Chapter 9
Briar
Ten hours is a long time to argue with yourself when the other side isn’t talking.
My wolf won’t engage. She’s sitting with the settled calm of an animal who’s made her choice and has nothing left to discuss, and every mile I put between us and that clearing is a mile she endures without protest. Fighting, I could work with.
This patient refusal is something I don’t know how to navigate.
The bite throbs in time with the road.
Somewhere past Texarkana, the shirt starts to feel wet against my collarbone.
I pull off at a gas station with a Shell sign half-lit against the dawn.
One truck at the pumps. A Chevy sedan by the air hose.
The automatic doors wheeze when I push through, and the light inside is the kind of fluorescent that makes everyone look jaundiced.
The woman at the counter is maybe fifty, bottle-red hair pulled back, reading glasses pushed up on her forehead.
“Morning, hon. Pump?”
“Restroom first.”
“Round the back. Key’s on the board.”
She gestures without looking up from her crossword. I take the key and walk out past the snack shelves.
The restroom smells like bleach and wet paper. One toilet, one sink, a cracked mirror screwed into the wall. I lock the door and turn to face myself.
The shirt is darker than it should be from the collar down, a stain blooming across the shoulder and spreading in a line toward my breast. I peel it off. The gauze underneath is saturated. I pull it away, and fresh blood wells up immediately. His fangs went deeper than I’d let myself register.
I clean it with a wad of paper towels and the soap from the dispenser, which smells like industrial lemons and stings when it hits the wound.
I hiss through my teeth and keep scrubbing until the pink runs clear.
Then I press a fresh pad of paper against it, hold it there until it stops weeping, and tape new gauze over the top with medical tape from my pack.
The clean shirt is at the bottom of the duffel. Black, high collar, buttoned to the throat. It’s eighty degrees outside. I put it on anyway.
In the mirror, the collar sits high enough that you can’t see the bandage if I don’t turn my head.
I go back inside.
The woman has her crossword down now. She watches me cross the store. When I set the key on the counter and ask for a coffee and twenty dollars of regular, her eyes go to my throat. Stay there for a second.
“You okay, honey?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s a lot of shirt for weather like this.”
My hand wants to go to my collar. I keep it on the counter. “Thermostat in my truck’s broken. Runs cold.”
“Huh.” She punches in my fuel. Her eyes haven’t moved off my face. “You need anything? We got a first aid kit in the office.”
“I’m fine.”
“You sure? You look —”
“I’m fine,” I snap.
Her mouth closes. She rings up the coffee. She doesn’t stop looking at me.
“Twenty-three forty-seven.”
I hand her cash. She counts change slowly, and as she puts it in my palm, she says, quietly, “There’s a women’s shelter in Hope. Forty miles up the interstate. They don’t ask questions.”
“It’s not like that.”
“Honey, they never say it’s like that.”
I take my coffee and leave. The bell over the door chimes. I’m aware of her watching me through the plate glass all the way back to the truck.
“This is fucking ridiculous,” I mutter, tugging my collar up.
I sit in the cab with the engine off. The coffee is terrible. I drink half of it before I put it in the holder and pull out.
The hills rise around the highway past Hot Springs.
At seven-forty in the morning, I cross the last bridge before the valley, and my body knows where I am before my eyes catch up.
My hands loosen on the wheel. My shoulders drop an inch.
The wolf I’ve been riding for ten hours finally shifts her weight.
Not toward the road ahead.
Behind us. To him.
For fuck’s sake.
I stop arguing.
The turnoff to the ranch is unmarked, aside from a cattle gate with a chain. I drive through. The lodge roof shows first between the oaks, then the barn, then the row of cabins along the creek. Smoke from Greta’s kitchen. A light in the lodge window.
I pull in behind the equipment shed and kill the engine.
My quarters are directly across the yard. I can see them from here. What I cannot do is get out of the truck.
I sit with my hands on the wheel and breathe.
A shape moves at the corner of the barn. Cameron, with a feed bucket in each hand, crossing toward the south pasture. He hasn’t seen me yet. He’s got a halter over his shoulder, and he’s whistling something tuneless.
He sees the truck. Stops whistling. Sets the buckets down.
I get out.
He walks over. Takes his time. Looks at the truck, looks at me, looks at the collar of my shirt and the way I’m holding myself, and by the time he reaches the cab, his face has gone from mine back to something more careful.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.”
