Page 62 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
Mateo stays hushed for a brief second. "Where are you thinking?"
"North of here. There are two or three towns that haven't shown any investigative activity yet. If we move her before they tighten the search pattern?—"
"Logan." He says it with the particular weight of a man who is about to tell me something I'm not going to like. "The towns they haven't reached yet are the towns they're moving toward. The search pattern is working north and east. Any town we send herto today could have investigators in it by tomorrow." He refuses to look away. "Moving her out of the territory right now puts her in a car on mountain roads between two active search zones. That's not safer. That's simply a different kind of exposed."
I press two fingers to the bridge of my nose and breathe through it.
He's right. I know he's right. I've been running the same calculation since the meeting started and arriving at the same uncomfortable answer, but I wanted someone else to confirm it before I closed the door on it.
"So she stays," I concede.
"She stays," Mateo concedes. "This territory is still the best cover she has. We know every approach. We can see them coming." He pauses. "She's safer here than anywhere Garrett could drive her to tonight."
I nod once. It's not the answer I wanted, but it's the one that holds up.
"I'll tell her tonight," I state.
"She's with Lila," Mateo comments. "From what I could tell when I checked in an hour ago, they were talking. Actually talking." He pauses. "Lila's good for this. She knows what it's like to be on the receiving end of this particular morning."
"I know," I reply. "That's why I left her there."
Mateo nods and heads for the door.
I give Harper the rest of the afternoon. She's been through enough for one day, and she doesn't need me hovering. If there is one thing I have learned about this woman, it's that she processes best when she has room to do so without an audience. So I spend the afternoon checking in with Garrett on the camera installations, running the south trail once with Declan to assess sight lines, and doing the kind of practical, physical work that has always been how I manage the things I can't solve by thinking about them harder.
By evening, I go to find her.
I find Harper on the cabin porch after dinner, sitting on the steps with her second cup of tea, watching the treeline in the particular way she watches everything—like she's reading it, building a picture from it, and filing what it tells her. She looks up when she hears me coming and shifts to make room, and I sit beside her, and we look at the mountain for a moment without speaking.
"I need to talk to you about something," I open.
"I know," she replies. "I've been watching Nora run schedules on her phone for three hours. Something's escalating."
I look at her. "I considered having Garrett take you somewhere tonight," I say, plainly. "Get you out of the territory, somewhere the investigators haven't reached yet."
She goes very still.
"Mateo talked me out of it," I continue before she can respond. "He's right that moving you tonight creates more exposure, not less. The search pattern is tightening from the south. Any town I could send you to is likely to have investigators in it by tomorrow." I hold her gaze. "But I wanted you to know I considered it. Because your safety is the priority, not?—"
"No," she interrupts, firmly and without heat.
I wait.
"No," she repeats, quieter this time but no less certain. "I understand why you thought about it, and I understand why Mateo was right, and I agree with the logic." She looks at me steadily. "But I also want to be clear that even if the logic had been different—even if sending me north made perfect tactical sense—I would not have gone." She pauses. "Dawson already chased me out of my own wedding. He ran me off a mountain road. He's been building a story about me in public since the moment I left." Her jaw sets into the particular line it gets whenshe has decided something and is done revising it. "He does not get to chase me out of another place I've chosen. Not this one."
I slowly drink her in.
The evening light is doing what it does at this hour, warm and long through the pines, and it's catching the green in her hazel eyes and the particular set of her jaw, and the woman who quickly hightailed it away from a wedding in a ruined dress and ended up here has decided, without drama and without performance, that here is where she stays.
My wolf goes very still.
Not the alert-still. The other kind. The kind that means this. Right here. This is what I've been waiting for.
"Okay," I say quietly.
She looks at me. "That's it? Okay?"
"You've made your position clear," I reply. "I respect your position."
