25. Chapter 25
She woke up on the cabin floor.
Back against the wall. Hands over her head. Her breathing in the shape it took when her body had decided on oxygen before her brain had decided on geography.
The smell in her nose was concrete.
The sound in her ears was Cliff's boots.
The air in her mouth was the air inside a van with her cheek on the metal floor. She was zip-tied. The inside of a warehouse was a half-breath behind her eyelids. Cliff's hand had been on her upper arm when Jace's wolf came through the door.
She couldn't figure out where the door was.
She had to figure out where the door was.
Her left hand mapped the wall at her back. Wood. Not concrete. Wood panel with a horizontal grain. A cabin wall. Her own cabin wall. Their cabin wall. The door was. The door was.
The door was six feet to her left. Past the foot of the bed. Unlocked because they didn't lock it at night because the compound was patrolled.
A voice said her name.
Quiet. Ten feet off. Below her eye-level.
Jace.
She pulled her hands down from over her head slow.
Jace was on his knees on the floor. Three feet from her. Hands open and visible at his sides. He hadn't crossed the three feet. He wasn't going to cross the three feet until she gave him the signal.
“Maren.”
“Yeah.”
“You're in our cabin. Blackridge compound. Our bed is behind you. The door is behind me. Unlocked. You can leave if you need to.”
She breathed out.
The walls of the cabin rearranged themselves into walls of the cabin.
The door was the door. The bed was the bed. The lamp by the bed was on at the lowest setting because he turned it on as he gotten up. The floor under her was wood. Cold.
“Jace.”
“Yeah.”
“I mapped the exits the second I woke up. Before I even knew where I was.”
“I've noticed.”
“Three years of it.”
“Good.”
“I'm not going to stop doing that.”
He nodded once.
“I'm not going to take it away from you.”
Her breath slowed.
She let her back come off the wall an inch.
Jace didn't move toward her. He stayed three feet off on his knees.
She had never seen him on his knees in front of her before.
She understood without being told that it was a wolf thing.
Alphas didn't put themselves below their mate at any other time, which meant that right now he had put himself below her on purpose, which was his way of saying I'm smaller than you in this room tonight so your body doesn't have to be afraid of me.
She pressed her palm to the floor.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay.”
She pushed up to sitting.
“Come over,” she said.
He came over. Sat on the floor with her. Against the wall. Shoulder to shoulder. He didn't reach for her. She reached for him, put her hand on his knee, and kept it there.
They sat on the cold floor a long while.
At some point, shoulder to shoulder against the cold wall, she felt him take a breath he had to make himself let out.
The next one took just as long. She realized without turning her head that he was doing what men like him did when they didn't trust their own throats.
Counting the breaths, picking the one he could speak on. He didn't speak.
His jaw pressed once to the top of her head, soft, and the arm along her back went tight and then loosed itself back.
She had not seen him do that anywhere else in three weeks.
Not with Theo. Not with Rhys. Not coming through the bay door in wolf form.
This was the version of him the pack never got.
The one that was afraid of what the last three days had nearly cost him.
Eventually they got back in bed.
Lamp on.
He didn't put his arms around her. He lay on his back with his palm up on the pillow between them, offering, and she turned her face into his palm and slept with his hand against her cheek.
The bath was on a different evening.
Training went long that day. Kira had put Maren down eight times and made her get up eight times and told her on the ninth that Kira didn't need her to fall anymore, she needed her to stop falling. Maren stopped falling. Kira had said better and left.
Maren was bruised.
Both forearms. The left hip where Kira had hooked her. A shin that was going to be a deeper color by morning. The small of her back where she'd landed on a patch of packed snow.
Jace drew the bath.
He didn't ask.
He came in from splitting wood, saw her at the kitchen table, saw the way she was sitting because her hip wouldn't let her sit any other way, and went into the bathroom and started the water. He came back out with a towel over his forearm.
“Come on.”
“Okay.”
He helped her out of her clothes. She let him.
He was careful around the shin and the hip.
He wasn't careful around the small of her back because the small of her back needed hot water and pressure.
He put his palm on that area for one second while her sweatshirt came off then held the pressure until her breath changed.
“Yeah,” he said. “That one too.”
“Yeah.”
He got her in the water.
The water was as hot as water could get without being too hot and he'd made it that way because he knew her.
Jace sat on the tile beside the tub.
He didn't climb in. This wasn't an invitation. This was something else.
