16. Chapter 16
The first light of dawn painted the cabin walls in amber and pale gold. The colors shifted across Declan’s face where he lay beside her, one arm still wrapped around her waist as if afraid she’d vanish while he slept.
She hadn’t slept. Couldn’t. Her mind kept circling back to the mission report, to that image of Declan carrying Mason through the forest with blood on him that wasn’t his own.
The grief felt different now. Smaller somehow. Or maybe just shared, the weight distributed across two sets of shoulders instead of one.
But the anger was still there. Quieter than last night, but present, a live wire under everything, a reminder that grief and anger didn’t line up neatly, that one didn’t cancel the other out.
Declan’s eyes opened. No grogginess. Just immediate awareness and the fear that followed, the fear that she’d changed her mind overnight, that the fragile truce they’d built would shatter in the morning light.
“I’m still here.” The words barely carried.
His hand flexed on the blanket. “I can see that.”
“I’m still angry.”
“I know.”
“But I need to talk about him.” She traced the scar along his collarbone. “About Mason. Not about what happened that day. About who he was before.”
Declan’s face softened around the eyes. “Okay.”
She took a breath and reached for the memories without the filter of rage that had colored every one of them for so long. Not letting it go. Just setting it aside for a moment, the way you set down something heavy to use both hands.
“He made the worst pancakes.” The words came easier than she expected. “Burned on the outside, raw in the middle. But he made them every Sunday anyway because our mom used to. He called it tradition.”
“Stubborn.”
“Relentless.” A smile ghosted across her lips. “He’d spend hours perfecting a recipe, refusing to quit even when the kitchen looked like a disaster zone. I’d tell him to just buy frozen ones, and he’d look at me like I’d suggested murder.”
Declan’s thumb moved in slow circles on her hip. Listening without interrupting. Without trying to fix anything.
“He taught me to shoot when I was twelve. Took me to the range every weekend until I could outshoot half the officers in his precinct. He said I had a gift for seeing patterns, that I’d make a good investigator someday.”
“You did.”
“I used those skills to hunt wolves.” The irony tasted bitter. “Used everything he taught me to plan revenge instead of building the life he wanted for me.”
“You used them to find answers.” Declan weighed each word. “There’s a difference.”
“I know the difference.” Her thumb traced along his collarbone. “I’m still angry that I had to spend three years finding it.”
He didn’t try to talk her out of that. Just stayed quiet with it.
“Grief doesn’t follow rules about what you should or shouldn’t feel.” His hand moved to her face. “Doesn’t follow a timeline.”
“How would you know?”
His breath shifted. A pause that had weight.
“Because I’ve carried bodies before.” He paused. “Before Mason. After. Wolves who degraded. Humans caught in territory disputes.”
He paused. “And I remember every single one.”
“Declan.”
“I carried Mason for three miles.” His eyes refocused on her face. “Through rough terrain. In the dark. His blood soaked through my clothes. I could smell his death for days afterward.”
She flinched. He caught her hand before she could pull away.
“I’m not telling you this to hurt you.” His grip was gentle but firm. “I’m telling you because you need to know I didn’t just find him and walk away. I honored him. Made sure he wasn’t left alone in the forest.”
“Why?” The word broke on her lips. “He was human. You didn’t know him. Why did it matter?”
“Because he died protecting people.” Declan’s thumb traced her knuckles. “Because his last words were about you. Because leaving him there would have been wrong, and I’d already lost him once. I wasn’t going to lose him twice.”
The grief rose sharp and sudden. Sage pressed her face against his shoulder, breathing through the wave of it. His arms came around her, solid and certain.
“We have rituals.” The words came low. “For the dead. Wolves carry their pack members home. We don’t leave them behind. Ever.”
“He wasn’t pack.”
“No.” His hand stroked her hair. “But he died on my watch. In my territory. That made him my responsibility.”
She pulled back enough to look at him. “Is that why you kept his photo? Why you investigated his life?”
“Partly.” His eyes found hers. “But mostly because I needed to know who he was. Wolves grieve by carrying the names and faces of those we lost. I gave Mason that, even though he wasn’t pack.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then “You said there was more. About Chester. About why he degraded.”
His jaw worked once. “Chester lost his mate eighteen months before Mason died.” He placed each word deliberately. “She was killed in a Thornwood border dispute. He had no pack after that. His original pack had dissolved two years earlier. He was alone. Completely.”
“What does that do to a wolf?”
“It hollows them out.” He drew her in. “The wolf identity needs pack to stay whole. Without that anchor, the wolf side starts separating from the human side. Slowly. The instincts go feral first. Then the judgment. Then the ability to tell livestock from people.”
She absorbed that. “Could it happen to anyone?”
“Any wolf who loses their pack and their mate in close succession. Who stays isolated long enough?” He paused, his expression turning deliberate.
“In the early stages, it’s reversible. Pack contact, time, a wolf willing to anchor them.
I thought Chester was still early enough.
I was wrong. By the time I found him that night, he was beyond reach.
Late-stage degradation doesn’t reverse.”
“You were trying to save him too.”
The words landed somewhere he hadn’t expected. She heard it in the slight catch of his breath.
“He wasn’t the monster you’ve been imagining for years.” The roughness in him surfaced. “He was a wolf who’d lost everything and had no one to pull him back. That doesn’t excuse what he did to Mason. Nothing excuses that. But it’s what happened.”
“And after?” Her voice was quiet. “The report said you drove him off. Where did he go?”
