Chapter 4
LOGAN
Idon't sleep.
This isn't unusual—I've never needed much of it, and the Alpha in me stays light even on quiet nights, one ear always open to the territory.
But tonight isn't about light sleeping. Tonight I sit in the chair by the dying fire with a cold cup of coffee and stare at the middle distance and try to think clearly about something that has knocked every clear thought I own completely sideways.
The cabin is quiet. Upstairs, I can hear the slow, even rhythm of her breathing—deeper now, finally, the particular quality of fighting sleep and eventually losing. She's been out for about an hour. I've been down here the entire time, doing absolutely nothing useful.
Every few minutes, my wolf surfaces with the same wordless insistence; it's been running all night. Go upstairs. She's yours. She's home. Why are you sitting down here alone when she's right there?
Every few minutes, I tell it to be quiet.
I give it another twenty minutes before I pick up the phone. It’s a pack-issued satellite line—standard cell service dies two miles down the mountain, but my father installed our own network years ago.
Mateo answers on the second ring, which means he wasn't fully asleep either.
He never is when something is off on the territory, and Mateo has had that instinct since he was a teenager running with a pack that no longer exists.
Twenty years I've known him—most of my life, all of his time with the Greybacks—and I still don't think he's ever slept through a night that had something unsettled in it.
"Everything alright?" His voice is even and alert without being alarmed.
"Yeah." I keep my voice low out of habit, which is unnecessary—she's upstairs and dead asleep—but I do it anyway. "I need to tell you something."
A pause. "How bad?"
"Not bad." I stop. Run a hand over my jaw. There's no clean way to say this, so I say it. "There's a human woman staying in my cabin tonight."
Silence on the other end. Then, carefully: "Okay."
"She wandered onto the territory. Her car broke down on the south road; she followed the smoke from my chimney through the woods." I give him the facts the way I always give him facts—direct, no padding. "She's asleep upstairs."
"Logan." His voice has shifted. I can hear him sitting up, the shift of his full attention coming through the line. "Why are you calling me at midnight about a stranded woman instead of waiting to tell me in the morning?"
I don't answer immediately.
The fire pops. Upstairs, she shifts in her sleep—the soft sound of movement, the creak of the bed frame—and my wolf goes immediately, embarrassingly alert. I press the heel of my hand against my sternum and breathe through it.
Stop.
Another pause on the line. Longer this time. And then, quietly: "Oh."
"Yeah."
"She's your mate."
I close my eyes. "Yeah."
The word sits between us over the phone line, and Mateo, to his credit, doesn't say anything right away. He lets it land properly, which is one of the reasons he's been my Beta for six years and not merely the closest thing I have to a brother.
"How certain?" he finally asks.
"Completely."
"From the moment you saw her?"
"From the moment she looked at me."
He exhales slowly. "Okay. Okay, how is she? Does she know?"
"She doesn't know anything. She's human, Mateo.
She showed up on my porch in a wedding dress at eleven at night, and she's been crying for hours, and she doesn't know what I am or what any of this is.
" I lean forward and put my elbows on my knees.
"She thinks she's staying the night until her car gets sorted. "
"Right." He's quiet for a moment, working through it the way he works through everything—methodically, from all angles. "Her car. Where is it?"
"South road, past the granite outcrop. Overheating, she said. Probably the coolant system." I straighten. "I need to get it off the road before anyone sees it and starts asking questions. Can you get Garrett up early?"
"I'll call him now. Meet at the south turnoff at first light?"
"Yeah. I'll be there." I pause. "I need to be back before she wakes up."
"Understood." A beat. "Logan."
"I know."
"You can't—"
"I know, Mateo."
He lets it go. For now. "Get some sleep if you can. Five-thirty."
I hang up and sit in the quiet for a while longer than I need to.
The fire has dropped to low embers. I should let it go—I'll be out the door before four hours of sleep would do me much good anyway—but I add another log anyway, mostly to have something to do with my hands.
The flames catch, and the light shifts across the room, and I sit back and look at the ceiling and try to be reasonable about this.
She is upstairs. She is asleep. She is a human woman who has had a catastrophic day and stumbled onto my mountain by accident, and she is my fated mate, and she is completely unaware of all of that, and there is absolutely nothing I am going to do about any of it tonight.