The joy he wouldn’t let onto his face came through the bond instead. Joy and satisfaction and the held-careful gentleness of a man who had waited his whole life to take care of someone like this.
Her hip.
Her shin.
Not a pull.
Not a hum.
A shape. A thing with edges. She could feel his pride in her on her side of it.
His grief at the bruises on his side of it.
His restraint on his side of it, because his wolf had wanted to go to the training yard every morning and take Kira's head off for the first hundred bruises.
Jace had held the wolf and told the wolf she was earning this, and she felt the holding inside his chest from inside her own.
“Jace.”
“Yeah.”
“I can feel you.”
“It is.”
“That's new.”
“It's going to get more new. Bond's deepening. We're not claimed yet.”
“Then let it deepen.”
“We don't have to do anything with that tonight.”
“Okay.”
“Finish your bath.”
She did.
Jace washed her hair. She hadn't asked him to. He did it anyway, with the lavender shampoo Elena bought for the compound in the big jugs because Elena didn't believe in buying the fancy stuff. Maren had used the fancy stuff once upon a time but preferred Elena's.
As his fingers massaged her scalp, something in her body she had never known how to put down went quiet under his hands.
He dried her off slow.
He put one of his own shirts on her then carried her to bed.
They slept tangled. No sex. She was much too sore.
The bond did the quiet thing it did all night.
Weeks went past.
The trial date got set for the second week of April.
Morales flew in twice for formal interviews.
Maren gave her testimony on the record for three hours the first day and two more the second.
She held. Morales took her hand at the door and said you're going to be fine on the stand, Ms. Palmer, and Maren had believed her.
Doubled patrols continued. The federal SUVs stayed at the county turn. A permanent DOJ protection arrangement was set up for Maren's trial-period travel. Freya coordinated on the compound end.
Combat training continued.
By mid-March Kira was putting Maren down once a session instead of twenty times.
By the last week of March Maren was running morning perimeter with the senior patrols.
Two miles through the east woods in the pre-dawn.
She ran with Brennan some mornings and with Declan others.
The pack started to treat her like a respected pack member on the path.
Wolves ahead of her on the path would slow to match her stride without her asking.
Wolves behind her would close up without being told.
She was running with Brennan one morning when they came around a curve in the fire-road and a branch came down across the path in the night.
Brennan pivoted into the brush to go around.
Maren pivoted at the same half-second without signaling him.
They rejoined the path on the other side of the branch in a stride.
Brennan glanced at her as they re-paced.
“What?”
“Reading the move before the signal. That's what pack wolves do with each other on a run. You shouldn't be able to. You're doing it.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
They kept running.
Tyler started finding a rhythm too.
He worked the woodpile most days with the older wolves.
He worked training yard two afternoons a week with Brennan.
He stopped wearing the wrist wraps on his bad days because the skin had healed enough that the wraps were vanity.
Elena put him on her elbow at pack meals less often.
He sat with the young wolves his age now.
Cade next to him sometimes. Twice Maren saw him laugh.
The laugh wasn't a full laugh. It was the small end of a laugh at somebody else's joke. It was a start.
The ridge was a rocky outcrop about a twenty-minute walk up the east fire-road from the compound.
Jace took her there on a Saturday afternoon in early April when the snow started to come off the south-facing slopes and the air in the trees smelled the way the air smelled when winter started to remember that winter wasn't permanent.
They sat on the flat rock at the top.
The compound was visible below them through a break in the trees. The cabins, the lodge, the training yard. The path down to the south fire-road. The iron gate and the stone posts.
“Every time I come up here,” Jace said, “I think about the fact that I ran my first patrol here when I was seven. My father had me on his shoulders. I've been standing on this rock my whole life thinking about what this pack would look like if it was mine to build.”
“You’ve always deserved this,” Maren said.
Jace glanced over with a smile.
“Jace?”
“Yeah.”
“We saved each other.”
He took her hand.
Declan was on the lodge porch when they came down.
He had the laptop closed and his coat on. He wore the look Declan wore when intel came in through Freya's networks.
“Alpha.”
“Go.”
“Thornwood's met with Ridgecrest's alpha twice this month. Possible alliance.”
“Keep eyes on it. Names and dates.”
“And Roman and Sera are alive. West of Thornwood. Neutral pack had eyes on them briefly. They're keeping their heads down.”
Maren didn't say anything for a stretched second.
“Good.”
Declan nodded. Passed the update over without comment. Went back inside.
Jace squeezed Maren's hand.
They walked the rest of the way down to the cabin in the dark.
Home.