my ribs. The smell of loam and oak bark and something else — somethingdense and close, the kind of scent that makes every hair on a wolf’s body stand up. Then sky. Stars. A canopy of branches black against the moon.
My wolf’s body. Not my hands. Paws.
I don’t remember shifting. I don’t remember walking out of my cabin. I don’t remember anything between closing my eyes on the cot and opening them on the east ridge.
What the fuck?
She shifted me in my sleep. She walked me out. She carried me a quarter mile up the ridge in fur, through the patrol Dane posted tonight. She got past them because she’s Briar’s wolf, and Briar’s wolf doesn’t get caught. And she brought me here.
I made a decision, dammit! We weren’t going to go.
She doesn’t care.
His scent hits me, and my whole body tenses.
Close. So close, my nose is full of it. The thick alpha musk of him, and under it the sharper note of a male whose body is responding to a female in heat. Thirty feet. Maybe less. Downwind in the thicket east of my position.
He’s been lying there. Waiting. The way I waited on his ridgeline weeks ago.
I stand. My wolf is vibrating. Every hair is up. I shift to human because I need my voice. The night air on my bare skin after the shift sends the heat through me so hard I have to brace a hand against the nearest tree to stay upright.
He steps out of the trees.