Chapter 5
Isla
The ranger at Fish and Wildlife tells me they take my report seriously.
He tells me this for the fourth time in five days while I stand at the window of Tom's apartment with my phone pressed to my ear and my coffee going cold on the nightstand.
He uses words like "active file" and "regional assessment" and "ongoing monitoring," but none of them mean anything because I've filed nine reports since January and not a single person from his office has walked my fence line.
"Ms. Mackenzie, I understand your frustration—"
"Do you have a timeline?"
Silence. The silence of a man searching his desk for the version of no that sounds like a yes.
"We're coordinating with the county sheriff's office on jurisdiction. These interagency processes—"
"You've been coordinating since January. In March there were snare lines in the state forest. In September there are gutted coyotes on my property and men in trucks telling me I won't own it much longer. That's not a jurisdictional question. That's a threat."
More silence. I hear him breathing. I hear the creak of a government-issue chair.
"I'll flag this for my supervisor."
I hang up. I set the phone on the nightstand beside the coffee and press both palms flat on the windowsill.
Eight months. Nine reports. Fourteen snare lines pulled, six trail cameras destroyed, four dead coyotes arranged at my gate, two slashed tires, and one threat delivered through a truck window on my own land.
And the best the regional office can manage is a flag for a supervisor who has done nothing since I started calling.
Downstairs, Colt has a table covered in paper.
He called me down twenty minutes after I hung up the phone.
The common room table: a laptop, a stack of printed county records, and a map of the coastal ridge marked in red pen.
Colt sits with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, two pens behind his left ear, dark circles under his eyes that say he started this before sunrise.
Knox stands at the head of the table. Tom stands behind Colt's chair, arms folded.
"Sit down," Knox says. A suggestion from a man who knows what's coming.
I sit.
Colt turns the laptop toward me. "Ridgecrest Holdings.
Development company registered in Portland eighteen months ago.
Single-purpose LLC, no public-facing projects, no website.
Their sole activity in the state filing records is land acquisition.
" He taps the map. Red circles mark properties along the state forest boundary, running north and south of my twelve acres.
"They've bought every parcel of state-adjacent timber in the region.
Fourteen properties. All within the past eighteen months. "
I look at the map. My land sits in the middle of the red circles.
"It's an acquisition corridor."
Colt's head comes up.
"I spent eleven years in environmental consulting before I moved here. I sat in rooms where they drew maps like this one." I tap the gap where my twelve acres should be. "Buy the perimeter, squeeze the holdout, wait for the price to drop."
"Every property bordering the state forest," Colt says. "Except one."
"Mine."
He nods. "I ran the plates you photographed on the white Dodge. Both trucks registered to a contracting company out of Bend. The contracting company has one client." He flips a page in the county records. "Ridgecrest Holdings."
My hands press against the table. I feel the grain of the wood under my palms.
"The poachers aren't independent operators," Colt says.
"They're contractors. Paid to work your land and the boundary around it.
Snare lines, camera destruction, tire slashing, the carcasses.
All designed to make the property unworkable.
Dangerous. The kind of place a person sells because it stopped being worth the fight. "
Nobody moves.
"Eight months." My voice comes out flat. "They've been doing this for eight months. Everything I reported, every incursion, every escalation—it was engineered."
Colt pushes his glasses up. "The trail camera footage from the state forest boundary shows the same two trucks running your east perimeter on a schedule.
Tuesdays and Fridays. The snare lines go in the night before your Monday and Thursday checks.
They've been mapping your routine since at least February. "
I think about my Tuesday supply runs. My Monday perimeter drives. The notebook on my desk where I log patrol times and feeding schedules because I keep everything written down and organized and predictable.
They read my notebook through my routine. They didn't need to break into my office. They just watched.
"The dead coyotes weren't a warning about pulling snare lines," I say.
Knox meets my eyes. "No. They weren't."
"They were a message. Leave, or it gets worse."
"Which means they'll escalate," Knox says.
I push my chair back and stand. Not because I'm leaving but because sitting with this feels wrong, and my body needs to move. I cross to the window and look out at the compound lot, at the garage where Tom set up temporary cages for the hawk and the owl, at the gravel where his truck is parked.
Six years I put into that land. And behind it, the whole time, someone with a checkbook and a map, working to take it apart.
The fury settles in my gut and stays there.
I turn back to the table. "So, what do we do about it?"
Knox and Colt exchange a look that tells me they've already had that conversation.
"Colt keeps building the paper trail," Knox says.
"County records, registered agents, financial connections.
When we know who's behind Ridgecrest Holdings, we'll pay them a visit.
" He taps the map. "I've got respect for the Sheriff.
He's fair. But fair and fast aren't the same thing, and the law doesn't always show up before the damage is done.
So we hand him the paper trail and let the county do what the county does, and in the meantime, the club handles what's in front of us.
" He looks at me. "Your reports. Every one you filed. They matter now."
I nod. My throat tightens, and I swallow against it, because I'm not going to stand in this room and feel emotional about the fact that those reports finally mean something.
Knox calls a meeting—someone called it church—that afternoon.
I sit in Tom's apartment with the hawk on the windowsill in his travel cage, the bird screaming at a moth on the other side of the glass, and I listen to the low rumble of voices through the floor.
The meeting breaks. Boots on the stairs. I hear Finn's voice first, then Rex, then the heavier tread of bodies moving with purpose. Not the loose, scattered sound of men heading to the kitchen for coffee, but directed, each step carrying weight.
I go to the hallway and look over the rail.
