Page 39 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
He ends the call before I can respond.
I stand in the covered walkway for a few minutes longer, working through how to say what I need to say in a way that gives Harper the information without making her feel managed. She'll push back. That part I'm certain of. But she's practical, and the practical argument here is real: the route east puts her closer to the people looking for her. The mountain buys her time. And time is what she said she needed.
I go back inside.
Harper is still on the bed, lying on top of the covers now, looking at the ceiling with her hands folded on her stomach, and she looks over when I come in.
"Weather update?" she asks.
"Weather's fine," I tell her, coming further into the room. "There's something else." I pull the chair around so I'm facing her rather than the window and sit down, and she reads my expression and pushes herself up to sitting immediately because she has never needed to be told when something is serious. "Mateo's been getting reports. People in the towns east of here are asking questions—specifically about a woman matching your description. No mention of me. And something got posted online from the diner this morning—one of those women from the group of three. Blurry photo, not definitive, but enough that someone who was looking would have a direction."
A quietness falls over her, absorbing it. I watch her face move through the calculation. Fear would be simpler. This is something else.
"His people," she says finally, working it out as she says it and arriving at certainty by the end of the two words.
"That's Mateo's read."
She pulls her knees up and wraps her arms around them, and I can see the process happening—methodical, from the inside out, the way it always is with Harper. "If we keep going east?—"
"You're moving toward wherever they're asking," I reply. "If we go back, you're behind it. You have time."
She doesn't say anything for a moment.
"I'm not afraid of Dawson," she tells me and means it. "I want to be clear about that. He doesn't—he's not someone who frightens me."
"I know," I reply.
"It's—" She pauses, looking for the honest version of it. "I'm not ready. Not yet. I have the proof, but I don't have my footing yet, and he's already been on camera for days building his version of this, and if I walk back into that before I have a solid, bulletproof strategy—" She stops. "He'll talk over me. He always talks over me. And right now, throwing screenshots at the press without a plan isn't solid enough to stand on."
"Then don't go back until you do," I tell her simply.
She doesn't move, but her attention crosses the small space of the room and finds me. "You think going back to the mountain buys me that?"
"I think it buys you time," I reply. "To get your footing. On your terms, not his."
She's quiet for a long moment, looking at the middle distance with the inward stare of someone making a real decision rather than an easy one.
"In the morning," she finally decides. "When the weather clears."
"In the morning," I agree.
She nods once, then lies back down and looks at the ceiling. The decision has settled. Unresolved in places, maybe. But made entirely hers.
"Thank you," she tells me quietly. "For telling me instead of deciding."
I nod and don't say what I'm thinking, which is that it was never going to be any other way.
She looks back at the ceiling, and I settle into the chair that is, as predicted, approximately one foot too short for my legs, and the rain comes down outside, and the room holds us both in the particular silence of two people who have said what needed saying and don't need to fill the rest of it.
My wolf is quieter now. Not satisfied—it won't be satisfied for a long time, possibly ever, depending on how this goes—but quieter. Settled into its patient certainty the way it always settles when it's decided something and is simply waiting on the rest of the world to catch up.
Outside, the rain comes down.
In the morning, we go back.
15
HARPER
