Chapter 11
Caleb
She stayed.
I ran the eastern perimeter at dawn and turned that fact over in my mind the way you turn a stone, looking for what’s underneath.
She knew what we were. She knew what I was. She had every reason to pack her bag and drive until Greyhollow was a bad memory, but she didn't.
I felt relieved. But it wasn’t clean.
It came back harder when I let it settle. When you pressed against the wound and finally let go, the pain doubled.
I prowled the grounds in my wolf form, listening for anything out of place. The moon began to descend as dawn made its way to the sky. The light made it easy to find any activity that shouldn't have been there.
Nothing moved.
Fog caught in the firs' boughs.
I moved through them without sound.
The eastern line was clean. No foreign scents — only the fading ones from the night I saved Olivia in the woods.
I kept moving. Seven years of running perimeters had taught me that the forest didn't answer. It gave space.
I kept circling Olivia's decision. I thought about our exchange at the fireplace.
"Despite everything, I still care about this place."
She'd said it the way she said things that cost her — carefully, without looking at me directly. I'd watched her do it with Jake in the early weeks. With Stella. Even with Maureen. Olivia Cruz gave warmth easily.
I couldn't bring myself to be frustrated by the decision. Even if some would call her foolish or too selfless for her own good, that was simply the way Olivia was. Kind without measure.
She didn’t see how it actually cost her.
And she had no idea that she was doing it again right now.
Staying in a house full of people who were keeping something from her, extending trust to a man who had not yet earned the full weight of it.
Her kindness was working against her and she couldn't see it because I was the one blocking the view.
That thought sat in my chest like a coal.
My patrols eventually brought me to the ridge.
Below the trees, I could see Ashwood estate. The dawn's light dipped in and out of its crevices, shadows still clung to parts of it. Smoke came from the chimney, telling me that Maureen was going to start breakfast soon.
I could hear movement from Jake's room. Pretending he’d slept.
Olivia herself was somewhere in there in her own room. Even from here, I felt her. The bond made it easy to feel her heartbeat. It was steady. A part of me wondered if she was still asleep or if she was preparing to head to the kitchen. Her curtains were closed. So I wouldn't know for sure.
Strange enough now that she was here — but for the past seven years, it had been different.
At most, four hundred miles. From there, the bond thinned as she moved from one nursing assignment to the other. Sometimes I followed. Checked to see how she was doing. She kept helping people.
So many times, I wanted to approach her. But all that mattered was that she was safe.
The mist surrounded my paws and the rest of my form. I hid in the trees as the sunlight rose, careful not to let any possible travelers know I was around.
As I looked at the rest of Ashwood estate, the relief I was so anxious to carry finally began to crack.
She didn’t know yet.
That was the whole of it. She stayed because she didn’t know everything. And every hour she spent in this house believing she'd chosen it freely was an hour built on something that would break.
I turned around and started running.
My guilt had a shape.
For me, it wasn't the guilt of a man who did something terrible on purpose.
I didn't drive the car. I didn’t order the attack. I didn't choose, at twenty, to follow a scent through the forests in Northern California. Nor to find a girl standing in the afternoon light with her face tilted up at a hawk, her face as bright as the sun.
Perhaps I should have been more wary.
Perhaps if I didn't let the bond take over every sense of my being, I would have noticed the spy in the trees only a mile away from me.
I would have been tipped off to them noticing how drawn I was toward Olivia.
The way my body had oriented toward her without my permission.
The way every other instinct had gone quiet and that one had sharpened to a point.
To anyone trained to read a wolf's behavior, I had announced it clearly. Anyone watching would’ve known.
But I didn't notice. It changed everything.
I reached the mountain road too late.
I found Olivia on the shoulder, half under the guardrail, covered in blood. The other wolves were gone. They hadn't realized that Olivia, even in her maimed state, still had the faintest of heartbeats. A thread of a pulse.
I will never forget the sound of it. How small it was. How close to nothing.
Among wolves, life force was not a metaphor.
It was the current that ran beneath the skin — the thing that fueled the shift, that healed wounds faster than any human body should be able to, that made us harder to kill than we have any right to be.
It was finite. It did not regenerate quickly.
Giving it away was not a gesture, but a cost.
It moved through touch. Through blood if the bond was incomplete, which ours was.
I pressed my hands to her wounds and I held on.
I could feel my own pulse dimming at the edges as hers began, slowly, to strengthen.
The bond acted as a channel between us, carrying what I gave and pulling it toward whatever in her was still fighting to stay.
I saved her, but the word "save" is something I only use liberally. Because what I did on that mountain road was pour my own life force into an incomplete bond and hold on until her pulse steadied under my hands. I pulled her back from the edge. I did not undo what put her there.
The distinction stayed.
She thought it was an animal attack. A piece of bad luck on a mountain road in Northern California.
She didn't know about the spy. She didn't know that those wolves were not wild animals. They were members of the Voss pack.
She didn’t know Maykhel ordered it to make sure I would be deprived of our bond. A bond that would strengthen me as an opponent, and who he knew mattered most to me.
That was the shape of the guilt I carried. It wasn’t what I did. It was what it cost her.