“North.” He didn’t soften it. “He broke off Mason the moment I came in hard, and ran for the border. I had maybe three minutes, and I spent them on your brother. Stayed with him until he was gone.”
“And then?”
“Then I went after Chester. Ran him down that same night, short of the line. He was still feeding-wrong, still gone behind the eyes. I tried to call him back one last time, and there was nothing left in him to answer.” His jaw set.
“So I ended it. A wolf who’s killed people and can’t be brought back doesn’t get to keep walking.
That’s the job, and I don’t hand it to anyone else.
I didn’t take pleasure in it. I’ve never regretted it. ”
Sage lay still, processing. The rogue who had killed Mason had himself been destroyed by loss. The symmetry of it was ugly and human in a way she hadn’t expected from a wolf.
“Does it help?” he asked. “Knowing?”
She considered that honestly. “It doesn’t make the grief smaller. But it makes him real. Less like a monster I was chasing and more like someone who fell apart.”
She exhaled slowly. “I think I needed that.”
The cabin was warming by the time Sage rose to make coffee. Declan lay still, his breathing even in the way that meant he wasn’t sleeping but was giving her space.
She stood at the window with her mug and let herself do something she hadn’t done since before Mason died. Thought about him without the investigation attached.
He used to leave the bathroom mirror foggy every single morning and never wipe it down. She’d complained about it for years. She would give anything to find that fog on a mirror again.
He’d kept a list on his phone called ’places to take Sage.’ National parks, hiking trails, a diner in Billings. He’d been planning to get there eventually. He thought they had infinite time.
She let herself miss him cleanly, without the anger to blunt it. Just Mason her brother, who had believed she was exactly as capable as she’d needed to believe she was. The grief was sharper without the anger to dull it. She let it be sharp.
Declan came to stand beside her after a while. Same frost-stiffened trees. He didn’t say anything.
“He’d have made a terrible field investigator.” She looked at the trees, not at Declan. “He was too trusting. He always told people more than he should.”
“That sounds like someone who trusted the world to be worth trusting.”
“It got him killed.”
“It also made him the person whose sister spent three years making sure he wasn’t forgotten.”
He was watching the trees, not her.
“Tell me more.” No particular agenda behind it. “About the good things.”
So she did.
She told him about Mason teaching her to drive in an empty parking lot, patient even when she stalled the car six times in a row.
About the birthday he worked double shifts to buy her the camera she wanted, then claimed he’d gotten it on sale.
She found the receipt years later. Full price.
He’d eaten cheap meals for a month to cover it.
“He was everything.” The words came without the razor edge of grief. “He raised me after our parents died. Gave up a scholarship to stay home. Worked nights so he could be there when I got home from school. Never once made me feel like a burden.”
She told him about Mason’s terrible singing voice and the sticky notes he’d leave in her textbooks before every exam. He never stopped trying to make things lighter.
Declan listened. Didn’t interrupt. Didn’t try to fold his own memories in. Just held her and let her grieve out loud for the first time in years.
The sun climbed higher. The cabin warmed.
Somewhere in the telling, Sage felt the grief shift shape. Not smaller. Not gone. But carried differently, shared across two people instead of one.
“Thank you. For listening.”
“Thank you for trusting me with him.” He cleared his throat. “With who he was.”
“You didn’t fail him.” The words came easier now. Not absolution. Not yet. But the beginning of something that might grow into it, given time. “You couldn’t save him. Those aren’t the same thing.”
He was quiet after that. She could read the shape of his thoughts in the silence of him, the way his breathing slowed and his grip on her loosened slightly. A man who’d spent years believing he deserved punishment, finally sitting with the possibility that he didn’t.
“He would have liked you,” she murmured.
“You think so?”
“He liked stubborn people. People who showed up even when it was hard. People who carried more than they should and refused to put it down.” She pressed her lips to his temple. “He would have recognized you immediately.”
Something opened in the bond, warmer than grief, close to peace.
The radio on Declan’s belt crackled. He locked up, every muscle going tight.
“Dec.” Nolan came through short and sharp. “Three contacts on the eastern border. A full mile closer than Tuesday.”
Declan’s arm loosened from around her. His eyes shifted, the vulnerability replaced by something hard and calculated.
“Double the eastern watch. I’ll check in at next rotation.”
He clipped the radio back. His attention fixed on the window.
The scout movement, the tightening border perimeter, the way Thornwood was probing closer each time. She’d mapped enough surveillance operations to recognize the rhythm of preparation. This wasn’t intimidation anymore. This was positioning.
“They’re escalating.” She kept her breathing even. “This is what it looks like right before someone decides they have enough information to move.”
Declan stilled. “You’ve seen this before.”
“In criminal organizations, yes. Three weeks of watching, then a gap in the pattern, then they act.” She kept his eyes. “Whatever Thornwood is planning, it’s closer than Jace thinks.”
He absorbed her words and filed it alongside things that mattered.
“I need to report this to Jace. All of it.” He touched her face, brief and deliberate. “But this conversation isn’t over.”
“I know.” She leaned in close to him. “Go. Tell Jace what I said about the timing. It might matter.”
He kissed her once, then pulled on his jacket and walked out into the morning.
Sage stood in the warmed cabin thinking about escalation patterns, and about a man who had worked double shifts to buy his sister a camera, and about how loss could hollow a wolf down to its worst instincts.
She thought about all three things for a long time. Then she set her mug down, picked up her jacket, and went after Declan.
She didn’t know yet what that meant. She was still working it out.