Page 40 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
The drive back is quieter than the drive out.
While I wouldn’t call it uncomfortable, it's the particular quiet of two people who have said most of what needed saying and are comfortable enough now to let the rest of it sit. Logan drives the way he does everything: unhurried and steady, one hand on the wheel, the mountain road unspooling ahead of us in the early morning light. The weather has cleared overnight into something sharp and clean, the sky the kind of blue that only happens after rain, and I watch it through the windshield and let my mind do what it's been doing since I woke up in that motel room.
Turn things over. Put them down. Pick them back up.
Dawson's people are asking questions in towns east of here. That's the reality I'm carrying back up this mountain with me, sitting in the passenger seat of my own car with someone else driving, going back to a place I said I was only staying at temporarily. The irony of it isn't lost on me. Nor is the fact that somewhere underneath the calculation about timing and footing and not walking back into Dawson's narrative before I'm ready, there's a quieter truth I'm not quite examining yet.
I wanted to come back.
Not because it was the practical call. I wanted to.
I turn my gaze to the closest window to the valley below and don't say that out loud.
"You're thinking," Logan observes, somewhere around the twenty-minute mark.
"I'm always thinking," I reply.
"Louder than usual," he replies, and a slight smirk appears.
I almost smile. "Dawson's people working east from the mountain. I keep running the math on it."
"What does the math tell you?"
"That I made the right call coming back." I pause. "Which doesn't mean I've stopped thinking about it."
"I know," he replies simply.
We drive the rest of the way in the easy quiet that has become, somewhere over our time together, one of my favorite things about being around this man.
Nora ison the porch of the lodge when we pull in.
I don't know how she knew—the mountain communication system operates by rules I haven't fully mapped yet—but she's there, expression open and entirely unbothered, having clearly been waiting and having clearly decided that's nobody's business but her own.
"You came back," she announces the moment I get out of the car.
"I came back," I confirm.
She crosses the clearing in about four strides and pulls me into a hug that is immediate and unself-conscious and warm in the way Nora is warm—completely, without qualification, like it never occurred to her to do it any other way. I hug her back before I've consciously decided to, which tells me somethingabout how much has shifted in our short time of dwelling together.
"Good," she declares, stepping back, and I get the full force of those amber eyes, which has never once been a casual experience. "Because Declan has been unbearable."
"Why has Declan been unbearable?"
"He's always unbearable when something interesting is happening, and he's not a part of it." She glances at Logan over my shoulder. "She's staying."
"She's staying temporarily," I clarify.
Nora's face suggests she has opinions about the word 'temporarily' and has decided to keep them to herself, which, for Nora, represents significant restraint.
Lila appears in the lodge doorway behind her, notebook already in hand, and gives me the quiet, genuine smile that I've come to associate with her particular brand of warmth—not effusive, but simply and absolutely real. "Glad you're back," she offers.
"Glad to be back," I reply, and mean it more than I expect to.
Nora turns toward the lodge door and holds it open, as if expecting someone who has already decided what happens next. "Come on," she urges. "Lila made lunch, and there's enough for everyone."
"I hope you're hungry," Lila adds from the doorway, already turning back inside.
I follow them in, and Lila falls into step beside me as we move through the lodge toward the kitchen, dropping her voice to something quieter than the general noise of the room.
