I look toward where I haven't yet deployed the last sensor, then back at the prints. The calculation takes four seconds. "We follow it."
Ciaran’s expression suggests he already knows what I'm going to say and has already decided he agrees. "Stay behind me."
The prints lead us northeast along a ridgeline for nearly a quarter mile before the terrain drops into a rocky hollow choked with scrub brush and deadfall. Ciaran slows as we descend, his attention sharpening in the way it does when his senses are doing work mine can't.
The cache is under a rock overhang at the base of the hollow. Two ammunition crates wrapped in an olive tarp, secured with bungee cords and pushed far enough under the rock face to be invisible from above. If we hadn't followed the prints directly here, we would have walked within ten feet of it and never known.
I crouch in front of it. "Don't touch anything yet."
I work through the documentation methodically, taking wide shots establishing position, mid-range showing the tarp and cording, close-ups of the crate stenciling. Military surplus markings, paint fresh enough that it hasn't weathered. I photograph the boot prints in the surrounding soil, the depression in the ground where the crates have been sitting for at least several days based on the soil compression, and the sight lines from the hollow toward the nearest patrol corridor.
"Whoever placed this knew the patrol schedule," I say. "This hollow has a direct sight line to the eastern ridge approach. You could watch a full rotation from here without being detected."
Ciaran picks up his radio again. When he signs off, he looks at me. "Enforcers are inbound. Fifteen minutes."
The team arrives led by Kieran Rourke, who brings four others moving with the coiled energy of wolves looking for direction. He barely acknowledges me beyond a brief, assessing glance, then crouches over the crates and begins directing his team to break down the cache with efficient, practiced movements.
I step back and give them room, moving to a slight rise at the hollow's edge to check position against my GPS data.
That's when I see the wolf on the ridge.
Sixty yards out, standing at the crest in full view. Coal-dark coat, substantial, positioned where it can see both me and the hollow below. Not moving. Not hiding. Watching me with the still, deliberate attention of something that wants to be seen.
Then it howls one long, sustained note that rolls down the ridge and through the hollow like an announcement.
Kieran's head snaps up. He's on his feet and gone into the underbrush before the sound finishes, moving uphill at a speed far superior to human biomechanics. Two of his team follow.
Ciaran appears at my shoulder. "You saw it."
"Standing in plain sight on the ridge," I say. "It wasn't scouting cover. It wanted me to know it was there."
He watches the empty ridgeline, then his face changes to uncomfortable frankness. "It was watching you. Not the cache." He pauses. "You."
I know. I've been processing that since the howl faded. The traps set on wolf trails, the cache positioned with sight lines to patrol corridors, and now this—a deliberate display aimed specifically at me. None of it adds up to incidental. "They wouldn't bother if I weren't getting somewhere," I say. "And they wouldn't follow me specifically unless someone told them to."
Ciaran doesn't offer reassurance. "We should get back."
Alden isat the window when I come in, standing in the still way that means he's been there long enough that stillness became automatic. He turns as I enter, and the look he gives me covers the whole of me in one sweep before settling on my face. It's fast, controlled, but I've learned to read the fraction of a second before the control locks down.
I set my camera on his desk and pull up the documentation, and update him on the situation with the traps, ammo cache, and the rogue Kieran went after.
Alden looks at the photographs without touching the camera. The muscle in his jaw tightens once.
"The trap placement required intimate knowledge of your patrol patterns," I say. "Not approximated knowledge. Whichtrails, which crossing points, which routes run at speed versus at caution." I hold his gaze. "The rogue knows my GPS range. Knows which corridors I've been mapping. Knows I'm working with you closely enough to be a threat to whatever this is." I let that land. "The attacks have shifted to follow my investigation.”
Alden is quiet for a moment, nodding in agreement.
"Someone inside this pack is feeding information outward," I say. "To the rogue, to the hunters, or both. And they've been doing it long enough to be careful about it."
He looks back at the photographs, and then at me, and this time the look is less controlled than the ones that came before. Something underneath the Alpha composure that I don't have clean language for, something that registers in my chest before my brain finishes classifying it.
"You're not surprised," I say.
"No." His voice is quiet. "But I needed you to say it out loud."
The office is very still around us, the only sound the low creak of the building settling in the evening cold. The pine-and-smoke scent of him is close enough that I notice it without meaning to, and I don't move back.
"Then we agree," I say. "We're not just tracking a rogue. We're tracking whoever is directing one."
