I wonder what the earth remembers about the girl who sat on a hillside with a Frostbourne alpha and believed that love was simple.
I feel him now. Calm. Patient. He’s still on the porch.
I could go back. Right now. Walk down this ridge, cross the yard, sit beside him on those steps, and finish what we started. Ask him about Sienna. Hear whatever the answer is and deal with it.
But the truth is, I’m not running from Sienna. Sienna is the excuse. The convenient complication I can point to and say, “This is why I can’t.”
What I’m running from is the sound of my own voice saying,“Don’t you dare stop,”and meaning it with every part of me. What I’m running from is the knowledge that what I’m feeling isn’t residual or instinctive or a biological inconvenience. It’s real. It was always real. And I’ve been telling myself it died when he left because if it didn’t die, then I’ve been in pain this whole time for no reason. If the bond survived, then we could have found each other. Could have built the life I imagined on that hillside. Could have raised our son together.
And we didn’t. Because he walked away. And I let him.
Maybe I should have been fighting for him as hard as I wanted him to fight for me.
The moon moves behind a cloud. The valley goes dark. The ranch lights glow faint and warm below me.
I’m a grown woman. I’ve fought wars, buried friends, faked my own death, and raised a son alone. I’ve killed men with my bare hands and rebuilt pack wards from nothing and survived on stubbornness and spite when everything else ran out. I am not the girl on the hillside. I am not breakable or naive or waiting to be rescued.
But I’m lying on a ridge in wolf form at midnight because a man kissed me and my whole world toppled. I don’t know how to be the woman who handles everything when the one thing I can’t handle is sitting on a porch step waiting for me to come home.
I close my eyes.
I don’t go back. Not tonight. I sleep on the ridge with the earth humming beneath me and the stars turning overhead. I let the land hold me the way it held my mother and her mother before her.
Tomorrow I’ll face him. Tomorrow I’ll be the commander, the mother, the alpha. Tomorrow I’ll build walls, make plans, keep everyone alive.
Tonight I’m a wolf on the run, and the only honest thing I can do is admit that I’m afraid.
Not of him.
Of how much I want to stop running.
Chapter 18
Merric
She didn’t come back. I sat on the bunkhouse steps until well past midnight, feeling her, a bright, restless heat moving through the eastern hills. Running. The rhythm of paws on hard ground, the quality of a wolf who’s covering distance not to get somewhere but to get away from something.
From me.
Around two in the morning, the running stopped. She settled. High on the eastern ridge, curled against the earth, her presence going still. Not sleeping. Holding. I felt her exhaustion, and underneath it, something rawer. Fear. Not of danger. Of the door that opened between us in that bunkhouse, and what it means if she walks through it.
I stayed on the steps. Didn’t follow. Didn’t sleep. Just sat with her fear bleeding through. And nothing I could do about it that wouldn’t drive her further away. I’ve never felt so helpless.
Dawn finds me in the kitchen making coffee with the gritty autopilot of a man who’s been awake for thirty-six hours. Sienna comes in, takes one look at me, and pours a second cup without asking.
“You look like hell.”
“Feel like it too.”
She sits across from me. Studies my face. “Is this about what I walked in on last night? Because I’m sorry, I should have knocked, Greta gave me the plate and—”
“It’s fine, Sienna.”
“It’s clearly not fine. You look like you haven’t slept, and Brenna’s wolf was running the hills half the night… Don’t look at me like that, Briar heard her. Everyone heard her.”
Great. So the whole ranch knows that something happened between us, and Brenna handled it by bolting into the forest in wolf form. Subtle.
“I’ll handle it,” I say.
