Page 22 of Warded By His Wolf

The house reduced to Maddox, me, and the gravity of a sealed space.

I stood at the window and watched the first snow begin. Not a tentative fall, the real weight of a mountain storm, the kind that erases roads and takes the tree line by degrees. Thick flakes, falling with the patience of something that knew it had time.

Three days of this. Three days of documentation and sensor logs and the question neither of us had asked, sealed inside this house while the mountain buried us.

“Is there more coffee?” I asked, turning from the window.

Maddox looked up from his tablet. His face was shadowed, but his eyes caught the snow-light and held it.

“There’s always more coffee.”

He moved to make it, and I settled back with my cards, and the house arranged itself around us the way it had been arranging itself for three days: like something that already knew what we were to each other and was waiting for the humans involved to catch up.

He set the mug at my elbow without comment. I said thank you without looking up. We worked in the snowbound quiet, and somewhere between the third card and the fourth, I realized I wasn’t waiting for something to go wrong.

I was waiting to see what would happen when we finally stopped pretending the air between us was ordinary.

At eleven-fifteen, his phone lit up on the table.

He picked it up, and I watched his face change, stillness shifting into something sharper, a predator going from resting to ready with nothing visible in between.

He read it twice. Then he looked at me, and what was in his eyes was not reassurance.

“What?”

He turned the phone so I could see. Jace. No preamble. Three lines that landed like stones dropped into deep water.

Marker resonance spiked at nine forty. He knows the storm window. He knows you’re there.

Then nothing. The signal had dropped. The storm had taken it.

I did the math the way Maddox had taught me to do it, without sentiment. Nine-forty was twenty minutes after Noah’s taillights left the property. Twenty minutes after the population of this house dropped to two.

Elias hadn’t read the storm window from a forecast.

He’d read the change in who was here. He’d been watching closely enough, patiently enough, to count.

“He knows the number is two,” I said.

Maddox set down the phone. His eyes held mine, and behind them I could see the wolf, present, calculating, absolutely unafraid.

“Yes,” he said. “He does.”

The snow kept falling, burying the road, sealing us in. Three days of storm. Three days of window. The math was tight, and we were locked inside the equation.

“What do we do?” I asked.

He paused in the doorway, already moving toward the perimeter. “We hold. The safe house holds or it doesn’t. But it’s not going to fail because we stopped paying attention.”

He disappeared into the dark, and I sat with my cards and my cooling coffee and the weight of being watched by something I couldn’t see.

Somewhere out in the storm, a man who hunted seers had just finished counting the people between him and what he wanted.

Inside these walls, the count was one.

Chapter 8

Eight Hours Old