Chapter 4
Briar
He doesn’t ride east the next day. Six hours on the ridge in wolf form — stone under my belly, sun on my back, the compound below going through its stressed routines.
He stays in the main house. The stocky patrol coordinator crosses the yard three times.
The woman runs her fighters through drills. Nothing moves east.
Fine. I’ve got nowhere to be.
I eat jerky when I get to the truck, drink from the creek, then sleep four hours in the cab with the windows cracked and my knife where I can reach it without sitting up.
The cabin takes two trips from the truck.
The anchor bracket is heavy; the lag screws heavier.
I bolted the bracket to the floor joists with a hand drill I picked up outside Austin on the drive down, same stop where I bought the dart gun.
Modified veterinary model, single shot, compressed air, effective to thirty feet.
The ranch supply store didn’t ask questions when I paid cash and said I was managing feral hogs.
The chair goes over the bracket. Four bolts through the base plate. I throw my weight against it from every angle.
Good. That’s not moving.
Wrist restraints through the chair arms. Ankles to the legs. Chest strap for backup. I size them for the body I’ve been watching from the ridge — wider than standard, longer through the arm.
I’ll fine-tune when he’s in it.
Medical kit on the shelf. Antiseptic, gauze, sutures, painkillers. He needs to be alive and functional, at least for now. An unconscious man answers nothing, and a dead one answers less.
The knife on the table. I test the edge against my thumb. Red line, instant.
Good.
And the rabbit. I set it on the floor facing the chair and crouch down to check the angle — what he’ll see when the drug clears, and his vision settles.
Button eyes. Matted fur. A stuffed toy once loved by someone small.
I’ve been thinking about those boxes. The ones from the facility storage room, where they kept the things taken at intake.
Small shoes with the laces still tied. A crayon drawing of a house — yellow sun, green grass, the kind every child draws because every child believes in a place like that.
Filed in cardboard alongside intake documentation.
This is why you’re here. Don’t lose it in the logistics.
I stand up. Look at the room.
It’ll do.
I dust my hands off and settle onto the sleeping bag I’ve laid out in the corner. On assignments like this, you take sleep when you can get it.
The next morning, I’m in position before dawn.
Not on the ridge — in the scrub beside the trail, two hundred yards below the marker stone.
I walked this stretch in wolf form yesterday, testing wind and cover.
Thick brush on three sides. Northwest wind puts me downwind of the trail in the morning. Hard limestone that won’t hold prints.
Human form. I need hands for the dart gun.
One of the two doses I pulled from Merric’s stores — wolf-grade, dosed for an alpha male I’m estimating at two-twenty.
I’ve adjusted upward ten percent for the faster metabolism.
The margin is thin. I’d rather he sleeps too long than wakes up while I’m still getting him to the cabin.
I settle in and wait.
Merric trained me in fixed-position surveillance when I was seventeen — three-day hides, no movement, the discipline of existing in a space without disturbing it.
My body knows how to go quiet. Heart rate down.
Breathing shallow. The need to shift and fidget pushed down until there’s nothing left but the waiting itself.
An hour. Two. The sun climbs. The shade I picked shrinks. A lizard runs across my boot, stops, runs again. The mockingbird in the oak works through its calls — aggressive, territorial, the same six notes in a loop.
Shut up.
It doesn’t.
Then hooves on limestone.
There.
He comes around the bend forty feet out. The mare first, picking her way between the rocks. Then him.
Thirty feet. Twenty.
Keep coming.
At ten feet, I can see the grain of his shirt where it pulls across his shoulders.
Hands easy on the reins, loose. His forearms below rolled sleeves — tanned, the muscle built from years of fence posts and hay bales and animals that don’t want to go where you’re putting them. Not gym muscle. Labor muscle.
And then his scent hits me.
My wolf comes up hard. My grip on the gun goes wrong — both hands — and I feel her pulling toward that smell. I clamp down. Breathe through my mouth. Get the barrel back where it needs to be.
It’s natural to be wary of an unknown alpha. More attentive.
That’s all it is.
She pulls back. Not satisfied. Just outweighed.
He passes. His scent drops from immediate to present. My hands steady.
One chance. Don’t waste it.
He dismounts at the stone. Sits. His back to the trail. His hand finds the flat face of the marker, fingers spreading against the surface — not looking for it, finding it. The same gesture, worn into muscle.
I move.
Out of the scrub. Stock to my shoulder. Boots quiet on limestone. The mare’s ears rotate — she catches something in my scent — but I’m past her before she decides what to do about it.
Fifteen feet. Ten.
I fire.
The dart takes him in the right shoulder above the scapula. He’s already turning when the sound finishes — fast, one hand going for the dart — and his eyes find mine before I expect them to.
