Page 57 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
I watch her do it in real time. I watch the list she made click forward through its items one by one and find, one by one, that the answer she saw fits every single entry on it.
The patrols.
The way he moves in the forest.
The scars.
The layers.
All of it.
The thing I notice most, standing here at the bottom of these steps looking up at her, is that she hasn't let go of the railing. Her knuckles are still white. She is holding on, and I understand that holding on, because holding on is what you do when the ground has shifted and you haven't found the new footing yet, and the fact that she is holding on rather than walking away is the most significant thing happening on this porch right now.
I take the first step up.
She watches me come.
I take the second step, and the third, and I stop when I'm close enough that she doesn't have to raise her voice to answer me, if she answers me, and I look at her and she looks at me, and the mountain holds its breath around us the way it held its breath the first night she appeared on this porch in a ruined dress and my wolf said mine with a certainty I have been living inside of ever since.
I think: I love her.
I think: she saw everything, and she is still standing there.
I think: she is still holding on to that railing, and she has not moved a single step away from me, and that means something, that means everything; that is the only thing that matters right now on this mountain in this morning light.
I think: Mateo said she wasn't going to run, and I need him to be right about that more than I have ever needed him to be right about anything in twenty years of trusting him.
I think: there are no right words for this, and I am going to have to say them anyway, in whatever order they come, without the careful preparation I spent all this time constructing, none of which applies anymore.
"Harper," I say quietly. "I can explain."
21
HARPER
Ifollow him inside.
He steps past me on the porch—close enough that I have to turn sideways to let him by, close enough that I feel the warmth of him as he passes—and he pushes the cabin door open and goes through it, and I follow him without deliberating about whether I'm going to, because there is no version of me that stands on that porch and waits while the man who shifted from a wolf into a human being in front of my eyes goes inside alone.
The door closes behind us.
I turn to face him.
"Now," I demand, and my voice comes out harder than I intend it to, but I don't adjust it because I have been asking questions for three days and getting timber rotation, and I am done with timber rotation. "Right now. All of it. No more of whatever that was on the south trail. Tell me exactly what is happening on this mountain."
Logan looks at me. The gray eyes are doing the steady thing, the calm thing, and the infuriating thing, where nothing reaches the surface that he doesn't authorize.
"Sit down," he says quietly.
"I don't want to sit down."
"Harper." Just my name. The whole weight of it.
I pull out a chair and sit down. He puts the kettle on, which under any other circumstances would be absurd, and which right now is the most grounding thing happening in this room, and then he turns around and leans against the counter and looks at me.
"Ask me what you want to know," he says. "I'll answer everything."
"What are you?" I press directly, because there is no version of this that starts anywhere else.
