Page 33 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
"I had a read of the situation," I reply evenly.
"That's not what I mean." She turns then, looking at me with that direct hazel attention that I have learned to brace for and have not yet managed to fully brace for. "I mean, you didn't react. You shut it down. Like turning off a light." She pauses. "Most people would have at least looked angry."
"Getting angry doesn't help," I tell her. "It gives the other person something to work with."
"So you—" She gestures vaguely.
"I made it clear the situation was over," I reply. "That's all."
She pauses to reflect. "It was more than that," she finally decides and doesn't push it further, which is the thing about Harper—she knows when she's identified something true and doesn't need to pry it open to validate the identification.
She looks back out the window.
Outside, the treeline closes in on both sides as the backcountry route takes us deeper into the rural stretch. The sky above has gone the flat, heavy gray of a system that meansbusiness, and I keep my speed steady and my hands easy on the wheel.
Beside me, Harper has her elbow on the door and her chin in her hand, watching the landscape pass, and my wolf has finally settled into something that isn't quite peace but is the closest it's going to get today. The incident at the diner is filed where I've put it—the man was opportunistic, not deliberate, a stranger with a phone rather than one of Dawson's people. But the coverage Harper found on Lila's laptop is spreading, and the window of anonymous travel is narrowing faster than I'd hoped.
I reach for my phone at the next straight stretch and fire off a message to Mateo one-handed.
Route changed. Storm closed the main highway. Taking the backcountry road east. Update you when we stop.
His reply comes back within a minute.
Understood. Heads up — coverage on Harper picked up overnight. Stay off main stops if you can.
I pocket the phone without responding to that one out loud.
"Everything okay?" Harper asks, catching the motion.
"Letting Mateo know the route changed," I reply. "So he knows where to find us."
She nods and turns back to the window.
The first drops hit the windshield a few minutes later—light and scattered, barely enough to warrant the wipers, the opening suggestion of what's building behind us. I turn them on low. They sweep once, twice, clearing the glass.
Harper watches the drops appear and tracks one with her finger against the window without touching it, following its path down the glass.
I keep my eyes on the road and say nothing, and the rain comes in slowly around us, and the mountain falls away further behind us with every mile.
13
HARPER
The rain makes the decision for us.
We'd been taking our time since leaving the diner this morning—the backcountry route had turned out to be genuinely worth the detour, the kind of road that runs through country you wouldn't see otherwise, and neither of us had been in any particular hurry to reach the end of it. We'd stopped once at a pull-off to look at the valley below, where the clouds were still breaking apart from the morning storm, and Logan had pointed out a ridge line that marked the edge of a conservation parcel he managed, and I'd stood there in the cold with my hands in my jacket pockets, thinking that I'd never once in my adult life taken a detour solely because the road was worth seeing.
By mid-afternoon, the sky had started making its intentions clear—the flat, heavy gray deepening and pressing lower; the wind picking up through the treeline in a way that suggested seriousness rather than passing. Logan had slowed the car without commenting on it, and I'd watched the first real rain start to come down and said nothing, because there wasn't anything to say that the weather wasn't already saying for us.
We tried driving slower. That worked for about twenty minutes before the road ahead turned into something requiring more respect than either of us wanted to give it—the backcountry route with no shoulder and a creek running close to the treeline and the wipers at full speed barely keeping pace with what was coming down.
"Motel," Logan says, and it isn't a question.
"Motel," I agree.
It appears about three miles later, the way things appear in rural territory when you actually need them—a low building set back from the road; a neon vacancy sign glowing orange through the rain; and a parking lot with a handful of other cars that have clearly made the same calculation we did. The kind of place that has been exactly where it is for forty years and has no intention of changing.
Logan pulls under the covered awning near the entrance and kills the engine. Through the lobby window, I can see a front desk, a wall of keys, and a diner visible through a doorway on the far side—connected to the building, which means we don't have to go back out in the rain to eat.
