Chapter 10
LOGAN
Garrett finds me before dinner two days from our last conversation.
He comes up the path from the garage with his hands in his jacket pockets and that particular expression he wears when he's delivering news he's already fully processed and is waiting for everyone else to catch up to him. He stops at the foot of the porch steps and looks up at me.
"Car's done," he announces.
"Good work," I tell him and mean it. He'd turned it around faster than he'd originally estimated, which is Garrett's standard operating procedure—under-promise, over-deliver, and say very little about either.
He nods once. Then: "Weather's coming in."
I'd already felt it. The particular pressure drop that moves through the mountains before a system arrives, the way the air takes on a specific quality that most people can't read, and I've been reading my whole life.
By late afternoon, the cloud cover had dropped, and the temperature had shifted, and by the time dinner came around, there was the low, steady sound of wind picking up through the upper ridge.
"Road conditions?" I ask.
"Already getting soft on the north face. If it comes in overnight the way it looks like it will, the pass won't be safe until it clears." He pauses. "Could be morning. Could be longer."
"I'll tell her tonight," I say.
He nods and heads back toward the garage.
I find Harper at dinner already in the middle of a conversation with Nora and Declan that appears to have started somewhere reasonable and gone somewhere else entirely.
She's got that look on her face—the dry, sharp one that means she's about to say something that will make the whole table react—and whatever she says next does exactly that, Declan making a noise of protest while Nora laughs and Lila looks up from her notebook with a smile she tries to hide and doesn't.
I take the end seat and watch her exist inside this group of people with an ease that wasn't there three days ago and is undeniable now, and my wolf does what it always does in these moments—settles into that low, attentive stillness that I've stopped trying to talk it out of.
I wait until after dinner, when the table is clearing and the conversation is breaking into smaller pieces. Harper is helping Nora carry plates to the kitchen, which nobody asked her to do and which she does anyway, which is the most Harper thing I have observed her do yet.
I catch her on the way back through.
"Garrett finished the car," I tell her.
She looks up at me, and her face carries something I've learned to give time before I decide what it is. "That's good," she replies, carefully.
"It is. There's a problem with the road, though." I keep my voice even. "Weather's coming in overnight. The pass won't be safe to drive until it clears—could be by morning; it could take a little longer depending on how the system moves through."
She takes that in. "So we wait for the weather."
"Once it clears, I'll drive you myself. We leave when the road's ready and you are."
She withholds words for a brief moment, turning her mug in both hands with the focused inwardness she gets when something is still being assembled. Then she nods. "Okay," she replies. "Tomorrow morning then, if the weather holds."
Something about the way she says it—matter-of-fact, already moving on, the decision made and filed—sits in my chest in a way I don't examine out loud.
"Okay," I say back.
She drifts back toward the group after that, easy and unhurried, and I step outside to pull up the weather service on my phone.
The forecast confirms what Garrett read in the air—a system moving through overnight, the pass road flagged as a weather closure until conditions improve.
Estimated clearance early in the morning if the system moves through at the projected pace. Possibly later.
I send Mateo a message.
Weather closure on the pass tonight. Driving her to town in the morning if it clears. Going to prep the car.
His reply comes back in under a minute.
Understood. Talk before you leave.
I pocket the phone and go back inside.
The group disperses in ones and twos the way it always does at the end of an evening.
Declan goes loudly. Garrett had already been gone for an hour.
Lila and Nora leave together, talking quietly.
Mateo catches my eye once on his way out and tips his head toward the door—the same signal he used before—and I follow him out onto the lodge porch.
The night is cold and clear despite the weather system building somewhere above the ridge line. Mateo leans against the railing and looks at me directly, which means whatever he's about to say, he's been thinking about for a while.
"She's leaving tomorrow," he says.
"If the road clears."
"It'll clear." He pauses. "Logan."
"I know what you're going to say."
"Then listen to it anyway." He keeps his voice low and even. "A wolf who lets his mate leave before the bond settles—before she's even aware of the bond—runs a real risk of it fracturing. Not fading. Fracturing." His eyes lock onto mine. "You know what that does."
I do know. I've seen it once, years ago, in a wolf from a neighboring pack whose mate had left before the bond was completed. The wolf had survived it technically. Functionally, it was a different answer.
"I know," I tell him.
"And?"
"And it doesn't change anything." My attention goes to the treeline, dark and solid against the night sky. "I've told you this already, Mateo."
"You told me when she'd been here one night, and you were running on no sleep, and the bond had immediately hit," he replies.
"I'm telling you now, after you've spent numerous days watching her, and the bond has deepened, whether you've acknowledged it or not.
" He pauses. "It's stronger than it was. You feel it."
He's right. I do feel it. The pull toward her has been building steadily since the first night, a low, constant frequency that I've been managing the way I manage everything—methodically, with discipline, by keeping my hands and my attention occupied with other things.
It hasn't gotten quieter. If anything, it's gotten more specific, more detailed, and attuned to things as particular as the way she holds her coffee mug, the dry precision of her humor, and the way she goes still when she's actually thinking rather than only processing.
