Page 8 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
"Okay," I say. "Only for tonight."
He nods. No fanfare, no I-told-you-so, no performance of generosity. A simple acceptance of the settled thing. "For tonight."
He tips his head toward the stairs.
The room upstairsis simple and clean—a bed with a heavy quilt the color of pine needles, a window that looks out onto the dark silhouette of the treeline, and a lamp on the side table, throwing a low, warm circle of light across the wood floor. I sit on the edge of the bed in his too-big clothes, wool socks pulled up to my shins, and I listen to the mountain settle around the cabin.
Wind through the pines. The distant sound of something moving in the trees is far enough to be background noise but close enough to make the solid walls feel like a gift. The timber frame is shifting in the cold. Downstairs, the quiet sounds of someone moving around, a cabinet closing, and then nothing.
I know logically that I should be coming apart right now. I know the math of it—stranded, no plan, no signal; everything I thought my life was revealed to be something else entirely overthe course of a single afternoon. There is a reasonable, justified breakdown waiting for me somewhere in the near future, and I am fully aware of its address.
But the quilt is heavy and warm. The lamp is the kind of low light that only exists in places that have never tried to be anything other than what they are. I am clean and fed and not cold anymore, and I can breathe in a way I couldn't this morning in that suite with the prosecco and the bobby pins and the dress.
I pull the quilt up to my chin and stare at the ceiling.
I should be crying. By every logical measure, tonight calls for it. The wedding, the venue, the look on his face when the door opened and I caught him—all of it is right there, outside the warmth of the quilt, waiting patiently for me to fall apart.
Instead, I feel okay.
Okay is the word for it. In this warm room, in this solid cabin, on this mountain I didn't know existed this morning—okay is exactly what I am, and it's more than I had any right to expect from today.
Thanks to the overall shock, there's a blankness where the rest of it should be. There are things I should remember but don’t. The day, even that moment, exists in fragmented pieces—the confrontation, the screenshots, the dress, the drive, and the dark—but the middle of it has gone somewhere I can't reach right now, and I find that I really don't want to reach for it. My mind keeps sliding away from it the way a tongue avoids a sore tooth, and I let it. Whatever is waiting on the other side of that door can wait a little longer.
Outside, the pines move in the wind.
I close my eyes.
4
LOGAN
Idon't sleep.
This isn't unusual—I've never needed much of it, and the Alpha in me stays light even on quiet nights, one ear always open to the territory. But tonight isn't about light sleeping. Tonight I sit in the chair by the dying fire with a cold cup of coffee and stare at the middle distance and try to think clearly about something that has knocked every clear thought I own completely sideways.
The cabin is quiet. Upstairs, I can hear the slow, even rhythm of her breathing—deeper now, finally, the particular quality of fighting sleep and eventually losing. She's been out for about an hour. I've been down here the entire time, doing absolutely nothing useful.
Every few minutes, my wolf surfaces with the same wordless insistence; it's been running all night.Go upstairs. She's yours. She's home. Why are you sitting down here alone when she's right there?
Every few minutes, I tell it to be quiet.
I give it another twenty minutes before I pick up the phone. It’s a pack-issued satellite line—standard cell service dies twomiles down the mountain, but my father installed our own network years ago.
Mateo answers on the second ring, which means he wasn't fully asleep either. He never is when something is off on the territory, and Mateo has had that instinct since he was a teenager running with a pack that no longer exists. Twenty years I've known him—most of my life, all of his time with the Greybacks—and I still don't think he's ever slept through a night that had something unsettled in it.
"Everything alright?" His voice is even and alert without being alarmed.
"Yeah." I keep my voice low out of habit, which is unnecessary—she's upstairs and dead asleep—but I do it anyway. "I need to tell you something."
A pause. "How bad?"
"Not bad." I stop. Run a hand over my jaw. There's no clean way to say this, so I say it. "There's a human woman staying in my cabin tonight."
Silence on the other end. Then, carefully: "Okay."
"She wandered onto the territory. Her car broke down on the south road; she followed the smoke from my chimney through the woods." I give him the facts the way I always give him facts—direct, no padding. "She's asleep upstairs."
"Logan." His voice has shifted. I can hear him sitting up, the shift of his full attention coming through the line. "Why are you calling me at midnight about a stranded woman instead of waiting to tell me in the morning?"
