Page 27 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
"I know." She keeps her eyes on me, and I let her. "I mean it more now."
I look at her—hazel eyes gone green in this light, her hair loose around her shoulders, wearing Nora's clothes like she was always going to end up in them—and feel the bond pull with a specificity that takes real effort to hold steady against.
"Get some sleep," I tell her. "I'll check the road status first thing."
She nods and goes inside.
I don't go inside immediately.
I give her ten minutes to settle, and then I cross to the garage. Garrett has left the bay light on, which means he knew I'd be coming, which is Garrett.
I pull Harper's Subaru out of the bay and run through it properly—tires, fluid levels, and the work Garrett did on the coolant system. It's solid. Garrett doesn't leave a job anything less than solid. But forty minutes down a mountain pass after overnight weather is a different road than forty minutes in clear conditions, and I don't take that difference casually regardless of whose hands last touched the engine.
I load the back with what the drive might need—a tow strap, a basic tool kit, tire chains in case the pass is worse than the forecast suggests, and two emergency blankets still in their packaging. A thermos I fill in the cabin kitchen while Harper sleeps. It's probably more than the morning will require. I do it anyway.
The car is familiar in a way that catches me off guard—I've had my hands on the engine, I've watched Garrett work it back to running, and now I'm standing in the garage bay looking at the thing that's going to carry her away from here and doing my best to be practical about that.
My wolf has no interest in being practical about it.
I go back inside and sit in the chair by the dying fire, the way I sat the first night she was here, and I think about the drive clearly and without flinching.
Tomorrow the weather will clear, and the pass will open, and I'll drive her car forty minutes down the mountain, and she'll walk back into the world that's been waiting for her. The press statements and the complicated mother and the five years of a life that wasn't quite hers. She'll face all of it the way she faces everything—practically, stubbornly, with that dry precision that isn't a defense mechanism so much as who she is.
And then I'll walk back.
The way I've been walking this mountain my whole life. Four legs through the treeline, up the ridge, home by the route I know better than I know anything else. I'll find somewhere off the road, out of sight, and shift, and the mountain will do the rest. It's forty minutes by car and considerably less than that the other way, through the forest, at the pace my wolf runs when it has somewhere to be.
My wolf doesn't respond to that with any enthusiasm. It knows what it means, too.
Mateo's warning sits in my chest alongside everything else. The fracture. The risk of a bond that doesn't settle. I've been holding it at arm's length since he said it, examining it honestly because Mateo doesn't raise things he doesn't mean.
I know the risk. I've known it since the first night.
It doesn't change the answer.
She probably could never fathom what a bond is. She doesn't know that I’m a wolf. She came here by accident on the worst night of her life, and she has been making every decision without the full picture. If I let the risk to myself factor into what she gets to choose, I'm not respecting her freedom—I'm finding a more justifiable way to take it from her.
I won't do that.
If she comes back someday, it'll be because she wants to. If she doesn't, it'll be because she chose something else.
Either way, it has to be hers.
Upstairs, she's asleep—the kind of deep, surrendered sleep that comes after a day that asked everything—and I know it without checking, which is simply how I know things on this mountain. I sit with the dying fire and her packed car in the garage and the forty-minute road, waiting for morning, and I let myself have the weight of it, only for tonight, before I put it somewhere I can carry it.
11
HARPER
The pass does not clear by seven.
Despite the forecast Logan checked the night before, the mountain decides to do something entirely unexpected. The storm stalls directly over the ridge, washing out the lower roads and making travel impossible for the next three days.
I spend the rest of the time living in the cabin, helping Lila in the clinic, and falling into a quiet rhythm I didn't expect.
When the pass finally clears, I know because Logan knocks on the guest room door at six fifty-five and says "road's open" through the wood in the same tone he uses for everything—level, unhurried, completely unbothered by the fact that it's not yet seven in the morning—and I'm already half awake anyway, lying in the dark with the particular alertness of someone whose brain decided sleep was finished before the rest of her agreed.
I'm dressed and downstairs in fifteen minutes.
