He showered under water cold enough to numb, dressed in his uniform with mechanical precision, and forced himself to eat standing at the kitchen counter. The cabin’s silence pressed in on him. No photographs on the walls. No personal touches. Just clean lines and functional furniture and the faint, ever-present scent of a panther marking his territory.
For all those years, this space had been enough.
Now it smelled wrong. Empty. Like an essential presence was absent.
Her. His panther supplied helpfully. Bring her here. Fill this space with her scent.
Wyatt set his coffee mug down hard enough to crack the handle.
The driveto the station took twelve minutes. Wyatt spent all twelve trying not to think about Narla Wright.
He failed.
The first day she’d walked into his station to register as a new supernatural resident, he’d been undone. Dark hair in a practical braid, warm brown skin, those deep brown eyes that saw toomuch and revealed nothing. She’d moved with quiet grace, smelling like beeswax, lavender, and woodsmoke he couldn’t identify but desperately wanted more of.
Their gazes had met across the front desk.
The beast had roared one word?—
MATE
—with a certainty that left no room for doubt.
Wyatt had ignored it.
He’d filled out the paperwork with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking. Avoided eye contact. Told himself the reaction was anomalous, a fluke of surge energy or magical interference or anything except what his panther insisted it was.
And then he’d started digging.
Because Narla Wright didn’t add up. Her background was too clean, too carefully constructed. A widow who’d moved across the country to start over—plausible enough on the surface. But the details felt rehearsed. She never cracked, not once, not even when he’d pushed. And she guarded her secrets with the fierce desperation of someone who believed exposure meant death.
Years of quiet investigation. Watching her from across crowded rooms, noting every inconsistency, cataloguing every suspicious moment. He had a drawer full of notes. Observations he’d told himself were professional, evidence of due diligence rather than obsession.
His panther had known the truth all along.
Not surveillance. Courtship.
Wyatt’s hands tightened on the steering wheel.
The station came into view—converted firehouse, brick softened by decades of coastal weather. He pulled into his usual spot, killed the engine, and sat motionless for a long moment.
He felt her across town. Not a precise location, but an awareness. A pull.
Except she wasn’t a threat. And she definitely wasn’t prey.
I don’t trust her.
His panther’s response was a silent, knowing rumble that translated roughly to: And yet you fucked her against a support beam last night, so perhaps reconsider your priorities.
Wyatt got out of the car before he could argue with himself any further.
FIVE
WYATT
Deputy Rena Marsh looked up from the front desk as he walked in, her wolf-sharp senses immediately cataloguing everything wrong with him.
“You look like hell, boss.”
