Page 57 of Warded By His Wolf

Ivy’s mouth twitched: the expression she made when I’d said something exactly accurate and she’d wanted to be the one to say it first. I sat with that. With the morning light coming in at the angle it comes in October at this elevation. With her legal pad and her eggs and the sight of a woman who had just decided the direction of her entire life and was already making columns about it.

I had no procedure for this.

The realization should have been alarming. Instead it settled into my chest like something that had always been true and was only now being acknowledged, the wolf in me utterly unbothered by a problem he had already solved. I drank my coffee and watched her build her columns and kept my one secret of the morning exactly where it was.

The call with Roan and Gideon came through at nine-fifteen. I took it in the kitchen doorway where I could see both Ivy and the tree line, old habit, the kind that doesn’t die just because the threat withdrew.

Gideon’s voice came through the secure channel with the evenness of a man who had been wrong before and would not be wrong twice. “The testimony Miss Bennett provided has already generated pattern matches against two faction operations we’d been tracking blind for seven months. The counter-intelligence file is active. The northern corridor operation is running without its anchor.”

Roan joined, deeper, carrying field command in the timbre. “Miriam’s informant chain is severed at every joint Gideon could identify. The two he’s less certain about are flagged for extraction inside forty-eight hours.”

Gideon spoke next. “The agency’s assessment is that her three years of documented work represents one of the most significant single-source intelligence contributions we have ever received. Done untrained. Unsupported. While being systematically told it wasn’t real.”

The weight of it landed in the kitchen, and even leashed the wolf in me straightened at the words. Ivy had stopped writing. Her hand lay flat on the legal pad, her body very still.

“Reed.” Roan’s voice carried the inflection he saved for things that mattered. “Good work.”

From Roan, that was the operational equivalent of a citation. I received it, and noted that what I felt wasn’t the clean satisfaction of a finished operation. It was harder to name: the feeling of a man who stayed because staying was right, and turned out to be right about that too. Including the parts that cost him. Including the night Gideon put a seven-month number on her dismantling and I started going somewhere cold. She took my shaking hands and pressed them flat over her heart until they stopped.

I ended the call and crossed to her. She looked up with the steadiness that meant she was processing something large.

“They were looking for someone who could see what I saw,” she said. “For two years.”

“You’d been trying to report it for three.”

“I know.” She picked up her pen and didn’t write anything. “I know.”

The morning continued around us: coffee cooling, sunlight shifting, the domestic quiet of a house that had held through siege and was settling into whatever came after.

Around noon, tires sounded on the access road, the road that requires knowing where to turn twice before it looks like a road at all.

Ivy’s head came up, and my own instincts rose to meet hers before the sound had even registered. Through the bond, the flicker of old vigilance.

“Noah’s truck,” I said. “Back from his run.”

She relaxed and returned to her columns. I stood and went to the window. Noah’s run this morning had included a stop I hadn’t mentioned: a rendezvous eight days in the arranging, cleared through Tara the hour Jace confirmed the range was empty.

The truck came around the final curve, and my nose caught the new scent on the air before my eyes confirmed it. Noah was driving. He was not alone.

“Ivy.” I kept my voice even, which took effort. “Come here.”

She came to the window. She looked out.

The passenger door opened, and Ella got out.

The sound Ivy made wasn’t a word. Through the bond, the feeling hit me whole, disbelief cracking open into something enormous, eight days of held-back longing releasing all at once. Then she was through the kitchen door and across the porch and down the steps. Ella met her halfway across the yard, and the two of them collided into an embrace that knocked the breath audibly out of both of them.

I stayed on the porch, every instinct standing down at once. Some things don’t need a guard. They need a witness.

“You promised someday,” Ivy said into Ella’s shoulder, loud enough to carry. She was laughing and not only laughing. “You said⁠⁠⁠—”

“He called at seven a.m.,” Ella said. “A man with a voice like a locked door told me my best friend was safe, that she missed me. He said a truck would be at the park-and-ride by nine if I could keep a secret.” She pulled back.

She held Ivy at arm’s length, reading her face the way Ivy read everyone. Whatever she found there made her own face crumple for exactly one second before she rebuilt it. “You look, Ivy. You look right. You’ve never looked right before. I don’t know how else to say it.”

Ivy laughed, the real one, unguarded, her head tipping back. Through the bond her joy ran so bright I had to look at the tree line for a moment and let it settle.

Ella looked past her, up at the porch, and found me, the wolf in me going instinctively still under that kind of scrutiny. Even from that distance I could see the rapid, unforgiving assessment: the same thing Ivy did with her whole body, Ella did entirely with her eyes.