The chair goes over the bracket. Four bolts through the base plate. I throw my weight against it from every angle.
Good. That’s not moving.
Wrist restraints through the chair arms. Ankles to the legs. Chest strap for backup. I size them for the body I’ve been watching from the ridge — wider than standard, longer through the arm.
I’ll fine-tune when he’s in it.
Medical kit on the shelf. Antiseptic, gauze, sutures, painkillers. He needs to be alive and functional, at least for now. An unconscious man answers nothing, and a dead one answers less.
The knife on the table. I test the edge against my thumb. Red line, instant.
Good.
And the rabbit. I set it on the floor facing the chair and crouch down to check the angle — what he’ll see when the drug clears, and his vision settles.
Button eyes. Matted fur. A stuffed toy once loved by someone small.
I’ve been thinking about those boxes. The ones from the facility storage room, where they kept the things taken at intake. Small shoes with the laces still tied. A crayon drawing of a house — yellow sun, green grass, the kind every child draws because every child believes in a place like that. Filed in cardboard alongside intake documentation.
This is why you’re here. Don’t lose it in the logistics.
I stand up. Look at the room.
It’ll do.
I dust my hands off and settle onto the sleeping bag I’ve laid out in the corner. On assignments like this, you take sleep when you can get it.
The next morning, I’m in position before dawn. Not on the ridge — in the scrub beside the trail, two hundred yards below the marker stone. I walked this stretch in wolf form yesterday, testing wind and cover. Thick brush on three sides. Northwest wind puts me downwind of the trail in the morning. Hard limestone that won’t hold prints.
Human form. I need hands for the dart gun. One of the two doses I pulled from Merric’s stores — wolf-grade, dosed for an alpha male I’m estimating at two-twenty. I’ve adjusted upward ten percent for the faster metabolism. The margin is thin. I’d rather he sleeps too long than wakes up while I’m still getting him to the cabin.
I settle in and wait.
Merric trained me in fixed-position surveillance when I was seventeen — three-day hides, no movement, the discipline of existing in a space without disturbing it. My body knows how to go quiet. Heart rate down. Breathing shallow. The need to shift and fidget pushed down until there’s nothing left but the waiting itself.
An hour. Two. The sun climbs. The shade I picked shrinks. A lizard runs across my boot, stops, runs again. The mockingbird in the oak works through its calls — aggressive, territorial, the same six notes in a loop.
Shut up.
It doesn’t.
Then hooves on limestone.
There.
He comes around the bend forty feet out. The mare first, picking her way between the rocks. Then him.
Thirty feet. Twenty.
Keep coming.
At ten feet, I can see the grain of his shirt where it pulls across his shoulders. Hands easy on the reins, loose. His forearmsbelow rolled sleeves — tanned, the muscle built from years of fence posts and hay bales and animals that don’t want to go where you’re putting them. Not gym muscle. Labor muscle.
And then his scent hits me.
My wolf comes up hard. My grip on the gun goes wrong — both hands — and I feel her pulling toward that smell. I clamp down. Breathe through my mouth. Get the barrel back where it needs to be.
It’s natural to be wary of an unknown alpha. More attentive.