Page 6 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
She is not home, I tell it.She is a stranger. It's late. She's a mess, and so is whatever brought her here, and you need to settle down.
My wolf doesn't argue. It doesn't concede either. It simply goes still and watchful, the way it does when it's already made up its mind about something and sees no reason to keep making the case.
I stand with my hand on the door and look at the back of her—the ruined dress, the collapsed veil, the rigid set of her shoulders that is doing its best impression of composure—and I try to think clearly.
It's late. It's dark. She's a human woman who walked out of the mountain forest alone at eleven o'clock at night in a wedding dress, which means whatever happened today was bad enough that this—a stranger's cabin, no signal, no plan—was the better option. She hasn't told me anything yet, and I already know that much.
My wolf is telling me she's my fated mate.
I don't know her name. I don't know where she came from. I don't know what she's running from, what she needs, or how any of this is supposed to work.
What I know is that it's cold out, the fire is going, and she looks like she's about thirty seconds from the edge of something she's been holding back all day.
That's enough to start with.
Everything else will have to wait.
3
HARPER
The cabin is warm.
That's the first thing I notice, and it hits me harder than it should—the immediate, physical relief of stepping out of the cold and into a space that has a fire going and solid walls and the faint smell of coffee. My body registers it before my brain does, a full-system exhale that I don't entirely authorize.
I stop in the middle of the room and take stock.
It's a good space. Timber-framed, stone hearth running the length of the far wall, the fire built low and steady the way someone makes a fire when they actually know what they're doing. Bookshelves packed without any particular system. A kitchen off to the left, functional and clean, with no unnecessary flourishes. The whole place has the feeling of somewhere that gets used—worn in the right places, solid everywhere else. Nothing decorative that doesn't serve a purpose.
It suits him, is my first coherent thought.
I turn around.
He's still by the door, one hand resting on the frame, watching me with an expression that is almost aggressivelyneutral. And I realize, now that I'm inside and the immediate panic of the last hour has dropped half a register, that large was an understatement.
He is enormous. Well over six feet and broad through the shoulders in a way that makes the doorframe look appropriately scaled for once. Dark blond hair, a little too long, like cutting it has been a lower priority than everything else he has going on. A beard kept trimmed but not fussed over. He's in worn jeans and a flannel with the sleeves pushed up, and there are scars along his forearms—pale and old, the kind that come from something more serious than accidents. His eyes are steel gray and very focused, the kind of focused that doesn't miss much and isn't trying to pretend otherwise.
He should be terrifying. Objectively, by every reasonable metric—strange man, remote cabin, middle of the night—he should be the most frightening part of this entire situation.
He isn't. I don't know what to do with that.
"I should explain," I say, because the silence has gone on long enough, and I have never been good at sitting inside one.
"You don't have to right now."
"I want to." I pull in a breath. "My car broke down. On the road—maybe two miles back, south I think—there's a rock face that juts out—" I stop. Reorganize. "It was overheating for a while, and then it suddenly quit. It was getting dark, and I could see smoke from the chimney through the trees, so I followed it." I pause. "That's the whole thing. That's the entire explanation."
He nods once, like that's a perfectly reasonable sequence of events and not the most chaotic string of sentences I've ever said out loud. "Okay."
"Okay," I repeat. "Just okay?"
"What else would it be?"
I genuinely don't have an answer for that. I look away first.
I look down at myself instead, which is its own problem in itself. The dress is wrecked—mud along the entire hem; a tear near my left hip that I don't remember happening; and the veil listing sideways off the back of my head at an angle I can feel but can't fix without a mirror. I have been hiking through mountain forest in forty-two buttons and eleven pounds of silk, and I look exactly like that sounds.
"I'm aware," I say, gesturing vaguely at all of it, "that I look insane."
