“I know what alphas do.”
“And now you’re going to stand in a council hall and tell them you built a wall that put children on tables.”
“If I tell the truth. Yes.”
“That destroys us, Garrett. The name. The ranch. Every wolf who stayed when Conner left.”
“Some of them are going anyway. Marsha Rayburn drove out of here yesterday.”
“Marsha is angry. She’ll come back.”
“She won’t.”
She turns back to the counter. Folds the dough over once. Presses it flat. Folds it again. The rhythm is the same as it’s been every morning of my life.
“Your father is in his chair,” she says. “He won’t ask where you’ve gone Friday. I won’t tell him. If you come back with a censure and a fine, he never has to know how close you came to giving it all up. And if you come back with the ranch gone—” She folds the dough one more time. “He’ll sit in that chair until he dies, and he won’t ask.”
“That’s not an answer, Ma.”
“It’s the only one I have. Decide what you can live with. I already did. Long ago.”
She turns the dough into the loaf pan. Covers it with a cloth. Washes her hands, then dries them, and walks out of the kitchen without looking at me again.
I stand at the counter for a while. The bread is rising under the cloth. The kitchen smells the way it has always smelled.
The rest of the week passes in pieces. Dawes runs the compound. I sign the feed orders, the fence repair schedule, and the duty roster. I eat because Ma puts food in front of me. I sleep in fragments.
By Thursday night, I can’t sleep at all.
Once again, I’m in the study with Holcomb’s statement on the desk in front of me. Three typed pages, clean margins. Everyword chosen. I’ve read it a hundred times. I can recite it from memory now.
My wolf is acting strange.
Not restless. Not the pacing animal of the weeks before. Quiet. He’s been this way since Tuesday, and I’ve been telling myself it’s exhaustion. An animal who’s been through too much.
It isn’t that.
The closest word I have iswatchful. The wolf is watching something. Not the hearing. Not the compound. Not the heat pull from before. This is something else. A focus that has turned inward, to the center of my chest.
I put my hand on my breastbone. Nothing hurts. Nothing feels wrong. Just the strange settled quality, and underneath it a warmth that doesn’t match the rest of me. My human side is tight, knotted shoulders, exhaustion sitting behind my eyes. The warmth is separate. Its own thing.
It’s been three weeks since the clearing. I’ve felt her fury, her heat, her grief. I’ve felt the shut-door slam and the reluctant closing. This is something I don’t recognize.
Something’s different.
The thought arrives without my calling for it. She’s different. Whatever is happening to her, my wolf has already decided it matters more than anything else in the world.
I lift my hand off my chest. I fold the statement and put it in the inner pocket of the jacket I’ve hung on the chair. Then I sit in the dark until 5 a.m., when Dawes comes to the kitchen door with the truck keys.
He’s in his dress shirt, no tie, he doesn’t own one, but the shirt is ironed, and his boots are polished. He’s carrying two coffees and a folder.
“Lost Creek is four hours,” he says. “We need to be there by ten.”
“I know.”
He hands me a coffee. We get in the truck. He drives.
The sun comes up over the trees. The road winds east out of our territory and then north, up through ranch country, through pine woods, over rivers I used to fish when Maren was small enough to carry on my shoulders. I haven’t been this far from the compound in three years. The last time was for a cattle sale in San Marcos. Before that, never — the pack required me close, and my father’s decline required me closer.