Page 55 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
"This one's different," he remarks. He lowers the book slightly and looks at me over the top of it with those gray eyes that have never once failed to see exactly what I'm trying to do. "What are you working out?"
I look at him across the warm, dim room. The firelight is doing what firelight does, catching the angles of him, the dark blond hair, the broad set of his shoulders, and the unhurried patience that is simply who he is, regardless of the circumstance.
"I’m thinking about layers," I respond.
His gray eyes find mine and stay there, and the alarm I'm half expecting doesn't arrive—what does is recognition, quiet and certain. Like I've said a word he knows and has been waiting to hear and isn't entirely sure what to do with the fact that I've said it.
"Get some sleep," he murmurs, gently. "Some things take time."
I close the journal.
But I don't stop thinking.
20
LOGAN
Iwake up knowing something is wrong before I know what it is.
That's how it works—awareness landing before explanation, the territory feeding my wolf information the rest of me hasn't caught up to yet. I lie still for a moment and let it come into focus. Unfamiliar scent in the early air. Human. More than one. Moving along the southern perimeter line, which is the line that matters most right now.
Harper is still asleep beside me.
I get up without touching her, without waking her, moving through the dark with the practiced quiet that I’ve done numerous times. I dress at the door, pulling out my phone as I step outside, already typing to Mateo before the door has closed behind me.
Perimeter breach. South line. Meet me outside.
Mateo is already there when I come around the corner of the cabin. He's been up. I can tell by the way he's standing—fully alert, jacket on, the particular readiness of someone whose instincts woke him before his phone did.
"Two of them," he says quietly the moment I'm close enough. "Came up from the south road on foot. Left their vehicle about a mile back." He pauses. "Cameras."
"Dawson's people," I confirm.
"Has to be." He looks toward the treeline. "They're moving toward the north ridge. If they reach the sight line to the lodge?—"
"They won't."
I'm already moving to the stand of pines at the back corner of the property, where I keep the spare clothes in a waterproof bag between two roots. I set the bag aside and step further into the shadow of the trees.
I shift.
The second and a half of it familiarly moves through me—not painful, never painful, but total. The world reshapes itself around me as I come down onto four legs, and the difference between the two states is something I have never been able to adequately describe in human terms because human terms aren't built for it. Everything sharpens. The dark isn't dark anymore. Every scent becomes a separate, complete piece of information—the damp pine resin, the cold granite, and the particular human smell of the two men moving through my territory that my wolf has already catalogued and filed under threat, manageable, handle it. Every sound has a precise location. The creek is two hundred yards east. A deer moving through the upper meadow. Mateo's breathing behind me is steady and controlled.
The territory spreads out around me, making the problem immediately and completely legible.
I move toward the southern treeline.
I'm ten feet from the property edge when I hear it.
The porch.
The specific sound of the third board from the left taking weight—a sound I know better than almost anything on this property—and it stops me cold in the pre-dawn dark.
I turn.
Harper is on the porch.
She's in her sleep clothes, a jacket thrown over them, her chestnut hair loose and uncombed, standing completely still, both hands gripping the porch railing, her eyes fixed on me with an expression I have never seen on her face in this short time I have known her.
