A long and heavy silence followed.
Then Sienna let out a breath that sounded like a confession.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “Okay. Okay. Okay. That was… something.”
I turned to look at her.
She wasn’t shaking visibly, but the tension in her face gave her away. Her fingers clenched the straps of her pack. Color had drained from her cheeks, leaving her pale against the bright cranberry of her jacket.
“You all right?” I asked.
She nodded.
Then shook her head.
Then nodded again.
Her voice came out thin. “That was different.”
“Different how?”
She swallowed. “I’m not usually scared in the woods.”
“I know.”
“I mean…ever. Even when things get weird, unexpected, or big… I even talked to a moose in Alaska for fifteen minutes about his life goals and wasn’t scared. And those suckers are ornery.”
I blinked. “Life goals.”
“Yes,” she insisted. “Mortimer was very contemplative.”
I rumbled out something like a laugh, but it faded quickly when I saw her expression.
She was shaken, even if she didn’t want to admit it.
“Bears, I can do,” she said, voice wobbling. “Even cougars. Even snowstorms. But wolves? Like that? A whole pack? I’ve never—” She cut herself off. “I didn’t like how that felt.”
My jaw tightened slightly. “They weren’t hunting.”
“I know,” she said. “But they were evaluating.”
“They were deciding.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “And I didn’t like being something they had to decide about.”
That hit me harder than I expected, and I stepped closer, not touching her, but close enough that the air between us shifted.
“You did everything right,” I said. “Exactly right.”
She shook her head. “No, I froze.”
“You stayed still,” I corrected. “That’s not freezing. That’s instinct keeping you safe.”
But she wasn’t listening to that logic. Her chest rose and fell too quickly. Her gaze skittered away from mine. The warmth she carried, always so bright and fierce, was dimmed by something deeper.
Fear at the edges, but something else in the center.
Something vulnerable.
