22. Chapter 22
Maren couldn't sleep.
Third night in a row. She'd tried. She'd lain on top of the covers with Jace's coat over her the way she'd slept on top of covers in her own cabin two weeks ago. She'd counted shingles on the cabin ceiling. She'd matched her breathing to his. None of it had worked.
At two in the morning she got up.
She pulled a blanket off the foot of the bed.
She pulled Jace's coat on over the sweatshirt she'd gone to bed in.
She opened the door slow enough that it didn't wake him, which was a thing she shouldn't have been able to do, because wolves heard doors.
But Jace had gotten an hour of sleep in the last forty and his body had taken it.
She stepped onto his porch.
The compound at two in the morning was just as she expected it. Cold. Quiet. A porch light on three cabins down. The shape of the lodge at the far end of the clearing. Snow packed down the paths.
Somewhere in the trees around the compound there were doubled patrols. She'd heard Theo brief them at sunset. Two wolves on the west perimeter, two east, two on the south fire-road, three floating. All of them had pack-link range with Theo at the lodge.
She sat on the top step.
A minute later she heard Jace's feet behind her.
He sat down beside her. Pulled the blanket to include himself. His shoulder against her shoulder.
“Can't sleep?”
“No.”
“Third night.”
“They've slept through worse.”
“Does the pack sleep through this?”
“Pack sleeps in shifts through this. Has for a thousand years. We're the ones who don't, because it's us.”
She leaned against him.
They sat a long minute.
“I keep thinking about the affidavit,” she said. “About what my dad wrote at the end. He wrote that if we did this right, a lot of women would come home. Morales said the same number. I keep thinking about all those families with a phone call coming.”
“Yeah.”
“That's worth this, Jace.”
“Every word of it is.”
“Even the waiting is worth this.”
“Yeah.”
Brock's threat from the marker sat in her mind and, for the first time, didn't frighten her.
The feds and the dogs coming up the fire road, the camp in the woods—he'd built the whole lever on the pack being the side with something to hide from a federal agent.
But the only federal agent who was ever coming up that road had ridden up it that morning beside Theo, FBI on her back for the whole gate to read, and driven off with the archive in her own custody.
Brock couldn't expose Blackridge to the one agency already keeping its secret with them.
And the archive cut both ways now: the day his camp surfaced, so did every shell company and port date her father had copied out by hand.
The lever he'd carried to the stone had quietly become a thing he couldn't pull without breaking his own hand.
“He can't touch us with the feds now,” she said. “He took that fight to the one place they're already ours.”
“No,” Jace said. “He can't.”
He put his head against the side of her head.
His radio was on his belt. The radio was on because Theo was the one on comms. Not because Jace expected it to crackle.
It crackled at two oh seven.
Theo, voice low and fast.
“Southern woods. Multiple contacts. Six to eight. Human. Armed. Moving fast. Three hundred yards out and closing.”
Jace was on his feet before the radio had finished the sentence.
Maren didn't notice Jace taking his shirt off. It was already gone by the time she was standing on the porch.
Jace's voice came out at a register she hadn't heard him use in front of her before.
Not pack-link. Alpha-command. Out loud. The pitch dropped far enough that her body understood it without her having to parse the words, and her feet had started to move toward the kitchen before she'd decided to move.
“Protective positions. Now.”
She knew, without anybody telling her, that every wolf on the compound had just heard that in pack-link at the same pitch.
Elena was at the kitchen door by the time Maren came off the porch. Housecoat over a flannel nightgown, boots, a long-handled flashlight in one hand.
“With me, Luna.”
“Okay.”
Rachel came up from the medical side with two pups, Axel and a younger one whose name Maren didn't know yet, and Elena swept them into her path.
The five of them moved toward the kitchen.
Elena unlocked a door Maren had never noticed before, inside the pantry, that led down a set of wooden stairs into a cellar under the lodge.
The cellar was the cellar. Earth walls braced in old cedar. A kerosene lamp in a corner that Elena lit with a match. Two cots. A stack of blankets. A shelf of canned goods.
Rachel laid the pups on a cot. Elena put Maren on a blanket at the wall opposite the stairs.
“Eat this.”
“I'm not hungry.”
“Eat it anyway. You're going to need the blood sugar when he comes back.”
Maren took the bread.
Above them, the compound went completely quiet.
Not the quiet of a pack asleep.
The quiet of a pack in positions.
Clothes came off him in the steps between his door and the edge of the clearing.
Shirt at the first step. Jeans at the third.
Boots at the gravel. His wolf came up through him at a speed that didn't leave the transition a cognitive thing.
