Page 74 of Left Cold, Wolf Owned
Logan pulls up the camera feeds on the lodge laptop, the monitor angled so Mateo and I can both see. The south entrance camera, the east access, the bridge crossing—all running, all timestamped.
The south entrance feed shows three separate vehicles over the past eighteen hours. Dark SUVs, late model, are making the same pass along the logging road at intervals that are too regular to be coincidental. Not investigators this time—the vehicles are too clean and too coordinated, and the intervals are too precise. This is security running a reconnaissance pattern.
I watch the third pass twice.
"Stop it there," I instruct, and Logan freezes the frame.
I lean closer to the screen.
The passenger door of the second vehicle is open at a particular angle, and the man stepping out is large, with close-cropped hair and the particular way of standing that I recognize before I've consciously processed why: the weight distribution,the positioning relative to the vehicle, and the way his eyes move across the treeline.
"That's Croft," I say flatly.
Logan looks at me. "You know him?"
"He's Dawson's personal security lead," I confirm. "He's been with Dawson for six years. He's not an investigator. He's not a hired contractor." I straighten up. "He's the man Dawson sends when he's stopped asking nicely."
Mateo and Logan exchange a look.
"He knows where we are," I announce. "Or he knows well enough. This road doesn't lead anywhere else."
The room is very quiet for a moment.
"I want to move you," Logan says, and his voice is low and careful but carries to the whole table. "There's a place north of here—off the main roads, pack-owned, nobody knows about it. Garrett could have you there by nightfall."
I don't look away from the screen. "No."
"Harper—"
"I said no." I turn to face him then, and whatever he sees in my face makes him go still. "I have been running from Dawson Whitaker since the morning I walked out of that venue. I ran from the wedding. I ran from the city. I drove up a mountain road, and my car broke down, and I ended up here." I hold his gaze. "I ran once. I ran in a wedding dress down a mountain road with no plan and nowhere to go, and it was the rightest thing I've ever done. This is the second rightest thing. I am planting my feet and I am keeping them there."
Mateo is very still across the table.
"He has security," Logan notes. "Legal resources. He's not coming for a conversation."
"I know exactly what he's coming for," I confirm. "He's coming to retrieve something he considers his, in front of enough witnesses that I look unstable if I refuse, with enoughlegal weight that refusing looks like a problem." I keep my eyes on Logan's. "I know how he operates because I spent five years inside the operation." I pause. "Which means I know exactly where it breaks down."
Logan receives it, and whatever it does on his face is brief and contained, and then he straightens, and the Alpha quality of him comes fully online, and he looks at Mateo.
"Get everyone to the lodge," he says. "Now."
The pack is assembled in under fifteen minutes.
Logan stands at the front of the room with the particular focused authority that the pack responds to without being told to, and I sit at the table where I have been sitting from that first morning, and nobody questions it.
"Dawson Whitaker is forty minutes south," Logan opens, without preamble. "He's brought personal security and legal resources. His lead security operative has been identified on our south logging road running reconnaissance. He knows this property exists." He pauses. "We are operating on the assumption that he will attempt a direct approach within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours."
The room takes that in.
"Mateo," Logan continues, moving through it with the focused efficiency that years of territorial defense builds into a person until it stops feeling like effort. "I want observation posts on the south logging road and the valley access route. Two wolves per post, rotating every four hours. Eyes on every vehicle that moves in this direction."
"Already placing them," Mateo remarks. "I can have both posts operational within the hour."
"Nora, southern ridge teams to full alert. Anyone on rotation gets their shift extended until further notice. I want the ridge covered from first light to after dark with no gaps."
"Done," Nora asserts, already on her phone.
"Garrett, continuous monitoring on all camera feeds. I want someone on that screen every hour of the day and night. Any vehicle we don't recognize on the access road gets logged and reported to Mateo immediately."
