Page 53 of Before the Bond
Fog caught in the firs' boughs.
I moved through them without sound.
The eastern line was clean. No foreign scents — only the fading ones from the night I saved Olivia in the woods.
I kept moving. Seven years of running perimeters had taught me that the forest didn't answer. It gave space.
I kept circling Olivia's decision. I thought about our exchange at the fireplace.
"Despite everything, I still care about this place."
She'd said it the way she said things that cost her — carefully, without looking at me directly. I'd watched her do it with Jake in the early weeks. With Stella. Even with Maureen. Olivia Cruz gave warmth easily.
I couldn't bring myself to be frustrated by the decision. Even if some would call her foolish or too selfless for her own good, that was simply the way Olivia was. Kind without measure.
She didn’t see how it actually cost her.
And she had no idea that she was doing it again right now. Staying in a house full of people who were keeping something from her, extending trust to a man who had not yet earned the full weight of it. Her kindness was working against her and she couldn't see it because I was the one blocking the view.
That thought sat in my chest like a coal.
My patrols eventually brought me to the ridge.
Below the trees, I could see Ashwood estate. The dawn's light dipped in and out of its crevices, shadows still clung to parts of it. Smoke came from the chimney, telling me that Maureen was going to start breakfast soon.
I could hear movement from Jake's room. Pretending he’d slept.
Olivia herself was somewhere in there in her own room. Even from here, I felt her. The bond made it easy to feel her heartbeat. It was steady. A part of me wondered if she was still asleep or if she was preparing to head to the kitchen. Her curtains were closed. So I wouldn't know for sure.
Strange enough now that she was here — but for the past seven years, it had been different.
At most, four hundred miles. From there, the bond thinned as she moved from one nursing assignment to the other.Sometimes I followed. Checked to see how she was doing. She kept helping people.
So many times, I wanted to approach her. But all that mattered was that she was safe.
The mist surrounded my paws and the rest of my form. I hid in the trees as the sunlight rose, careful not to let any possible travelers know I was around.
As I looked at the rest of Ashwood estate, the relief I was so anxious to carry finally began to crack.
She didn’t know yet.
That was the whole of it. She stayed because she didn’t know everything. And every hour she spent in this house believing she'd chosen it freely was an hour built on something that would break.
I turned around and started running.
My guilt had a shape.
For me, it wasn't the guilt of a man who did something terrible on purpose.
I didn't drive the car. I didn’t order the attack. I didn't choose, at twenty, to follow a scent through the forests in Northern California. Nor to find a girl standing in the afternoon light with her face tilted up at a hawk, her face as bright as the sun.
Perhaps I should have been more wary.
Perhaps if I didn't let the bond take over every sense of my being, I would have noticed the spy in the trees only a mile away from me.
I would have been tipped off to them noticing how drawn I was toward Olivia. The way my body had oriented toward her without my permission. The way every other instinct had gone quiet and that one had sharpened to a point. To anyone trained to read a wolf's behavior, I had announced it clearly. Anyone watching would’ve known.
But I didn't notice. It changed everything.