He was on four legs hitting the tree line going south at a pace his wolf hadn't needed to reach in years.
Theo was two strides behind, shifting as he went.
Eleven more wolves peeled off the compound paths and fanned into the trees around him, two along the east, two along the west, the rest south with him in a loose wedge that had drilled this exact pattern in Rhys’s training yard every month since Jace had been alpha.
Rhys stayed human at the lodge with the radio, because Rhys on pack-link from the lodge with the map in his head was worth more than Theo's wolf in a fight.
Contacts now two hundred yards, Theo sent. Spread out. Moving in a line. Suppressed rifles. Heat signatures.
Jace's wolf catalogued the lines as flanks and called out adjustments through the pack link.
Left and right flanks close first. Center holds.
The pack understood.
A hundred fifty yards out the first human's boot cracked a twig a wolf had been taught to hear. Two of Jace's wolves shifted direction and were on the man before the man had figured out what the sound had been.
Second man two seconds later. Third, five.
Jace was going for the center because the center was Bastian's buy-shot. Somebody who had been paid enough to come into a wolf-held compound in the dark and had a reason to believe he was going to come back out. Jace was going to find that man and end him and take whatever he was carrying.
He found him at a hundred yards. Big man. Crouched. Rifle up, scanning the trees for heat. The man's heat-scope didn't compensate for ambient cold and for wolves in cold-weather coats. Jace ran him down at the back.
Teeth at the throat. One motion. Clean.
He turned and found the next one.
Suppressed rifle fire cracked twice to his left. He heard the shapes of the bullets hit trees and not wolves. The pack behind him redistributed on instinct without him needing to send it.
Second center-man went down under a brown wolf Jace recognized as Brennan moving on a leg that wasn't one hundred percent. Brennan took the man cleanly anyway.
Third center-man tried to fall back. Jace's wolf liked that one. Fall-back man was the one you kept alive. Fall-back man was the one who came back telling a story to a federal agent.
Leave him alive, Jace sent. The partial shift of his vocal cords into the pack-link at wolf-voice pitch was a trick he had only learned three years ago.
Declan had the fall-back man already. Pinned at the back of the neck, not closing.
The fall-back man was bleeding from a gash Declan had put across his shoulder, and his face had the shape of a man who understood that he was going to live for the next six minutes but probably not much longer than that.
The rest of the attackers were down or dropping inside of another thirty seconds.
Six dead. One alive.
Pack losses zero.
Jace did one slow three-sixty in his wolf's body.
His ears sorted the compound's sounds back into the order of compound-sounds.
Theo at the lodge, breathing even. The cellar under the kitchen, nine bodies in it including the pups, one breathing uneven which was Axel's mother who had made it down after everyone else. His own cabin, empty.
The clearing, empty of attackers.
Clean, he sent.
Theo answered a second later.
Morales en route. The survivor goes into federal custody by sunrise. Rhys on perimeter patrol. You're clear to go home, alpha.
Jace started back toward the lodge.
He shifted because he needed his mouth to say her name, and because after seeing his wolf at its most vicious, after seeing all of who he was, he wanted the choice to be hers.
Jace was standing twenty feet from her.
He was a man again. Blood on his chest. Blood on his hands. Blood on his face where he hadn't wiped it. His hair wet from sweat at the front. His breathing was the breathing of a wolf that had just come down off a run.
He was waiting to see whether she would move toward him.
She moved toward him.
She didn't run. She walked. She crossed the twenty feet at her pace and stopped one foot from him and looked at him and didn't flinch.
She put her hands on his face.
Blood under her palms. Warm where the blood was still warm. Cold already where it had started to cool in the air.
Maren didn't close her eyes.
She opened them.
She looked at him. At the gold of his eyes that showed his wolf was still just under the surface. At the line of his jaw where blood still lingered. At the mouth that killed a man three hundred yards south of them six minutes ago.
She breathed him in.
She scented him the way she had watched pack wolves scent each other.
He smelled like the wolf and like her mate and like a man who came back.
“All of them?”
“All but one. He's going to Morales with a story about who paid him.”
“Good.”
She leaned in. Her forehead against his forehead. Her hands still at his face. The blood on his cheek smeared onto her cheek and she didn't wipe it off.
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
His arms came around her.
He picked her up.
She didn't let go.
Behind them, Theo was coming across the clearing with the radio still at his ear.
“Morales incoming. Two federal teams. Custody transfer of the survivor by sunrise. Field office wants a full statement by noon.”
Jace made a small sound of acknowledgment into Maren's hair.
Theo moved past them into the lodge.
The clearing was gray, but fading, as if making way for the first wash of color that came with the sun.
Maren held on.
Jace held on.