7. Chapter 7
Noon at the southern marker.
Jace stopped his core group fifty yards out and let the Thornwood side see them coming.
The marker was a stone pillar at the bend in the creek where Blackridge land ended and the long disputed strip of timber began.
His grandfather had set the pillar in his grandfather's day.
Jace stood at it twenty-three times in his fifteen years as alpha.
He walked away from it twenty-three times, the way you walked away from a marker when a meeting was done enough to leave but never settled enough to stop watching.
The sun was straight up for once. There was a wind off the north ridge that smelled of cold stone and Thornwood wolves.
Six of them on the far side of the creek bed. Garrett Vanier in the middle. Five behind him, two of them Jace knew by sight from years of border meetings, three of them younger.
Treaty protocol said you walked the last fifty yards in human form with both hands visible.
Jace walked it.
Theo at his right, half a step back. Rhys at his left at the same distance.
Declan a pace behind both of them with his hands loose.
Standard formation. Three at the marker, two in fallback positions in the trees Jace had set before sunrise, comms on the pack-link, weapons at the ready Garrett's wolves wouldn't know they had.
Garrett was a heavy wolf in any form. In human form he was a thick-shouldered man in his fifties with a face like he'd never made a comfortable bargain.
The Thornwood alpha had outlasted three council shifts and four challenges by being smarter than anyone gave him credit for.
Jace stopped underestimating him the third year of his own alpha-ship.
Garrett was thinking about something today as Jace came up to the marker. Jace could read it on him at thirty yards. Garrett hadn't wanted to call this meeting. Whoever Garrett was working for had made him call it.
That was a useful thing to know.
He met Jace at the line where the creek bed split.
“Holbrook.”
“Vanier.”
The wind moved.
Garrett looked at Theo, at Rhys, at Declan. Counted them. Did the math. Did it again.
He looked back at Jace.
“Thanks for coming.”
“Your invitation.”
A small dry sound from Garrett, almost a laugh. “Yes.”
Both alphas held silence the right number of seconds for treaty.
Garrett went first.
“A good client tasked us with keeping an eye out for a certain human in the area.”
“Why?”
“I don't know the details.” Garrett's voice was the voice of a man who knew exactly the details and wasn't about to say them. “Only that he wants to talk to her. So he can see.”
The word talk sat on the air the way a knife sits on a table when nobody picks it up.
Jace's wolf went very quiet inside him. The wolf had been at the front of him all morning. It went quiet now in the way a hunting wolf goes quiet at the moment it decides where the throat is.
He let his face stay where it was.
“She's my mate.”
Garrett didn't move.
Behind him the Thornwood wolves did. Not big.
Not sudden. A shift of body weight. A half-step back.
The look that traveled wolf to wolf in the small involuntary recalibration that happened when six packed predators learned that the human they'd been hired to track was bonded to the alpha across the creek.
The math just changed for every one of them.
Garrett knew the math the step-back had just shown. Every wolf at that line did.
Jace let it.
Garrett's jaw worked once.
“My client is human,” he said. “He doesn't understand what that means.”
“Then you should explain to him that if he comes for her, he's going to find me.”
Silence.
The wind shifted.
Garrett pulled a slow breath in through his teeth and let it out through his nose.
“He isn't going to like that.”
“Then sounds like he's about to be an ex-client.”
The line was dry. The line wasn't a joke, and every wolf on the creek bank knew it. But it was dry.
Garrett's mouth moved at the corner. A breath of a laugh. Brief.
He looked at his men once. Lifted his chin a quarter-inch.
The five Thornwood wolves stepped back from the line. Not turning their backs. Eyes on Blackridge until they'd cleared the marker.
He held Jace's eyes a second longer.
“Holbrook,” he said, quiet. “He's not going to take it well.”
“I'm counting on it.”
“He's going to come at you sideways. He has the money for it and he has the patience for it.”
“Yeah. That too.”
Garrett held a second. The look he gave Jace wasn't friendly. It also wasn't unfriendly. It was the look of one alpha telling another alpha what he couldn't say in front of his own pack: I wouldn't have taken this contract if I had known. I am not going to die for it now that I do.
Jace read the look and gave Garrett the courtesy of not making him say any of it.
Garrett nodded once.
“Treaty's good.”
“Treaty's good.”
Garrett turned. Walked back through the creek bed to his men. They moved off through the trees the way Thornwood always moved through trees, in close formation, no looking back.
Jace watched the last gray shape disappear into the pines.
Theo, beside him, said quiet, “He'll report back tonight. Bastian won't like it.”
“No. He won't.”
“Garrett bought it.”
“Garrett bought what was true.”
Theo dipped his head once. Didn't say more.
Rhys, on Jace's left, hadn't moved since Garrett came to the line. He was reading the woods now, the way Rhys read woods when a meeting went well enough to leave but not so well that you stopped scanning.
Declan, behind, said, “Two on the ridge. Watching. Garrett left them.”
“Let them watch,” Jace said.
They walked back the way they'd come. The fallback wolves came down out of the trees and fell in behind the core group. Six of them went home through the cold afternoon at a pace that wasn't slow and wasn't fast.
Nobody said much.
Jace let his wolf come up a quarter of an inch. Just enough to read the woods better. To smell the wind that smelled like Thornwood for a few hundred yards still and then went back to smelling like Blackridge.
He thought about Garrett's face at the line.
The way Garrett had read the math and let the math stand.
Garrett would report back tonight to Bastian and tell him the truth.
The woman was an alpha's mate. Pack law was about to get in the way.
The Blackridge alpha had called Bastian an ex-client to his face in front of five Thornwood wolves. Bastian wouldn't take it well.
Bastian would also not be done.
A man who had spent three years paying a wolf-pack retainer to track one human waitress wasn't a man who walked away quietly from his own three-year project because somebody had told him a hard thing about his odds.
He would think. He would adjust. He would come at the problem from a different angle.
The angle would be slower than a kidnapping and would involve more lawyers and wouldn't, if Jace was reading him right, involve another direct contact for some weeks.
Weeks were a thing Jace could work with.
Weeks were time.
The thing under his ribs that had hummed quiet since the woman on a porch at dawn yesterday had said come back from that meet was loud in his chest the whole drive home.
It would be quiet again when he saw her.
He was a man who didn't lie to himself about how much that would mean.
When they pulled into the compound the sun was three hours past noon and the snow on the path between the lodge and the cabins went to slush at the high spots.
Maren was on the porch of her cabin.
She wasn't standing the way somebody who had just been waiting was standing. She was at the railing the way a woman who had been at the railing for some hours was at the railing. Coat. Tire iron in one hand at her side, low.
Jace got out of the SUV and didn't go straight to her. Talked to Theo across the hood a minute. Sent Declan and Rhys toward the lodge. Kept the post-parley discipline he'd kept after every parley of his life.
Then he crossed the clearing to her porch.
She watched him come.
She kept her place at the porch rail until he was at the bottom of her steps.
He stopped there. Didn't go up.
She looked back.
The breath she'd been holding since dawn finally left her on a single long exhale that her shoulders went down with.
He didn't either.
He read her face the way he'd read Garrett's.
The way he'd been reading faces for fifteen years as alpha.
Hers was a different language. Tighter. Slower to give up its meaning.
He could see the night she hadn't slept on it.
He could see the hand on the railing she'd kept there for hours.
He could see the thing in her chest that had told her his death was a possibility she'd had to sit with all the way to noon.
After a while she nodded. Once.
He nodded back.
He turned and walked toward the lodge to debrief his men, because that was the next thing the alpha had to do, and the wolf at the surface went quiet for the first time since dawn because she had seen him step out of the SUV whole.