Page 42 of Warded By His Wolf

At two forty-seven a.m., the north sensor fired.

Maddox was out of bed and moving before the second ping confirmed what the first one meant. I watched him pull on his clothes with the speed of a man who had done this before, and I understood (with a clarity that had nothing to do with visions) exactly what that sensor was telling us.

They had split.

The southern approach. The containment pattern Jace was running seven miles of. All of it, misdirection.

The north was always the door.

Chapter 15

What Was Waiting

MADDOX

The north sensor fired at two forty-seven a.m., and I was already moving before the second ping confirmed what my wolf had been tracking for the past hour, the wrongness in the air, the weight of something intentional pressing against the perimeter.

Split approach. The knowledge arrived as I cleared the hallway. They’d opened the engagement at the north while we’d built the watch on the south, and the tactical cleanness of it told me who was running this operation.

Ivy was awake. I felt her through the bond, not panicked, not frozen. Alert in the way she got when her mind ran faster than her fear. Out of bed. Moving. The steady pulse of her in my chest was the only thing keeping the wolf from tearing through walls.

“North door,” I said into the radio, flat. “Jace, report.”

Static. Then his voice, clipped and in motion: “South trail contact. Two operatives. Engaging.”

They’d split their forces. Which meant Elias wasn’t with the south team.

I hit the hallway junction at the same moment Noah’s voice cracked through from the north entrance. “Contact at the door. One operative. I’ve got it.”

The sound that followed (impact, grunt, a body meeting reinforced wood) said Noah was holding. A lifetime of mountain living had made him precisely the kind of man you wanted between an enemy and a door.

But the north was noise. The south was containment. Which left⁠⁠⁠—

Through the bond, Ivy’s presence moved. Not to the interior room. Toward the back of the house.

And then her voice, not aloud, but through the bond, clear as a struck bell, the first time she’d ever pushed words down the wire instead of feeling: Back steps. He’s at the back steps. Come now.

I was already coming.

I came through the back door into cold air and stopped for exactly half a second, long enough to take the scene whole.

Ivy on the porch. Hands wrapped around the railing. Chin up. And at the bottom of the steps, standing in the snow like he’d been waiting for precisely this moment: Elias Thorne.

He looked exactly as she’d described him in every report. Lean. Severe. Pale eyes holding no urgency, because urgency was for people who doubted their outcomes. Tactical black. The stillness of a man who had done this many times and never once needed to rush.

“Miss Bennett,” he said. Her name in his mouth sounded like inventory. A line item being checked off a retrieval list.

My wolf hit the surface so fast my vision shifted, the world going red-gold at the edges, every sense narrowing to a point, her heartbeat from twelve feet, the cold calculation coming off the man in the snow, the exact temperature of Ivy’s fear converting into something that wasn’t fear at all.

I crossed the porch in three strides and put myself between her and the steps, and for the first time since I’d walked through her apartment door five nights ago, I stopped holding anything back.

Elias’s pale eyes moved from her to me, and what he saw made him go still in a way that had nothing to do with patience. He was reading me the way trackers read terrain: distance, threat class, the math on whether his operational window had just closed.

It had.

“Reed.” My name came out of him carefully. “The agency’s safe house specialist. I heard you were assigned here.”

“Then you heard wrong.” My voice dropped into the register that meant the wolf was speaking through a human throat. “I’m not assigned. I’m staying.”