Page 41 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
"The coverage picked up while you were gone," she tells me. "It's national now. Three major outlets ran it yesterday."
I slow my step slightly. "What are they saying?"
"Mostly still running with his version. But a few are starting to ask questions about the timeline—one piece notedsome inconsistencies in his statement." She pauses. "Nothing definitive yet. But the questions are starting."
I think about that for a moment, standing near the kitchen while Nora moves around it like she owns it, which she functionally does. "Good," I decide finally. "That's actually good."
Lila watches me with that perceptive quiet of hers. "You're not ready to go back yet."
"Not yet." I pull out a chair at the table. "But I'm getting closer to knowing exactly how I'm going to dismantle his story when I do."
She nods, satisfied with that, sets her journal on the table, and goes to help Nora with the food.
Over the nextcouple of days, I find my rhythm.
It happens without my planning it. No strategy. No statement. It simply happens. I keep finding things that need doing and doing them, the way I always have, because idle hands and an active brain is a genuinely bad combination, and the mountain, it turns out, has no shortage of things that need organizing.
The pack's business records are a particular project. Logan's timber and land management operation is legitimate and well-run on the operational side—I'd understood that quickly enough from conversations with Garrett and the others—but the administrative infrastructure has the particular chaos of something that's been managed by people who are excellent at the work and less interested in the paperwork that surrounds it. I spend two full afternoons with Garrett going through vehicle maintenance logs, fuel records, and contract files, building a system that cross-references everything properly and flags anything overdue.
Garrett watches me work with the quiet approval of a man who has been wanting this done for years and is glad someone else is doing it.
"You're faster than I expected," he finally observes on the second afternoon.
"Nonprofit events run on logistics," I tell him without looking up from the spreadsheet. "Same bones."
He looks at the screen for a moment, then at me. "Good bones," he replies, which, from Garrett, is practically a standing ovation.
Lila's supply systems get a similar treatment—the clinic inventory is rebuilt properly, expiry dates are flagged, and a reorder schedule is set up that she can maintain without it becoming a whole separate job. She watches me finish it wearing the face of a woman who has been handed a gift she didn't know she needed.
"This is going to save me hours every month," she tells me.
"It should have been done like this from the start," I reply.
She glances at the cabinet with a look that contains an entire history. "All I ask is that you don't tell Declan it's been reorganized. I'd like it to survive the month."
"My lips are sealed," I reply, and she laughs.
Through this all, Logan watches.
I notice it the way I notice everything about him — peripherally, without being obvious about it, the same way he watches everything. He doesn't insert himself. He doesn't comment. He's present in the way he's always present—somewhere nearby, paying attention in that unhurried, all-encompassing way that I have stopped finding unsettling and started finding, if I'm being honest, grounding.
On the third evening back, after dinner has been cleared and the lodge has gone to its evening quiet, we end up on theporch steps the way we seem to end up on porch steps—without planning it and without naming it.
The sky is doing something extraordinary. The kind of clear, dense dark that only exists this far from city light, the stars so close and numerous that the sky looks almost textured. I've been on this mountain for a minute, and it still stops me every time.
"Tell me something you've never told anyone," I venture, after a while.
He looks at me sideways. "That's a significant request."
"You don't have to," I reply. "I'm curious. About what's under the rest of it."
He's quiet for a long moment, looking at the treeline.
"When my father died," he finally begins, "the first thing I felt was relief." He pauses. "Not because I wanted him gone. I didn't. I loved him completely. But he'd been sick for two years, and the last six months were—" He stops. "The relief was for him. That he wasn't in that anymore." He pauses again. "But I've never said that out loud because it sounds like something else."
I look at him. "It doesn't sound like something else."
"No?"