I caught Elias's scent on the second perimeter run.
It wasn't new. Donovan and I had been tracking traces of him along the boundary for weeks — always outside the line, always careful, the behavior of someone gathering information rather than making a move. We knew he was there. We knew what he was doing.
What I didn't know — what changed everything — was that Olivia had already met him.
Donovan told me after the fact. She'd come back through the east door one morning and he'd stopped her at the threshold.
Asked if she'd run into anyone on the trail.
She said a neighbor. Donovan recognized it immediately and said nothing — not to her, and not to me until later.
By then, Elias had already made contact twice.
I should have told her then what that meant. I didn't.
What was new now was where the scent landed.
The marked areas closed tighter and tighter around the boundary. Not the outer perimeter anymore. Not the road. I followed the trail more closely, and each point was nearer than the last.
I found the closest concentration of his scent near the inner edge of the estate grounds. In the distance, I could see Olivia's car.
The world closed in.
He wasn't watching the territory anymore. He was watching her specifically. And he'd been close enough to know exactly what she was to us.
They knew. They were aware that she was the mate they failed to kill seven years ago.
In many ways, I wondered why Donovan couldn’t have been alpha.
He knew when to be detached. He made decisions no matter how hard it turned other people against him.
That was on me. Because of my own shortcomings, Donovan was forced to harden into a man when I should have been the one guiding him.
I thought about that now, watching him enter the study.
He didn’t come in here often.
I informed him about Elias’s scent earlier, but we decided that a proper meeting with Jake and Stella would be more appropriate to discuss the full matter of the situation.
Donovan carried a mug of black coffee with him as he entered.
He paused in the doorway, waited for me to gesture at him closer, and then sat across from me.
“She’s still here,” I told him.
"I know,” he said. "I heard her moving around an hour ago. She was checking on Jake just a moment ago.”
Of course she did.
Donovan finally looked at me. I knew that look — not cold, not angry, but careful.
"He’s moved closer,” Donovan said. “Not just the boundary anymore. Bastard’s gutsy, I’ll give him that.”
I nodded. “Stella already affirmed she’ll be here. I haven’t been able to speak to Jake as he’s with Olivia right now, but I’m sure we can arrange something once she’s asleep.”
“Tomas and Maureen are on the lookout. If they see anyone coming up here, they’re to inform us immediately.”
I pressed my fingers against my temples.
When I saw Donovan open his mouth, I shifted my eyes sideways before he could speak. “Donovan —”
"You don't know what I'm going to say."
"Of course I do,” I said. “You’re going to say I need to tell her.”
I broke away from the desk and moved to the bookshelves by the window. The fog was even thicker this afternoon.
"Or,” I continued. “You're going to tell me to end it, cut the contact, and get her safely reassigned before the Voss pack has time to—"
"I was going to ask if you slept."
I swallowed. I didn’t bother to answer the question.
Donovan clucked his tongue and set his mug down. "But since you brought it up…"
"She knows about wolves," I explained. "I told her everything she needed to know.”
“Needed.”
My jaw tightened. Donovan could always read me too quickly.
I lowered my voice. My hands fumbled with a book I'd pulled from the shelf. I tried to scan through it. Anything to calm my mind.
“It’s enough for now,” I said. “We need to give her more time…”
“You mean you want more time,” Donovan said.
A sharp exhale escaped me. I didn’t want to get irritated. Not this early in the morning, and definitely not because Donovan was right.
"It's enough for now."
“I’m only pressing because I know you,” Donovan said. “Caleb…”
I finally slammed my hand against the wall.
"It's not that simple!”
"Oh, don’t give me that crap,” Donovan hissed. “Do you actually not care about hurting her?"
It wasn't a rhetorical question. That was the thing about Donovan — he asked questions whether you wanted to hear them or not.
"I care about it more than anything else.”
Donovan didn't say anything for a moment. He crossed his arms.
We heard footsteps. In the distance, we could hear Jake and Olivia. Olivia was laughing, no doubt because of a quip Jake made.
I watched my brother across from me sigh.
"I've been watching her," Donovan murmured. "With Jake."
A beat.
"She didn’t have the full picture,” Donovan said. “Less than half, even. But she took it, and she did more with it than she should have been able to do, and she didn't run when the rest came out."
He looked at me directly. "She's been watching you. You know that, right?"
I tried not to show how much that statement affected me.
Donovan pressed further. "The estate's different since she came here,” he said. “I don't know what you want me to say about that. But it is."
"The truth about what we are didn't cost her anything," I said. "This will."
"Which is why she needs to hear it from someone who's going to still be standing there after it does." He uncrossed his arms. "Elias doesn't care what it costs her. He cares what it costs you. She deserves to know the difference exists."
"Tell her. Before he does." He stopped but didn't turn. "You can choose how many people get hurt by this. You can't choose whether anyone does."
“I promise I know what I’m doing.”
Donovan drew closer. “But I’m warning you, Caleb.”
He jerked his head toward the trees.
“Elias will be back,” he said. “He’s been building toward something — we both know that. And when the Voss pack decides they’ve gathered enough, they will use what they know.”
He turned for the door, then paused.
"Including what she doesn't."