10 Tommy #2
My spine straightened on its own. I felt my whole posture lock plumb and square in a way that had nothing to do with deciding to do it, and the air around me changed—thickened with the pressure of something expanding outward to fill the bowl of the ravine.
The headlights seemed to dim. The dormants nearest us went quiet without knowing why.
And when I lifted my eyes to my alpha’s and let the gold come up full, no masking left to dim it, I felt the wolf settle behind them like a king sitting down on a throne he’d never once asked for.
The snarl that came out of me dropped below hearing, into the chest, into the ground—a low grinding territorial vibration that rolled out across the dirt and hit my pack in the soles of their feet, and I watched it land.
Watched Beto’s knees give a half-inch. Watched Santos’ knife hand drop without his telling it to.
Watched Finn take an actual step back and Levi—Levi, who could break me in half—go still as a struck bell.
Watched Reed’s head rock back a degree, his amber eyes going wide, his alpha instinct screaming at him that something just outranked it and his nose unable to find what.
Silence dropped over the whole ravine like a slab door sealing.
“She’s not an it.” My voice came out of me in a register I’d never used, low and even. “And you don’t give me an order about her.”
Reed’s throat worked. “Tommy. What are you—how are you—”
“This woman is a classified intelligence asset under regional protection.” The words came out clean and formal and they tasted like copper and ash and a lifetime of dread.
“She walks out of here breathing. She rides in my truck. Nobody on this crew puts a hand on her, looks at her sideways, or so much as thinks the word put down in her direction again, and that’s not me asking my alpha for a favor.
That’s the Midnight Wolf—the Fourth Signatory of the Founding Compact—telling every wolf inside a two-hundred-mile radius how tonight is going to go. ”
The name landed in the dirt between us and the whole pack flinched off it.
Reed went the color of cold ash.
“The Compact,” he said. Barely a breath. His focus swiveled on to Kaia. “The magic in your bloodline is awake? That means—”
He knew. Of course he knew. He’d been collecting bloodlines for years. It’s why he’d recruited me to this hotshots crew.
I didn’t blink. The gold held his. “I can recite the provision word for word right now if you want me to. My bloodline signed that compact to police our own kind, Reed. We are the shadow that keeps the pack clean. I know what you’ve been doing.
I know what this pack is. I figured out a long time ago you didn’t collect strays off the worst fires in the West by accident.
You wanted a crew of competent wolves who could stand the heat.
And I never said a word, because I trusted you, and because I was a coward about my own piece of it, and because being the funny one was easier than being the fourth name on a three-hundred-year-old gun. ”
The wolf flooded warm and proud through every locked joint in my body. Yes. This. We were always this. We were only ever hiding it.
I’d been so sure the crown would eat me.
I’d been so sure that the second I picked up the weight I’d lose the thing that made me me, that responsibility was a funeral for everything warm.
Standing there with my dying mate burning against my heart and my whole pack frozen under a pressure I’d carried all along, I understood I’d had it exactly backwards.
The crown wasn’t the cage. The fear of it was.
And I’d needed somebody worth putting it on for before I could find that out.
“She is the realest thing that has ever happened to me,” I said, and my voice cracked there, the heaviness breaking open just enough to let the man back through under the king.
“She’s my mate, Reed. Fated. The genuine article.
She doesn’t smell like it to you because they had her on a chemical leash since before she could walk and it’s all coming out of her at once and yeah, it smells like a house fire, I know.
I’ve had my nose in it for an hour. But under all that scorched wiring, I caught her true scent.
I’d know her anywhere, and the bond doesn’t lie, and I am not setting her down in the dirt because my pack’s nose is telling it a story that isn’t true. ”
For a long moment nobody breathed.
Then Reed Vásquez—my alpha, the man who’d built this whole impossible family one broken bloodline at a time over two decades of patience I was only now beginning to understand the size of—dropped his eyes. Off mine. Down and to the side, the smallest tilt of the head, the oldest gesture there is.
He gave ground.
“Okay,” he said. Rough.
He scrubbed a hand down his face and when it came away his eyes were brown again, just a tired man at one in the morning with fifty refugees and a problem that had just gotten exponentially worse.
“Okay. Your truck. Your protection.” He pointed one blunt finger at me and there was grief in it, and something that might’ve been pride, and a whole conversation we were going to have to have later that neither of us wanted.
“But she goes in quarantine when we hit the staging ground, Tommy, no argument, because half this crew is going to lose their minds being downwind of her and I have fifty civilians to keep from a panic. We keep her alive. We keep her separate. And you and I sit down and you tell me everything else you’ve been sitting on, Fourth Signatory. ”
He turned away before I could answer, his voice already snapping back into op-command as he wheeled on the others. “Load ‘em up! Move! We’re three minutes from sunrise patrols, let’s go!”
We need to cover the exit, Reed added through the link, his voice tight. We can’t leave a clean trail.
“It’s early August, Reed,” Santos warned, his voice crackling down the line. “Relative humidity is in the single digits. Fuel moisture is practically zero. You set a match to this ravine and it’s going to crown in the lodgepoles in ten minutes.”
“We do a tactical burnout,” Reed snapped.
“We anchor it at the rock face. Finn, Beto—you’re on containment detail.
Grab the Pulaskis and the bladder bags. Cut a ten-foot line from the shale slope to the creek bed.
Once the line is clear, use the drip torch to burn the fuels back toward the spillway entrance.
Consume the brush, cave the timber supports in, then wet down the margins.
Keep it under control. The rest of the crew is rolling. ”
Copy that, Boss, Finn sent back.
The two unmated wolves slipped out of the shadows, their eyes gleaming gold in the headlamps as they grabbed their gear from the buggy’s tool racks.
The rest of the pack jolted back into motion all at once, too fast, not meeting my eyes, giving me and the burning woman in my arms a wide unconscious berth as the pack’s mated males funneled the last dormants into the trucks.
I carried Kaia to a waiting pickup and got the door open with two fingers and slid her across the bench seat. She came awake just enough to fist a hand in my shirt and not let go, her gold eyes cracking open, unfocused, finding me.
“Mine,” she breathed. The wolf’s word, ruined and certain.
“Yeah.” I climbed in after her and pulled her head down into my lap and felt the fever pouring off her like a stove. “Yeah, sweetheart. All the way down. Same goes.”
I slammed the door.
And in the sudden quiet of the cab, with the dome light fading and her heart slamming against my thigh too fast, way too fast, I finally got a clean breath of her up close—the chemicals, the rot, the blood, and underneath all of it, faint and getting fainter, the green-warm thread that was her—and the cold thing I’d been outrunning since the tunnel finally caught me.
Her scent was changing. Not toward the mate-smell.
Away from it. Burning down toward something I didn’t have a word for, and her skin under my hand had gone from fever-hot to something past fever.
I had just bought us a quarantine tent at the far edge of a camp full of wolves who’d gag at the scent of her, with no clue what twenty-six years of poison did to a body when you ripped it all out in one night.
I’d won the standoff.
I had absolutely no idea how to keep her alive.