15. Chapter 15
Awarehouse about a ten minute drive from the pharmacy.
Concrete floor. Steel joists overhead. Roll-up door on a loading dock at one end and a man-door at the other.
Windows on the long walls, high up, the kind of windows that let light in and gave nobody outside a line of sight to anything but the top of a man's head on the other side.
The Thornwood team walked Maren in through the man-door on their feet because she was walking on her feet by then.
They didn't drag. Cliff had made the decision to not bruise her more than she was already bruised and the other two were taking their cue from him.
None of them had shifted. None of them needed to.
The warehouse was off the road but it wasn't off the map, and they had the same discipline the lot had had about not doing anything a wolf would have to clean up.
In the middle of the floor was a concrete support pillar.
Cliff put her against it.
One of the men cut the zip tie off her wrists. Brought her hands around to her front. Ran a new one through a steel eye-bolt put into the pillar for a purpose nobody was going to ask about, wrists through the new tie in front of her.
Arms in front of her. Shoulders pulled into the same shape. Back cold against the pillar.
Jace's coat was still on her. She understood later that nobody had touched his coat because nobody had wanted to.
Cliff pulled a folding chair across the concrete and set it down fifteen feet from her pillar and sat down in it.
The man who'd worked the zip tie with him at the lot had taken a position at the man-door.
The driver went back to the van to reset the ignition and came in through the roll-up.
All three in human form. The whole op had been built around hands.
He wasn't in a hurry.
“My uncle told me you'd be harder than you look. He said you'd run. You did. You did the right thing, by the way. Running was the move. It was always going to fail in the ice, but it was the move.”
She watched him.
“My name is Cliff. You figured that out at the lot. I saw you figure it out.”
She kept watching.
“Here's the business part. Sit with it a minute before you react.”
He crossed one ankle over the other knee.
“Twenty of Brock Bastian's men are sitting at your pack's perimeter right now. Not our wolves. His men. He was hoping we'd have you for him tonight, so he sent his team up ahead of the transport. Accelerants. Long-range weapons. Coordinates on every cabin in your clearing.”
He let her hold that a second.
“If you cooperate, they pack up and go home.
Nobody at your compound knows they were there.
If you don't cooperate … I make one phone call and Blackridge Pack goes up like the 4th of July.
Anybody who runs out gets shot. Your eighteen-year-old in the medical cabin doesn't get out of that one.
Neither does the old woman in your kitchen.
Neither does your alpha's brother. I can keep naming names or you can take the picture.”
She didn't take the picture. The picture was already in her chest. She had gone still before he'd finished.
A photo would have helped. Anything verifiable would have helped. He hadn't brought one. She understood in the same beat that he didn't need to. He was the one holding the line. Nobody in her position could call the bluff without the cost of being wrong landing on Elena, Tyler, Cade.
She had to believe him.
Options, counted.
One. Fight. She was zip-tied to a pillar with her arms in front of her. Three men in the building and Cliff's wolf behind his eyes. Option one wasn't an option.
Two. Call the bluff. Cost: Blackridge cabins. She wasn't calling the bluff.
Three. Cooperate with transport. Buy time. Let Jace close the distance she could already feel him closing.
Three was the option.
She nodded once.
“Okay.”
“Good.”
Cliff leaned back in the chair.
“Transport is four hours out. Sit tight.”
He looked at his phone. Put it face-down on his thigh. Didn't look at her again for a while.
She was a waitress three years and seven months into a life of not being found. Sit tight was a thing she had rehearsed in her own head in rooms like this one a dozen times, against a man exactly like this one. She knew how to sit tight.
She put her head back against the concrete pillar and reached for the bond.
His end of it was already reaching.
It met her halfway.
She sent him the shape of where she was.
Concrete. Steel. Three men. Cliff's face.
The direction she'd come from. The word accelerants she didn't know how to send and sent anyway as heat and danger, Tyler and Elena.
Then she sent don't come through the door yet.
Without words for it. Just the feeling of a door that wasn't to be opened without knowing what was on the other side of it.
Whether the shape of don't come through the door yet survived the trip, she couldn't tell.
What she got back wasn't words either. She got his rage at the closed distance she was still at. His determination, which was the same determination the bond had been carrying on its long quiet through the compound all week, now full volume. She got his I am coming.
His body closing the distance toward hers brought something else she hadn't expected.
His love, not as a word but as his body being a body on its way toward hers.
She'd always understood it as something people said in rooms. This wasn't said.
This was his body's decision, his chest sending it through their shared line without words.
Maren didn't have words for what she sent back. She sent a thing that had been in the base of her ribs since the night on her porch a week ago when he had said the moon goddess blessed me with you. She sent it up through the bond without preamble or warning or shame.
On the far end, his chest opened around it and took it and didn't let it go.
They held that.
Long enough that the light in the high windows of the warehouse went from mid-morning gray to early-afternoon gold, and a cold draft crossed the floor from the man-door once when one of the men went out to smoke and once when he came back.
Cliff's phone rang.
Not a text. A ring.
Cliff flipped it over and looked at the screen and the face he had been holding for two hours changed.
He stood up.
“Move. Now. He’s coming. Get her in the truck.”
The other two jumped into action the way pack wolves came into motion under alpha-pitch. He wasn't their alpha. He was the man in charge of this op and the pitch in his voice was the pitch of a man whose op had just come apart.
She felt it in her chest at the same second he said it. The closeness of him. Not minutes. Less than that.
The roll-up started to go up on the loading dock.
The refrigerated truck that had been backing up to the dock had been there for the last ten minutes.
She had heard it come. It was large. It was the size of the trucks that pulled up behind cafeterias and restaurants, and its interior was a square of deeper dark than the dark she was used to.
Her chest did something she didn't have a name for when she saw it.
Old. The thing in her chest was old. Old the way the first run had been old. It was a door she had already been on the wrong side of once before in her life and she didn't have the words for when or how.
She filed that.
Cliff came across the floor. Wolf behind his eyes. His teeth now more wolf than human.
He knelt in front of her. Cut the second zip tie off the eye-bolt. Kept the one on her wrists.
“Up.”
She got up.
Arms still bound in front of her. Shoulders stiff. The hip where the ice had taken her a color she couldn't see. Legs worked.
He turned her toward the dock.
At three feet from his face and two inches from her shoulder, she could see what his wolf was doing behind his eyes.
His wolf was scared.
He's scared, she thought. Registered it. Filed it.
A man whose wolf was scared was a man who made mistakes. She had three years of knowing that and she was going to have it for whatever came next.
He walked her toward the loading dock.
Behind them, in the warehouse wall at the north end, close enough she could feel it in the building now, the bond on her side went here. He was here.