Page 102 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
"Who taught you?" I ask.
"Nora's mother," Lila confirms. "Before she passed. She was the pack's healer before I came." She pauses. "Some of what I know comes from her, and some I've built myself. The Alpha female traditionally holds this knowledge alongside the pack medic." She meets my eyes. "I want to make sure you have it."
I take the bundle carefully. "Then teach me."
Loganand I ride out together on patrol mornings.
That became a thing without either of us announcing it—Logan appearing at the paddock gate on a patrol morning and me following, and the pattern establishing itself the way patterns do between two people who have stopped needing to negotiate the choreography.
These are his regular patrol rides—the systematic coverage of the territory that Logan runs on a rotation with Mateo and the outer wolves—and now I ride them with him. The land is mine now in the way it needs to be mine—past the guest frame, past the learner's distance from a place that belongs to someone else. As the Alpha female, learning the territory the way Logan has always known it: with the full attention of someone responsible for protecting it.
He shows me things I haven't seen yet. The creek crossing on the northern boundary is where the water runs shallow enough to ford in summer and chest-deep in snowmelt. The particular stand of old growth on the eastern ridge that marks the oldest section of the territory, the trees that were alreadyancient when Logan's grandfather claimed this mountain. The sight lines from the western trail cover three approach routes simultaneously, which is why the patrol rotation always places the most experienced wolves there.
I take notes on some of it. The rest I simply absorb, the way I've been absorbing this mountain since the beginning—by paying attention, by being present, and by treating it as something worth knowing completely.
One morning, we stop at the overlook—the same flat shelf of rock where we almost kissed, weeks before everything that followed, when he pulled back and looked at the tree line and saidwe should head back before the light goes, and we both knew exactly what had almost happened.
I pull my horse to a stop and look out over the territory, and Logan stops beside me, and for a moment we're merely two people on a ridge in the morning light with the full spread of Greyback land visible below us.
"I've been thinking about the last time we were here," I tell him.
He looks at me. "Have you."
"You didn't kiss me," I point out.
"No," he agrees. "I didn't."
"You should fix that," I observe.
He looks at me for a long moment with those gray eyes that are doing the fully present, fully attentive thing they do when he has decided something, and then he leans across the space between us and kisses me—unhurried, certain, with particular warmth, having all the time in the world and is choosing to spend it here.
When he pulls back, I am holding the reins loosely, and the morning light is doing its thing through the aspens, and the territory spreads below us like something that has always been mine and was only waiting for me to arrive.
"Better," I tell him.
"Agreed," he confirms.
I feel the particular completeness of knowing every section of what I'm looking at and why it matters and what it costs to protect it, and beside me is the man who showed it to me and chose to share it, and none of that is small.
There isan afternoon in the following weeks when I stop on the south trail during a solo walk, stand at the overlook, and look out at the mountain for a long time without doing anything else.
I think about the girl who ran away from her own wedding.
She had a plan, that woman—she always had a plan. Her whole life, she had been the person with the plan, the one who knew what was supposed to happen next and how to make it happen. And then one afternoon, the plan turned out to be built on something that wasn't real, and she got in a car in a wedding dress and drove away from it, and the car broke down on a mountain road, and she followed smoke through a forest, and a man answered a door.
I look out at all of it for a long time without moving.
The plan I had for my life—the careful, assembled, other-people's-expectations version—is gone. And what replaced it was not a plan at all. It was a car breaking down on a mountain road, and smoke through the trees, and a door opening, and a man who looked at me like I was something he'd been waiting for without knowing he was waiting.
None of it was planned.
All of it was right.
I'mon the porch when Logan comes back from the afternoon patrol, and he stops at the bottom of the steps when he sees me and looks up with the unhurried attention he always bringsto anything that involves me specifically, and something in my appearance must tell him where I've been because he comes up the steps and sits beside me without asking.
We look at the mountain for a while.
"I've been thinking," I offer, eventually.
