Page 56 of Warded By His Wolf

“I chose you before I understood any of this.” Her hand tightened on mine. “Before Tara explained bloodlines. Before Caleb put three years of being right on record. I chose you when you wrote my words down in a notebook without pausing.”

“I know.”

“The position. The safe house. The work.” She was reading my face the way she’d learned to. “It means staying. It means this becomes permanent.”

Something in my chest went very still, the man, not the wolf. The wolf had never doubted. But the man had spent eleven years being the one who stayed in other people’s lives temporarily, holding doors for people who walked through them and onward, and no one had ever once looked at me and chosen the staying itself.

I let the wolf show in my eyes. Not demanding. Present. My animal’s version of I have you.

“That’s what I want,” I said. “Whatever you decide is what happens next. But that’s what I want.”

The bond blazed, steady and warm.

“Then we stay,” Ivy said. “Together.”

The word settled into the room like something that had always been true and was only now being said aloud. Outside, somewhere in the dark, Jace was tracking a man who had run his final calculation and found it wanting. Inside, the safe house held what it was built to hold: people who had chosen each other with both eyes open.

Ivy leaned into me. I pulled her closer.

The night went on around us, quiet now. Safe now. Ours.

Chapter 20

What I Didn’t Know How to Want

MADDOX

The morning came in the way safe mornings do: slow, quiet, the tree line doing exactly what a safe tree line does. Nothing. My wolf noticed the nothing before I did, the coiled readiness of eight days finally letting go a notch.

I stood on the porch at seven with coffee going cold in my hand and registered the quality of that nothing. Jace’s final report had landed at five a.m.: Elias Thorne crossed the northern range boundary and kept moving, into terrain outside agency jurisdiction, outside immediate threat radius. For now. The qualifier my instincts refused to release, even as the rest of me registered the stillness that meant the house behind me was not being watched.

Eight days ago I drove up this mountain road with a woman who had blood in her mouth from biting through her own cheek in her sleep. Her body’s response to a vision so vivid it registered as injury. She had packed a bag in forty minutes and trusted a stranger with her life, because the alternative was waiting for the man in her dreams to find her first.

I stood on the porch until the quiet settled into something I could call earned rather than temporary. Then I made one phone call I’d been waiting eight days to make, and went inside: because I wanted to see it for myself. Ivy at the kitchen table. Already awake. Already working.

Her scent reached me before the doorway did, coffee and paper and her, unmistakably. She was exactly where I expected her to be. Legal pad in front of her, Caleb’s message pulled up on her phone, three columns started in her handwriting. Agency structure. Documentation scope. Travel. She’d been making it systematic for approximately twenty minutes, based on how far into the third column she was.

I made eggs without asking, the wolf in me satisfied by the simple act of feeding her, and set the plate beside her notes.

She ate without pausing her column-making, which was the most domestic and perfect thing I had witnessed in thirty-three years.

I sat across from her. “You’re going to say yes.”

She looked up. Her eyes were clear: the clarity of a woman who had stopped second-guessing herself sometime in the past week and had no intention of starting again. “I was a school counselor for ten years, making other people’s pain useful because no one knew what else to do with mine. Now someone’s asking me to make mine useful on a scale that actually changes things.” Her pen hovered over the third column. “Yes.”

“Good.”

“I’m also not going back to the apartment.”

“The plants are probably dead.”

“The plants are definitely dead.” She set the pen down. “Ella kills everything she touches.”

“You should call Ella.”

“Don’t push. She’ll spiral if I call before I know what I’m allowed to tell her.”

“She’s already spiraling. She’s been spiraling since Tuesday.”