The ridge. I reach it as the sun clears the first hour.
Below me is the Forrester compound.
Something’s different about it. Not the buildings — those are the same, layout unchanged. The scent is… wrong. More cortisol, the sharp edge of wolves running stressed. And fewer signatures than three weeks ago. I counted thirty-plus then. This morning I count twenty-six. Maybe twenty-seven.
Wolves have left.
I settle onto the rock shelf. Belly against warm limestone, chin down. A fly lands on my ear. I flick it. Another takes its place. I let it work. Holding position for hours is its own discipline — not just stillness, controlled stillness, muscles just engaged enough to prevent cramping, relaxed enough to keep from giving off the small tremors that betray a hidden animal. I’ve done this in snow and rain and terrain that cut through my pads. Warm limestone in the sun is nothing.
The compound moves below me. Fewer wolves in the yard than the hour warrants. The ones who are out move fast, tight, no lingering. A man I don’t recognize — stocky, mid-twenties — crosses the yard three times from different directions. Running patrol coordination. Filling a role like the enforcer who used to do it.
Conner’s absence is clear here. The pack is compensating. The effort shows. Like a dog favoring an injured leg — functional, but wrong.
Good. Stressed packs make mistakes.
Late morning, the main house door opens.
My wolf’s ears come forward.
A man crosses the yard. Bigger than the others — taller, broader through the chest. He moves without hurrying, and the compound adjusts around him. Not flinching. Not scrambling.Just giving way, the way wolves give way to a dominant male without being asked.
Garrett Forrester.
My wolf’s attention locks onto him.
Not a threat response — those are directional, aggressive, specific. This is something else. The way she reads difficult terrain. Every detail pulling at her like a thread she won’t let go.
Don’t.
She doesn’t stop, although the focus grows a little less sharp.
I keep watching.
He’s at the barn for five minutes. Then he’s on the bay mare and riding east. No escort. No second rider. He rode this same route the last time I was here before Willow and I left. Same hour, same direction — toward the ridge, toward whatever he keeps at the top.
I didn’t follow then. I will now.
He passes below my position. His scent reaches me through the foliage. Horse, leather, and the man underneath. Male. Alpha. A density I haven’t encountered before, a concentration that registers the way a deep track registers. Heavy. Lingering.
My wolf takes the scent in and holds it, nostrils flaring.
That’s enough.
She holds it anyway.
I give him five minutes. Then I move, staying downwind.
Tracking him is easy. The trail is worn, the scent fresh, his horse leaving clear prints in the softer ground. I stay low through the trees where the brush is thick enough to screen me. Silver-gray fur is wrong for this landscape. I move carefully.
He stops at the top of the ridge. There’s a marker stone under the live oak.
I circle wide, come in from the south behind a fall of limestone rubble. Thirty yards out. Still downwind. The stone is the same gray as my coat.
He’s dismounted. Sitting on the shelf beside the stone. His hand on it — not looking for the place, finding it. The fingers know exactly where to land.
The posture he carried across the compound yard is gone. What’s here is a man with damage. The line of his shoulders says years of it, and the weight has put a specific bend in his spine that didn’t show up before now.
The wind picks up, and his scent comes at me full and unfiltered.