Chapter 23 Cassidy
CASSIDY
Consciousness returns in pieces, and none of them are pleasant.
The first thing I'm aware of is the smell — woodsmoke, old grease, something damp beneath both of those, the quality of a structure that's been closed up between hunting seasons and opened again without airing properly.
The second thing is the dull, heavy weight at the back of my skull, the kind that comes with chemical exposure rather than a blow.
Chloroform. Fast-acting, unpleasant residue, and a headache that will last for hours.
The third thing is that my wrists are tied to the back of a wooden chair.
I open my eyes slowly and give myself thirty seconds to do nothing but assess, because rushing movement with this much sedative still in my system is how you end up on the floor.
The ceiling is rough-hewn timber. The walls are log construction, older build, the chinking between the logs gone gray with age. A fireplace on the east wall, stone-faced, with a low fire burning in it that gives the room its only light beyond the single lamp on a table in the corner.
Gun rack on the north wall, deer head above the fireplace, glass eyes catching the firelight. Three more on the adjacent wall, alongside a mounted set of elk antlers and what looks like a black bear pelt stretched and nailed flat.
Hunting cabin. Private use. The layout is too cramped and too personal for that. Someone's place.
My wrists are tied with paracord, looped twice and knotted at the back of the chair. I test the tension carefully without making it obvious. Tight, and getting tighter every time I struggle. No way I can get out on my own.
That's when I see the maps.
They're pinned directly to the wall above the ammunition crates.
I recognize the terrain immediately. The eastern ridge, the patrol corridors, the boundary markers along the Blackmoore property line.
And in the lower right corner of each map, stamped in blue ink so familiar I could identify it in my sleep at this point:
Gideon Rourke's authorization seal.
I've been staring at that stamp for two weeks, and seeing it pinned to a wall in a hunting cabin that smells like old ammunition and deliberate secrecy makes something cold settle in my chest.
Kieran is pacing near the window on the far wall, and based on how long he's been at it, I suspect he started before I woke up.
He's twenty-two and built like someone who spent his adolescence training for exactly this—lean but substantial, dark hair falling across his forehead, his wolf form a sable shadow in the back of my memory from the ridge.
Right now, he's wearing his frustration like a second skin, jaw set, shoulders tight, moving the way people move when they're trying to convince themselves of something.
He notices I'm awake without me saying anything—his head turns at the change in my breathing, which is the kind of small tell I keep forgetting these people are capable of reading.
"Good," he says, stopping his pacing. "You're going to listen to me."
"I'm tied to a chair," I say. My voice comes out rougher than I'd like, throat dry from the chemical exposure. "You've got a captive audience, which, given the circumstances, I'm going to guess is not a metaphor you meant ironically."
His expression tightens and he crosses the room toward me, stopping six feet away with his arms folded.
Up close, there's something in his face that I'd almost call conflict if I didn't know better—he has his father's determined set to the jaw, but his eyes carry something Gideon's never have. Doubt.
Kieran Rourke is not entirely comfortable with what he's doing. Maybe that’s my opening.
"Alden's bond with you will destroy this pack," he says.
The words come out with the cadence of something rehearsed.
"You understand that, right? You're not a shifter.
You can't defend yourself the way a mate is supposed to, you can't run patrols or hold territory or produce a line that continues pack leadership.
You are a liability, and the fact Alden can't see past whatever the bond does to his judgment means he's already compromised. "
"That's a lot of words for 'I think women should be useful or invisible,'" I say.
"This isn't about—" He stops, jaw tightening. "This isn't about you personally. It's about the pack."
"Everything's always about the pack," I say. "Has anyone ever asked what the pack thinks, or just what the men in charge want the pack to think?"
"Stop talking like that." He takes a step toward me, voice rising slightly.
"I'm trying to explain to you why this matters.
You're sitting here like I'm being unreasonable when I'm the only one who sees clearly what Alden is throwing away.
A strong Alpha with a strong mate — a shifter mate, someone born to this — could lead this pack for another generation.
Instead, he marked a human biologist who stumbled onto our land because she was chasing a wildlife investigation, and now the whole pack is fracturing over it while a rogue runs loose and hunters set up camp on the boundary. "
I let him finish. Then I look at the wall again.
"Who put those maps there?" I ask.
He blinks. The subject change catches him off balance, which is what I wanted. "What?"
"The patrol maps." I nod toward the wall above the ammunition crates, pulling his attention to them.
"Those are internal Blackmoore patrol routes which means they came from the archive.
And those—" I shift my gaze to the crates against the wall, two of them, olive tarp half-pulled back to show the stenciled military surplus markings— "are the same ammunition caches that Ciaran and I found buried in the eastern hollow two days ago.
" I bring my eyes back to Kieran's face.
"The same corridors that were on those maps.
The same corridors where someone set steel-jaw traps on paths your pack runs in wolf form at night. "
Something moves through his expression. It's not guilt exactly—it's more like a wall being reinforced while something tries to push through.