My wolf disagrees with this position at length and with enormous conviction.
I ignore it and close my eyes.
At five-fifteen, I leave a note on the kitchen counter—back before morning, door's unlocked—and step out into the pre-dawn dark.
The temperature has dropped hard overnight, breath coming out in vapor, and pine needles are brittle underfoot. I move quickly down the south trail and reach the logging road in under twenty minutes. Garrett's truck is already idling at the turnoff, exhaust curling white in the headlights.
Garrett is leaning against the driver's side door with a travel mug, squinting at me through the dark.
He's a large man—broad-framed, with a graying beard that's been the same approximate length for as long as I've known him, and deep-set blue eyes that have always looked like they're running quiet calculations about whatever's in front of them.
Heavy canvas jacket, steel-toed boots. He'd dressed for a job, not a pre-dawn call.
"Morning," he says, as if it isn't five-fifteen.
"Thanks for coming out."
"Mateo said a car." He takes a pull from his mug. "Didn't say much else."
"White Subaru, past the granite outcrop." I start walking, and Garrett falls into step beside me. He's never needed more information than the task requires, which is one of the many reasons I trust him completely.
We find it exactly where she described—pulled half onto the shoulder at an angle that says it quit without much warning, no time to pull off cleanly. I rest my hand on the hood. Cold. She's been here a while.
Garrett crouches at the front without being asked, flashlight out, running it along the undercarriage with the focused quiet, like he speaks engine better than conversation.
"Coolant hose," he says after about thirty seconds. "Blew out. She's bone dry." He stands and pops the hood, shining the light inside. "Lucky the engine didn't seize."
"Can you fix it?"
"Yeah. Not here." He drops the hood back down. "Get her to the garage, check what else took heat damage. Couple of days."
"Soon as you can."
Garrett looks at me sideways over the hood, as he does when he senses something beneath the surface of a straightforward request but chooses not to ask about it. "Sure thing, Boss."
We get a line on it, and Garrett drives while I follow, the Subaru rolling behind the truck on the tow cable down the mountain road.
The drive to the pack garage takes fifteen minutes, winding and slow in the dark.
I sit in the passenger seat and watch the treeline pass and think about the way she'd looked standing in my kitchen in borrowed clothes—the stubborn set of her jaw, the careful way she'd accepted help without making it about needing it.
She could be your mate in every sense, my wolf offers, unhelpfully.
She could be asleep in your house and completely terrified of you if you don't handle this right, I answer back.
My wolf has no response to that, which I take as a small victory.
The pack garage sits off the main property, a long, practical building that Garrett has made entirely his own over the years, organized with a precision that doesn't match his easygoing demeanor until you understand that engines are where he puts his full attention.
We get the Subaru backed in, and Garrett walks a slow circle around it with his flashlight, already cataloging.
"I'll get the part ordered first thing," he says. "Keep it inside so it's not sitting out where anyone walks by and asks questions."
I look at him. "Mateo talk to you?"
"Mateo told me a woman is staying with you." He doesn't look up from the front panel. "Didn't say much else."
"That's all it is for now," I say. "Keep it quiet."
He glances up at that—briefly cataloging rather than reacting—and then goes back to what he's doing. "Sure thing, Boss." He goes back to the engine without another word.
I leave him to it.
Mateo is on my porch when I come up the trail.
He's leaning against the railing with his arms crossed, dark hair still damp, already in his work clothes. Awake and fully assembled in a way that suggests he didn't go back to sleep after my call, which I expected.
"She still out?" he asks.
I glance up at the dark window. "Think so."
"Good." He straightens. "Talk to me."
I sit on the porch steps, and he drops down beside me, and I give him the rest of it—the scent on the south ridge, the way the bond landed when she met my eyes in the doorway, and what she'd looked like when she got there.
I tell him about the wedding dress, the hours of crying etched onto her face, and how she took up the smallest amount of space possible in my kitchen, as if she were calculating exactly how much she was allowed to need.
He listens without interrupting, which costs him.
When I finish, he's quiet for a beat. "She's human."
"Yes."
"Knows nothing."
"Nothing."