He waits in silence.
I don’t fill it.
“Merric and Brenna know you’re back?”
“They will.”
He nods. Looks at my shoulder the way the woman at the counter looked at my shoulder, only he understands what he’s seeing, or understands enough. His nostrils flare once. He doesn’t comment.
“Greta’s got biscuits.”
“Later.”
“Okay.”
He hesitates. “You need anything?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
He picks up the buckets. Starts toward the pasture. Five steps in, he stops.
“Briar.”
I look at him.
“Welcome home.”
He keeps walking.
I shoulder my pack and cross the yard to my quarters. The door closes behind me. Dust and absence. My cot is bare. The room is stripped. I drop the pack and sit on the edge of the cot.
He’s in my head.
Not loud. He doesn’t have to be loud. The sense of him is like standing next to someone in the dark — you know they’re there without hearing them move. He’s sitting somewhere, too. Not sleeping. Reaching toward me every few seconds, checking, and every time he reaches, my wolf hums.
Stop touching me.
He can’t hear me. But he feels the anger because he pulls back. Thirty seconds later, he reaches again.
I stand up and collect my toiletries, then walk to the shower block with a towel.
The communal bathroom is empty at this hour. I turn the water on. The solar tank hasn’t caught up to the morning, and what comes out is barely lukewarm. I stand under it and wash the Hill Country off. Dirt. Sweat. Blood. The water runs brown, then pink, then clear.
His scent does not come off.
It’s in the bite. I scrub the skin around it until the raw pink shows through, and the scent is still there, faint, under my ear, on the pad of my thumb where I touched the wound. My wolf rumbles, smug.
I want to claw my own shoulder open.
I look at the bite in the mirror above the basin. It’s vicious, the flesh mangled and torn. Nothing civilized or discreet about it. Then again, there’s nothing civilized or discreet about the male who gave it to me.
A mate mark. On my neck.
Motherfucker.
I press my forehead against the glass.
“There’s a way out of this,” I whisper. “There has to be.”
I dress in dark pants and a button-up. Fresh tape. Shirt buttoned to the throat.
I walk out.
The creek runs the south boundary of the property, and the ward line Willow set runs along it — invisible to human eyes, bright to me. The magic is solid, looped at intervals through stones and tree trunks and buried markers. I walk it slowly. My job is to check for breaches.
I stop at the first marker, a flat limestone by a cottonwood root, and put my hand on it to test the ward.
The ward reacts.
Not a breach. A recognition. The wolf-level signature Willow keyed it to — me, Briar, Merric’s scout — is still there, but something has been added. Something the ward doesn’t know. The magic flares under my palm, cool, questioning, and then settles.
I pull my hand back.
Willow is going to need to rekey this ward. Because now, underneath my signature, there’s another one. Male. Alpha. A man three hundred miles away.
I’m carrying him. The ward felt him.
Goddammit.
Inside me, the beast exhales.
“Satisfied?” I demand. “Is that what you are?”
She doesn’t answer.
I keep walking.
I check three more markers. Each one does the same thing: flares, questions, settles. The ward is adjusting to what I’ve brought home.
I make it back to the yard at ten. Training is running in the east field, I can hear the thud of bodies on the practice mats. I cross toward the cabins. Past the children’s room.
The door is open, the way Sable prefers. I slow.
Mia is on a mat on the floor, playing with her ball. Still so damned thin, so fragile, thanks to spending the majority of her life in a facility that my —
My what?
Nothing. He’s nothing to me.
The man who bit me and the man whose corridor fed her into the Syndicate are the same man.
And my wolf chose him. Now I am standing in this doorway with his mark on my neck and a ward outside that knows his signature.
And this child is playing with a rubber ball and learning to believe that the world keeps its promises.
I broke mine when I didn’t make him pay.
I smile at her, feeling like a fraud. She lowers the ball. Watches me go.
I make it to the tree line before my knees give out. I drop into a crouch behind a hickory, my back against the bark. I press both hands against the bite on my neck, and I breathe through my teeth, and I let the wolf have ten seconds.
Ten seconds of feeling him.
Ten seconds of the pull, unresisted, the full force of it reaching for the male she chose.
That’s enough.
I stand up. Brush the dirt off my knees. I feel the pull in reply, him reaching back.
I push him away.
Get out of my head, you fucking bastard.