Page 68 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
Harper looks back at her notebook, and I look at the treeline, and we sit in the particular quiet of two people who are ready for what's coming and are choosing, for this one hour, to simply be here before it arrives.
25
HARPER
Idon't sleep well.
That's not a complaint—it's simply true. I lie in the dark listening to the mountain settle around the cabin, and I think about what Logan told me on the porch. An investigator on the northern ridge. Mapping the territory. A vehicle registered to a company under Dawson's name.
He's not a distant problem anymore. He's a vehicle on a mountain road with binoculars, sketching a map of the place I've been calling home.
I get up before dawn, dress quietly, and make my way to the lodge. I'd overheard Nora mention the night before that she wanted to do a full supply check in the morning, given what was coming, and it occurs to me, somewhere between the cabin door and the treeline, that a supply check is exactly the kind of thing I am specifically equipped to help with.
By the time Nora arrives and finds me already pulling inventory from the back of the main storage cabinet, she doesn't look surprised.
"I was going to come find you," she announces.
"You didn't have to," I reply, setting a box of first-aid supplies on the counter. "I'm already here."
Lila arrives twelve minutes later with her own notebook and a particular focused calm, like she’s been thinking through medical contingencies since before breakfast. She takes one look at the counter where I've started laying out the lodge's existing supply inventory and pulls up a chair.
"Medical supplies first," she asserts, already opening to a fresh page. "If there's a confrontation on the property, I need everything accessible within two minutes, not buried in the back of the clinic storage."
"Agreed," I confirm. "Walk me through what you have and where it currently lives."
She does. I write it down in the order she gives it, and then I rewrite it in the order it should be—frequency of likely need during an emergency, physical accessibility from the main gathering points, and what needs to stay cold versus what can be moved.
We work through the morning the way three people work when they are all, in their different ways, most comfortable when they have something to do with their hands.
The medical supply staging takes the better part of two hours. Since we already fixed the main cabinets my second day on the mountain, the inventory is accurate, but now we need it mobile. We pull the trauma supplies, sort them by category, and build dedicated emergency kits—highest-priority items in the top compartments, secondary supplies grouped by function below them.
"If something happens on the property," I explain to Lila as we work, "you need to be able to put your hands on the right thing in the dark if necessary. That means the layout has to be logical enough to navigate without looking."
"That's not how it was before," Lila admits.
"I know," I reply. "It is now."
Nora, meanwhile, has been working through the kitchen and the main food stores with the decisive energy she brings to everything. By the time she's finished, I have a full inventory in front of me—quantities, locations, and expiry dates—and I start building the storage assignment system.
The principle is simple: everything the pack might need during an extended period on the property gets mapped to its most accessible location relative to where people will actually be when they need it. Medical supplies in the clinic, stocked and organized. Emergency food stores are divided between the main lodge kitchen and a secondary cache near the garage for the patrol rotations. Water, lighting, communication equipment—all of it assigned a location, documented, and labeled.
I create a master reference sheet and pin it to the inside of the main supply cabinet door.
"What's that?" Nora asks, looking over my shoulder.
"Everything you have, where it lives, and how much of it," I explain. "So nobody has to think about logistics when something's happening. They only have to look at the sheet."
Nora stares at it for a moment. "We've honestly needed this for years."
"You have it now," I tell her.
Pack members start drifting through as the morning moves toward afternoon—the younger wolves from the southern ridge team coming in with questions about vehicle assignments, a patrol leader needing clarification on the emergency communication protocol, and two others asking about fuel reserves and rotation schedules. I handle each one without redirecting them, building the answers into the documentation as I go, so the next person who has the same question can find it without asking.
At some point, Mateo comes through, checks the supply cabinet, reads the reference sheet, and looks at me with an expression that is approximately half assessment and half something warmer.
"This is good work," he says simply.
"It needed doing," I reply, which is true, and we leave it at that.
