Page 73 of Warded By His Wolf

The visions would not stop.

I stopped wanting them to.

Epilogue

IVY

The coffee was on the porch railing before I came through the door, fixed my way, still warm.

Three years, and the house had never once let the habit lapse. Some mornings it was Noah’s brewing and Maddox’s hands, his wolf calm enough now to share a kitchen without pacing it. Some mornings Maddox did both. Once, memorably, it was Jace, who set the mug down like it was a live grenade and left without making eye contact, and Maddox laughed so hard he had to sit on the steps.

This morning it was my husband’s doing, start to finish. Noah was down at the training annex arguing with a contractor about load-bearing walls. And Maddox Reed still took time to learn more about me every single day like there might be a quiz.

I wrapped my hands around the mug and watched him lose a footrace on the lawn, his wolf letting their daughter win with an ease that fooled no one but her.

“Careful,” I called. “She’ll outrun you for real soon.”

“She already does.” He pulled up with his hands on his knees, mock-winded, while our daughter shrieked her victory to the tree line. “I’ve been throwing the races for a year to protect my reputation.”

Elara Reed, age two and a half, undisputed sovereign of this mountain, came pounding back across the grass. Her dark hair flew, her father’s eyes flashed, and a purple wildflower was gripped in one fist like evidence.

“Mama. Look. For you.”

I knelt and received it with the seriousness it deserved. “It’s beautiful. Thank you for showing me.”

She beamed and wheeled away to resume terrorizing her father. I tucked the flower behind my ear and drank my coffee. I let myself feel the whole size of it, the way I’d taught myself to feel everything now. No rationing. No qualifiers.

Three years ago I stood at a window in this house and told myself I wasn’t waiting for anything. It was true then. It was truer now.

The property had grown the way things grow when people stop leaving. Noah’s second cabin stood at the north edge, because after the base reclassification he’d decided four miles was too far to commute to his own sensors. The training annex was newer, timber still bright, Tara’s design, my program. The sign on the door didn’t say anything as grand as what happened inside it. It just said ANNEX B, because Noah had made the sign, and Noah did not editorialize.

Inside that building, eleven months into our search, I had sat across a kitchen table from a terrified twenty-two-year-old. My grandmother’s line, my blood, a second cousin I hadn’t known existed. I watched her flinch through the sentence she’d rehearsed the whole drive up the mountain. It’s probably nothing, but.

I’d reached across the table and taken her hands.

In this family, I told her, we don’t start sentences that way anymore.

We found her before the network did. Eighteen days before, by Gideon’s reconstruction, which is a margin I still don’t look at directly. She was my first student. She is not my last: the program has four seers in it now, four gifts that will never be filed as anxiety, never be prescribed into silence, never spend three years apologizing to a journal. Tara runs the structural training. I run the part no framework covers: the believing.

The rest of the ledger, three years on, read the way vigilance reads when it’s healthy instead of frightened. Miriam Vale was a case number now, tried in the quiet venues where the supernatural world tries its own, her name spoken in the packs only as a lesson.

Roan carried the family accounting the way he’d promised, exact and unsentimental. Elias Thorne had never resurfaced; Gideon’s flag on him stayed open, and once a year Jace ran the northern range for a week and came back saying nothing, which was Jace for still gone.

And the other file (the one Gideon couldn’t attribute, the routing that ended above everything in structure without a name) stayed open too. Active. Unresolved. Every few months my gift brushed against something at the edge of the pattern, something patient, something that had never stopped holding our name. I wrote it down each time, dated it, sent it in. We didn’t live afraid of it.

We lived ready.

“You’re thinking loud,” Maddox said, dropping onto the porch step below me with Elara dangling upside down over one shoulder, entirely content, the wolf in him relaxed enough to let a toddler treat him like furniture.

“I’m thinking clearly. There’s a difference.”

“I know.” He righted our daughter, who immediately demanded pancakes with the authority of a woman twice her size. “Gideon confirmed Thursday, by the way. He and Tara want the quarterly review here instead of headquarters. Something about Elise sending documents up with him.”

“And Ella’s still coming Saturday.”

“Ella texted me a grocery list this morning. For our house.” He looked deeply pleased about it. “She’s decided I am under-provisioned.”

“She’s right.”