"I feel it," I confirm.
"Then you understand what I'm telling you."
"I understand what you're telling me." I turn to look at him directly.
"And I'm telling you that none of it changes the answer.
She doesn't know what the bond is. She has no idea what I am.
She came here by accident on the worst night of her life, and she's been making decisions inside a situation she doesn't have the full picture of.
" I pause. "If I factor in the bond when I'm deciding what she gets to choose, then I'm making her choices for her. I won't do that."
Mateo is quiet for a long moment. The sounds from inside the lodge carry faintly through the window—Harper's laugh at something Declan said, clear and unguarded, the kind she doesn't seem to know she's doing yet.
I watch Mateo hear it too.
"Alright," he says finally, quietly. "Alright." He straightens up from the railing. "For what it's worth—" he pauses, looking back through the window at where Harper is sitting at the table, "—I think you're either the most honorable wolf I've ever known or the most stubborn one."
"Probably both," I reply.
Something almost like a smile. "Probably," he agrees. He pushes off the railing and heads back inside, and I hear his voice pick back up within the group a few seconds later, easy and unremarkable.
I stay on the porch for a moment longer.
Harper and I walk back to the cabin the same way we have every night since she arrived—without deciding to, without naming it, simply two people moving in the same direction at the end of the same evening.
The trail is dark and familiar, and she doesn't lose her footing on the root tonight, which I notice and don't mention.
At the cabin door, she turns and looks at me in the low porch light, and there's something in her appearance that I've been seeing more of these past couple of days—something that isn't quite settled and isn't quite uncertain, something that lives in the space between a decision made and a decision owned.
"Thank you," she tells me. "For helping me. All of it."
"You've said that before," I reply.
"I know." She keeps her eyes on me, and I let her. "I mean it more now."
I look at her—hazel eyes gone green in this light, her hair loose around her shoulders, wearing Nora's clothes like she was always going to end up in them—and feel the bond pull with a specificity that takes real effort to hold steady against.
"Get some sleep," I tell her. "I'll check the road status first thing."
She nods and goes inside.
I don't go inside immediately.
I give her ten minutes to settle, and then I cross to the garage. Garrett has left the bay light on, which means he knew I'd be coming, which is Garrett.
I pull Harper's Subaru out of the bay and run through it properly—tires, fluid levels, and the work Garrett did on the coolant system.
It's solid. Garrett doesn't leave a job anything less than solid.
But forty minutes down a mountain pass after overnight weather is a different road than forty minutes in clear conditions, and I don't take that difference casually regardless of whose hands last touched the engine.
I load the back with what the drive might need—a tow strap, a basic tool kit, tire chains in case the pass is worse than the forecast suggests, and two emergency blankets still in their packaging.
A thermos I fill in the cabin kitchen while Harper sleeps.
It's probably more than the morning will require. I do it anyway.
The car is familiar in a way that catches me off guard—I've had my hands on the engine, I've watched Garrett work it back to running, and now I'm standing in the garage bay looking at the thing that's going to carry her away from here and doing my best to be practical about that.
My wolf has no interest in being practical about it.
I go back inside and sit in the chair by the dying fire, the way I sat the first night she was here, and I think about the drive clearly and without flinching.
Tomorrow the weather will clear, and the pass will open, and I'll drive her car forty minutes down the mountain, and she'll walk back into the world that's been waiting for her.
The press statements and the complicated mother and the five years of a life that wasn't quite hers.
She'll face all of it the way she faces everything—practically, stubbornly, with that dry precision that isn't a defense mechanism so much as who she is.
And then I'll walk back.
The way I've been walking this mountain my whole life.
Four legs through the treeline, up the ridge, home by the route I know better than I know anything else.
I'll find somewhere off the road, out of sight, and shift, and the mountain will do the rest. It's forty minutes by car and considerably less than that the other way, through the forest, at the pace my wolf runs when it has somewhere to be.
My wolf doesn't respond to that with any enthusiasm. It knows what it means, too.
Mateo's warning sits in my chest alongside everything else. The fracture. The risk of a bond that doesn't settle. I've been holding it at arm's length since he said it, examining it honestly because Mateo doesn't raise things he doesn't mean.
I know the risk. I've known it since the first night.
It doesn't change the answer.
She probably could never fathom what a bond is.
She doesn't know that I’m a wolf. She came here by accident on the worst night of her life, and she has been making every decision without the full picture.
If I let the risk to myself factor into what she gets to choose, I'm not respecting her freedom—I'm finding a more justifiable way to take it from her.
I won't do that.
If she comes back someday, it'll be because she wants to. If she doesn't, it'll be because she chose something else.
Either way, it has to be hers.
Upstairs, she's asleep—the kind of deep, surrendered sleep that comes after a day that asked everything—and I know it without checking, which is simply how I know things on this mountain.
I sit with the dying fire and her packed car in the garage and the forty-minute road, waiting for morning, and I let myself have the weight of it, only for tonight, before I put it somewhere I can carry it.