The brothers move through the common room below me.
Finn pulls a duffel from under the stairs and heads for the garage.
Rex talks to Diesel in the corner, both of their faces set.
Colt stacks the papers on the table into a folder, snaps the laptop shut.
Chain leans against the far wall with his phone to his ear and one hand on Morgan's shoulder.
She sits in the chair beside him with both hands on her belly.
Knox waits at the foot of the stairs. Tom faces him.
"Can you ride?" Knox's voice carries.
Tom doesn't answer for a beat. His shoulders stay square. His hands hang at his sides, and his medical kit rests on the bench behind him, packed and zipped, because Tom never leaves a room without knowing where his kit is.
"Yes."
Knox watches him for a second longer. Then he nods and turns away.
The compound shifts around me for the rest of the afternoon.
Bikes pulled from the garage, saddlebags packed, fuel checked.
I watch from the periphery and learn how it works through the women: Sarah runs logistics from the kitchen table with a phone in each hand.
Jess inventories the emergency supplies in the basement.
Nina takes the children upstairs. Garrett stays.
I hear Knox tell him that, and Garrett nods once and turns for the garage.
Jax—the prospect, the wolf shifter with the wired energy and the restless hands—stays too.
Two Cascades allies arrive in a truck before sunset.
The compound's full strength rides out at dawn. What stays behind is Garrett, Jax, the allies, and the women and children.
And me.
The fox kit needs her evening nebulizer at eight.
I lift her out of the carrier beside the hawk's cage and carry her to the garage wrapped in a towel, teeth bared above the terry cloth.
Less than three pounds and fights like thirty.
The wheeze has thinned since arriving at the compound—a crackle now, not the wet rasp that kept me up three nights running—but the treatments don't stop until the crackle does.
Tom has the nebulizer assembled when I get there. Mask, tubing, the medication I measured this morning. I pin the kit against my chest, one hand on her head. He cups the mask over her muzzle.
"Thirty seconds," I tell him. "She'll fight at twenty."
She fights at fifteen. Back legs kicking, teeth snapping at the mask edge, and Tom holds steady with his hands covering the kit's face. He reads my grip and matches it, his fingers settling against mine.
The kit stops fighting. Medication hisses through the mask. I count to thirty and Tom pulls it at twenty-nine seconds.
I set her back in the carrier. She curls up, shows me her teeth one more time, and then goes to sleeps.
Tom cleans the nebulizer parts and hangs them on the pegboard. I take the kit back upstairs. He doesn't follow.
Two hours later, Tom comes to the apartment at ten. I'm sitting on his bed in his shirt with a raptor care manual open on my knees because reading about something I already know by heart is better than thinking about the door I'm watching.
His glasses have slipped down his nose. They never stay where he puts them. He stands in the doorway for a long moment before he speaks.
"I need to tell you something about tomorrow. We have to ride out to a place called Bloodstone in the mountains," he says. "Knox is challenging for leadership of the orc clans. Single combat."
I close the book and set it on the nightstand.
"How long are you going to be gone for?"
"Two days. Maybe three."
He looks at me. I look at him. Last night fills the space between us without either of us saying a word.
Two days without the full club. Poachers escalating. Humans First out there somewhere with their flyers and their rage and their willingness to hurt people. And the man I've been leaning into for two years riding into the mountains to keep his brothers alive.
I don't ask him to stay.
I get up from the bed. I cross the room, and his body tenses as I close the distance, I put my hand flat on his chest, over his heart, and hold it there. My palm against the coarse fur and the muscle underneath, the heat of him bleeding through my skin.
The purr starts before he can stop it.
It rolls through his chest and into my palm and up my arm, I feel it in my ribs, in my throat, in the soles of my feet on the cold floor.
The sound fills the room. His whole body vibrates with it, and his eyes drop to my hand on his chest, his jaw goes slack, his eyes half-closed, and he doesn't try to stop it this time.
"Come back in one piece." I keep my voice steady. "I'll need someone to correct Finn's species identifications, he always butchers it."
His mouth twitches. His hand covers mine, palm pressing my fingers tight against his heart, and the purr deepens. We stand like that and the silence holds everything we haven't said. Two years of it between my palm and his heartbeat.
Then he leans down and presses his lips to my forehead, making me melt on the spot.
"Behave," he says against my hair.
He's through the door before I can answer.
The door closes, and I stand in the middle of his apartment with the purr still humming in the walls and the spot on my forehead where his mouth landed still warm.
I don't move for a long time.
Dawn turns the compound lot gray. I stand at the window with my arms crossed and watch.
Nine bikes idle in formation. Knox at the front, Finn beside him. Rex at the rear. The exhaust drifts through the early fog and the engines rumble low enough to shake the gravel.
Tom's is third from the rear. His medical kit straps across the saddlebags.
His helmet rests on the seat while he checks something on the right side of his bike, his hands moving the way they always move—sure, steady, everything in its place.
He swings a leg over and settles his weight, and the bike drops an inch under him.
Knox raises his hand. The formation tightens. The lead bike pulls forward, and the rest follow, one by one, the sound building from a rumble to a roar that fills the lot, the trees, then drains away as they round the gate and turn south.
Tom doesn't look back.
I press my forehead against the glass. Below me, the lot empties. Tire marks in the gravel and exhaust haze and nothing else. Sarah stands at the gate with Reeve on her hip, watching the road. Jess beside her. Morgan sits on the bench by the garage door, her eyes on the southern tree line.
I go downstairs and stand with them.