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“Patrol rotations.” Drayce looked at Maelin. “Northern boundary, doubled on the anchor point sections. Randomize the intervals, vary the routes.”

Maelin nodded once. “Done. Revised assignments by morning.”

“This also means we need eyes on her without her knowing we have eyes on her,” Pike said, already sounding like it was arranged. “Neighbor three houses down from the bookshop owes me a favor. She has a good view of the side street and an excellent excuse to be there.”

Drayce looked at him.

“She’s seventy-four. She gardens. Nobody questions her.”

“Pike,” Drayce said.

“She volunteers. She’s delighted. She made me a pie about it.”

Tor’s mouth moved. This was as visibly amused as Tor ever got, which meant the situation was genuinely funny. Maelin sipped his whiskey at an angle that meant the same thing.

Drayce looked at Pike. “Fine.” He picked up his glass. He was not going to examine his feelings about a seventy-four-year-old woman being delighted to covertly monitor Althea. “That’s everything.”

It was not everything.

Pike knew this. Tor knew this. Maelin had probably known it before he poured the whiskey. The strategy session had been real — every item was legitimate, every decision necessary. They’d spent forty-five minutes on real work before the silence at the end of it turned into what nobody had brought up yet.

Drayce’s glass was empty. Maelin topped it off without being asked, correctly, and settled back on the couch, apparently prepared to wait indefinitely.

Pike flipped back in the notebook.

“Three independent witness accounts,” he said casually, as if this was a normal agenda item. “Of you, yesterday, outside the Cauldron and Cup for ten minutes while she was visible through the window. Mrs. Holt — she knits near the fountain most mornings and has sharp eyes — Deputy Corin, checking the square perimeter and nearly walking into a lamppost, and a teenager whose name I’ve redacted but who posted about it on the town’s social page before I asked him to remove it.” He looked up from the notebook. “He tagged it ‘our sheriff has lost his mind, cute.’ He used ‘cute’ as a verb.”

Drayce looked at him.

“I have the screenshot.” Pike flipped a page. “For the record.”

“I was thinking.”

“About what.”

“The ward data.”

Pike wrote it in his notebook, being meticulous and taking his time, underlining it twice. He then looked up and said, “You were emotionally haunting her. That’s entirely different from thinking.”

“I was outside.”

“Haunting can occur outdoors.”

“Pike.”

“Mrs. Holt’s word, not mine. She said, and I’m quoting, ‘he looked at her like my husband used to look at the car he wanted but wouldn’t let himself buy.’ She found it poignant. She also wants you to know she’s rooting for you.” Pike capped his pen. “The teenager said you looked like a man ‘going through it.’ Again, a verb.”

Tor said nothing. Over the past three minutes, he had shifted his weight slightly forward. For Tor, that was the equivalent of leaning in. Drayce noticed and found it exactly inconvenient.

The fire crackled. Outside, the wind was working the weather off the ocean in a complicated pattern.

“She’s made seven marks on seven stones in one training session,” Drayce said to the fire. He hadn’t planned to say this. His wolf had apparently decided that circling forever was inefficient. “In the first deliberate session, she extinguished a live fire. Deliberately. While it was burning.”

Pike looked up. “The jacket.”

Drayce looked at him.

“Mrs. Holt’s contact in the laundry district mentioned a burn mark on the cuff. I’m running a comprehensive intelligence operation, and I feel you should know this.”