Page 12 of Warded By His Wolf

I released the railing one finger at a time. The way I let go of things I’d gripped too hard for too long. Then I straightened.

“Okay.”

He blinked.

It was the first unguarded thing I’d seen from him since my doorway. A one-second failure of composure that said the verdict he’d prepared for was not this one.

“Okay?” His voice came out lower. Rough at the edge, the way it got when something was close and he wasn’t pulling it back.

“You told me now.” I held his gaze one beat longer, long enough to be a choice, not an accident. “That counts.”

I turned and went inside, because what I needed now was Tara Quinn, more information, and a pen. In that order.

She was where I’d left her, and the quality of her attention had changed. Less assessment. More the focus of a woman who’d been waiting to say the next thing until the room was ready for it.

“The shifters,” I said before she could speak. “Maddox told me.”

“I assumed he would.” She studied my face. “Your physiological response is notably stable.”

“I’m a school counselor. I’ve learned to metabolize surprises without broadcasting them.”

The corner of her mouth moved, not a smile, but acknowledgment. “That training will serve you. The agency operates across multiple populations. Wolves are the primary composition. Not the only one.”

I put that away for later. “The visions. You said they’re structural. Pattern-generating.”

“Third-tier inheritance.” She opened her tablet, pulled up a diagram I didn’t fully understand yet. “Your gift isn’t emergent, it didn’t appear from nothing at a stress threshold. It’s bloodline-inherited. The architecture was always there. Someone in your family line trained it, at some point. Someone else documented it.”

The weight of that landed in my chest before I understood why.

“Documented.”

“Seer lines are identifiable to people who know how to read the markers.” She set down her pen with care, choosing her words the same way. “Your bloodline signature is inherited. Someone in your line was a trained seer, structured, identified, recorded somewhere.”

She paused.

“Which means someone else already knows that. And they knew it before you called the tip line.”

The silence in the kitchen had a particular shape. A premise being pulled out from under something much heavier than I was ready for.

The self-doubt Miriam Vale had spent three years installing. The professional language I’d learned to wrap my visions in. The exhausting work of staying smaller than what I saw.

None of it had ever been a response to my being wrong.

All of it may have been a response to someone making sure I stayed findable, doubting, and unprotected. Exactly as I was.

I looked at Tara, her sharp dark eyes watching me process. I looked at the doorway. Maddox’s shoulder held the edge of the frame there, close enough to hear everything, giving me space without giving me distance.

I looked at my own hands, still holding the pen.

The pen was steady.

Someone had built the doubt into me like architecture.

It was time to meet the architect.

Chapter 5

The Marker