Page 73 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
We stay there for a moment, both breathing like we've run the ridge trail twice.
Then she laughs—low and genuine, her face still in the pillow.
"Okay," she manages, muffled. "I changed my mind. You can stop now."
"Noted," I reply, and she laughs again, and I pull her close, and we lie tangled in the aftermath.
The firelight from the other room moves in long amber lines across the ceiling, and Harper is tracing the scar on my forearm in the quiet way she has when she's thinking through something and doesn't need to say it out loud yet.
"Okay," she says, eventually. "Tell me what it means. Formally claiming a mate. What does that look like for a wolf?"
I look at the ceiling for a moment. "A ceremony," I tell her. "In front of the pack. The Alpha formally presents his mate, and the pack formally acknowledges her." I pause. "It's not only symbolic. It's a declaration of protection. Every wolf in the territory commits to her safety as they commit to mine."
She absorbs that. "And you want to do that."
"When Dawson's threat is resolved," I confirm. "Yes."
She is speechless for some time. Then: "You want to introduce me to the pack as the Alpha female."
"You already are," I say simply. "The ceremony makes it official."
She turns her head to look at me on the pillow, and her face is the most unguarded I have ever seen it—past the dry humor,past the composure, all the way down to the thing underneath that she doesn't often let reach the surface.
"Okay," she says quietly.
"Okay," I agree.
My wolf settles into a quiet it has been moving toward since the first night Harper Collins stood on my porch, which turns out to have been exactly right about where it was going.
27
HARPER
The next morning starts quietly enough.
I'm on my second cup of coffee at the lodge table, working through a revised version of the eastern patrol schedule, when Mateo comes through the door. He's been in town since early morning—Logan had mentioned it the night before, something about checking in with contacts—and he comes in with the particular look he gets when the information he's carrying is significant, and he has already decided how to deliver it.
I know that expression now. I've learned it the way I've learned everything about this pack—by paying attention.
He finds Logan first, crossing the room to him and dropping his voice, and I give them approximately forty-five seconds before I set down my pen.
"Tell me," I instruct before either of them can decide on an approach.
Mateo looks at Logan, who nods once.
"Dawson is in the region," Mateo says, level and direct. "He arrived two days ago. He's staying at the Ridgeline Resort—about forty minutes south, high-end, the kind of place you rentwhen you want privacy and a base of operations." He pauses. "He didn't come alone. He brought at least four hired security guards, and based on what my contact at the resort saw, he brought paperwork. Legal paperwork."
I absorb that without moving.
"He's not sending people anymore," I conclude. "He came himself."
"He came himself," Mateo leaves it there.
I look at the table for a moment and give it the space to become real. Dawson, at a mountain resort forty minutes south, with security and lawyers, having failed to locate me through investigators and deciding that the solution is to show up in person. It is exactly what I would have predicted from him if I'd been thinking clearly enough to predict anything.
He's not a distance problem anymore.
"Show me the territory’s footage," I demand.