Dark. Hard. A face that’s made a decade of hard decisions and looks every day of it.
“What the—?” His eyes flash gold, his wolf catching me for a half-second. Something sharpens in his expression, something almost like a question.
Go down, you bastard.
The ketamine takes him. His legs go, and his weight pitches sideways toward the rock shelf.
I drop the gun, lunge forward, and catch his shoulder. Take his weight on my arms and go down to one knee with him, controlled, steering the fall away from the stone. If he cracks his fucking skull open, I’ll have done all of this for nothing, dammit.
He’s heavier than I estimated.
Of course he is.
But he’s out. Breathing slow and deep. The drug has him. Thank fuck.
I stay kneeling a moment, getting my breath back. His face, slack now — jaw unclenched, the lines between his brows smoothed out — seems younger now, younger than it has any right to be. The face his sister might have known, before the stone on the ridge and everything he built after.
Don’t look at it.
I stand up.
The mare is pulling at her ground tie, ears flat.
I catch the rein and talk her down with a low sound, soothing her.
She settles. I tie her reins around her neck so she doesn’t step on them, then watch as she gradually ambles off to graze nearby.
If she heads back to the compound, someone will come out to find him.
They’ll find the ridge empty, and the search party will come.
I might have hours, not days.
“Stay here, girl,” I murmur, wishing there was a better way to control this situation.
Work with what you’ve got.
I turn back to the unconscious male. Getting him to the truck is the hardest physical work I’ve done in years. I can’t carry him. I drag — his arm across my shoulders, his weight on my back, my legs doing the arithmetic.
“Fuck, you’re heavy,” I grumble beneath my breath.
Two hundred yards of stone and dry grass. The dirt shows the furrow of his boot heels the whole way, and I’ll have to come back and brush it out.
One thing at a time.
At the truck, I get him over the tailgate — a controlled roll that costs me my breath and most of my dignity. I pull a tarp over him and drive.
It’s ten minutes on ranch track to the cabin. I back the truck to the door, roll him out unceremoniously, then grab his heels and drag him over the threshold.
Once inside, I shut the door and get to work.
His shirt first. Buttons, practical, my fingers working through them while his chest rises and falls under my hands.
His skin is warm — warmer than it should be, alpha metabolism already fighting the drug.
There’s a scar across his left side. Old.
A white ridge where something opened his ribs, once.
My fingers find it before I’ve told them to.
Stop that.
I pull my hand back. Finish the shirt.
Boots. Socks. I pause for a moment before working on the top button of his jeans. My hands are doing the job, and my mind is running the reasons: a naked prisoner is a vulnerable prisoner, and vulnerability is a tool. The reasons are sound.
They don’t account for everything that’s happening in this room.
For fuck’s sake, just do it, Briar.
I grit my teeth and tug the heavy fabric over lean hips and down his thighs.
His knee looks like it’s taken some damage at some point, and for some reason, I find myself easing the denim carefully over the old injury.
Which is just fucking ridiculous because there’s a good chance he’s not going to be walking out of this cabin.
I avert my face as I tug off his black briefs, then pause to gather myself for the next step.
I run an eye over him as I stand with my hands on my hips.
Tall, long-limbed, broad through the shoulder, with a chest built for power.
As males go, he’s a good specimen. Almost a pity that I’m going to have to ruin him.
Back to work. You’re wasting time.
I get behind him, wedging my hands beneath his armpits and heaving him up into the chair. This would have been an impossible task if it weren’t for wolf strength and grim determination.
Eventually, I step back and look at what’s in front of me.
He’s in the chair. Naked, unconscious, head dropped forward. A bar of afternoon light from the window falls across his bare feet. No authority, no voice, nothing between his skin and the air. Just a body. Muscle and bone, and the record of everything that’s been done to it and everything it’s done.
I strap the restraints. Wrists, ankles, chest. Tight. I test each one.
I’m sweating by the time I’m done.
This better be worth it, Forrester.
I pull my own chair to the opposite wall and sit, knees up, arms across them.
On the floor between us is the rabbit. Button eyes facing the chair. A child’s comfort object, carried six hundred miles for this moment.
There. That’s what you wake up to.
The cabin is quiet. Outside, the mockingbird is still at it. The light through the window moves slowly across the floorboards toward his feet. Time trickles by.
And I wait.
His breathing changes. The deep rhythm shortens. His fingers move against the chair arms — small twitches, involuntary. His head lifts an inch. Drops. Lifts again. His wrists test the cuffs, then his ankles, then the chest strap. His body taking inventory before his mind catches up.
His eyes open.
He sees the rabbit.