"Human hunters used those routes to set those traps," I say, keeping my voice even. "If any pack member, in human or wolf form, hit one of those traps—your pack members, Kieran, they would have been badly injured, potentially killed.” I don’t look away and neither does he. "Did you know about the traps?"
"That's not—" He stops.
"That's a yes or no question," I say.
"The hunters were supposed to be a distraction," he says, the words coming out tight and clipped, like he's decided giving me the partial answer is preferable to letting me keep circling it. "Keep the town occupied. Keep attention on the mountain while the council dealt with the internal problem."
"The internal problem being Alden."
"The internal problem being weak leadership." He squares his shoulders, finding his footing in the script again. "The pack needs direction. It needs an Alpha who puts wolves first—not a human woman who doesn’t understand our world."
"Gideon put those traps on your patrol routes," I say.
"Or he told someone to. Those maps on the wall have his seal.
That ammunition is from the same cache positioned using your patrol timing data.
" I lean forward in the chair as far as the restraints allow.
"Your father set traps on paths your packmates run, without caring if pack members got hurt.
Does that fit into the vision of a strong pack you've been sold? "
He doesn't answer immediately, eyes glancing out the nearest window, a silent answer that doesn’t say much.
I feel the crack in the conviction and I don't push it further, because pushing it further right now isn't what I need. What I need is my field vest.
It's hanging on a peg near the door, and I recognized it the moment I finished cataloguing the room—forest green, eight pockets, built for extended fieldwork.
Kieran must have pulled it off me when he brought me here, probably looking for a radio or a weapon.
What he didn't know to look for, because he's never watched a wildlife biologist prep for a field day involving an aggressive unknown predator, is the two tranquilizer darts loaded in the inner right chest pocket.
I've been carrying them since the second week of this investigation. Standard protocol for potential rogue encounters with an animal large enough to require chemical immobilization.
I let Kieran finish his silence without filling it. Then I clear my throat.
"All that talking," I say, "I've been sitting here, parched. Is there any chance I can grab my water bottle? It's in the side pocket of my vest."
Kieran turns from the window, a deep scowl on his face. He tilts his head, eyes never leaving me, then looks at the vest and the cabin door.
"You're tied to a chair," he says.
"I know that. You know that. The water bottle is about eight feet away, and I can barely feel my hands. I'm not asking to stretch my legs." I hold his gaze. "I am genuinely thirsty."
He looks at the vest again, grabs it off the peg, and holds it toward me, the water bottle dangling in front of my face rather than untying me.
"I can't really drink it like this," I say, nodding down to my restraints.
His scowl deepens and he groans.
"I'll loosen them enough for you to stand," he says finally, moving behind the chair. "You try anything and I'll have you back down before you take a step."
"I believe you," I say, because I do, and because it's not a step I'm planning to take.
The knots loosen. Feeling rushes back into my wrists with the familiar unpleasant burn of returning circulation, and I stand slowly, working the stiffness from my shoulders.
Kieran stays two feet behind me, between me and the door.
I cross to the vest, unclip the water bottle, and make a production of struggling with the lid one-handed—because the other hand is already at the inner right chest pocket, fingers sliding past the zipper tab with the practiced ease of someone who has opened that pocket in the dark, in rain, in the kind of conditions that don't allow for fumbling.
The dart is narrow, the needle capped, the plunger loaded. I palm it and don't break my water bottle routine.
Kieran resumes talking.
"—what Gideon understands that Alden never has," he's saying, pacing again behind me, back to his speech, "is the pack's strength comes from purity of purpose.
A wolf who rules from instinct and tradition is a wolf who can hold what he's built.
Alden spends more time managing your presence in the pack than he does managing the pack itself, and that imbalance—"
I turn around and swing my arm.
The dart goes into his shoulder with a flat, decisive motion—no windup, no warning, the same technique I use on large predators when I need it done before the animal processes what's happening.
The needle hits deltoid muscle, which absorbs the compound cleanly, and I step back and put the chair between us as Kieran's hand comes up to the site.
He stares at me. "You—" he starts.
"Standard field tranquilizer," I say. "You'll want to sit down. It hits faster than you'd expect."
He lunges one step toward me and then his left knee buckles, the sedative moving through his system with the efficiency to take down an elephant.
He catches the wall with one hand, expression cycling through fury and disorientation in quick succession, and I am already at the door, pulling it open, the cold mountain air hitting my face like a slap that clears the last fog from my head.
The pines outside are dark, but the slope runs southwest, and I know these mountains well enough by now to orient from tree density and elevation.
The stone clearing—Blackmoore's ritual grounds—sits at a lower elevation to the northwest, maybe a mile and a half through dense timber if I take the game trail that cuts across the ridge.
The Blood Moon is already visible through the canopy, low and red, climbing the sky with the slow purpose of something that keeps its own schedule regardless of human emergencies.
I run.