Chapter 18
LOGAN
Iwake before she does.
That's not unusual—I wake before everyone, always have—but this morning it's different.
I lie still for a moment, listen to her breathe beside me, and feel the bond with a clarity that is new, even after the short amount of time of feeling it constantly.
Deeper. More settled. Like something that was already permanent has found an additional layer of permanence, a root it didn't have yesterday.
I knew this would happen.
I'd known since the first night that if this moment came, the bond would respond to it. I hadn't fully understood what responding would feel like from the inside—this particular weight, this specific certainty, a thing that was already absolute somehow becoming more so.
I watch the ceiling for a while and listen to her breathe and let myself have it, if only for a few minutes, before I start thinking practically.
She wakes slowly.
Harper surfaces from sleep the way she does most things—in stages, with awareness arriving before action.
She stretches—a long, unselfconscious movement—and the sheet slips, and I let myself look because I have earned that and she is worth looking at, the morning light catching the line of her collarbone and the tumble of chestnut hair across the pillow.
She opens her eyes and finds me watching, and something touches her features—not embarrassment, something warmer than that, something that is still getting used to being seen and isn't entirely sure what to do with it yet.
"Morning," she offers, her voice rough with sleep.
"Morning," I tell her.
She looks at the window—the pale early light, the pines visible through the glass—and she is quiet and unhurried, fully awake and entirely at ease with where she's woken up.
"You okay?" I finally ask.
She turns back to look at me, and the corners of her mouth move. "That's my line," she tells me.
"Borrowed it."
She considers me for a moment with those hazel eyes. "Yeah," she decides. "Actually yeah." A pause, smaller. "You?"
"Yeah," I tell her. "I am."
She gets up and moves around the cabin with the comfortable ease of a room that no longer requires anything from her, pulling on yesterday's clothes without ceremony, running her fingers through her chestnut hair in the approximate direction of order.
She makes coffee without asking whether I want some—she already knows I do—and brings both mugs to the table and sits across from me, and we drink in the morning, quietly, the way we've been doing things together since she arrived.
I watch her wrap both hands around the mug, which she has done every single morning since the first one, as if warmth is something she's still catching up on, and feel the bond with a weight that is new, even after some time of carrying it. Deeper. More settled. Rooted in a way it wasn't yesterday.
She looks up and catches me watching and smiles—small and real, the kind that reaches her eyes without her deciding to let it—and I pick up my coffee and look out the window.
My phone buzzes on the table.
Mateo. One line.
Need to talk. Soon.
I look at it for a moment, then at Harper, who has opened her notebook and is already writing something with the focused quiet that means she's in her own head and content to be there.
I pocket the phone.
One more hour. I'll give her one more hour of the morning before the rest of it arrives.
She goes to find Lila mid-morning, the two of them picking up whatever project they're in the middle of—I'd watched them head toward the far end of the lodge together, Harper still holding her second cup of coffee and laughing at something Lila had said with unguarded ease.
I watch her until she disappears through the lodge door.
Then I step outside and call Mateo.
He picks up on the first ring, which tells me he's been waiting.
"Tell me," I open, before he can say anything.
"Private investigators," he tells me, and the words land with a weight that matches the tone I've heard coming off him for the past two days.
"At least two of them, working out of the towns east and south.
They're not asking about the mountain specifically, but they're asking about a woman in a wedding dress seen near the mountain roads.
" A pause. "Logan, someone remembered her car.
White Subaru pulled onto the shoulder of the south road.
They've got a description and a direction. "
I press my free hand flat against the cabin wall and breathe through it.
"How close?" I press.
"Close enough that it's time to stop calling it distant," Mateo tells me. "They're systematic. They're working toward us."
"Dawson," I state.
"Has to be. The press coverage died down enough that this isn't media anymore. Someone hired people specifically to find her." Another pause. "He's not letting it go."
I think about Harper in the lodge with Lila, organizing something, making herself useful in the uncomplicated way she always does.
I think about the way she'd said yeah, actually yeah this morning—the surprised relief in it, the specific sound of someone who'd been waiting to feel okay and has discovered she does.
"I need a meeting," I tell him. "Full pack. This afternoon."
"I'll set it up," he replies. "What about Harper?"
"I'll have Lila keep her occupied," I tell him. "She doesn't need to be in this one yet. I don't want her to feel the walls closing in before I understand exactly how close they are."
Getting Lila alone requires some maneuvering, since Harper has been working alongside her most mornings. I wait until Harper steps out to find Garrett about a parts order she'd flagged in the records, and I cross to the clinic and close the door quietly behind me.
Lila sets down her clipboard before I've said a word.
"What do you need?" she prompts.
"Two hours this afternoon with Harper," I tell her. "Somewhere away from the lodge. The eastern supply cache, the outer trail, or anywhere she'll have something useful to do." I keep my voice even. "I need to run a meeting she can't be part of yet."
Lila doesn't push for details. She nods, reading my face the way she reads everything in her clinic—practically, accurately, without making it bigger than it needs to be right now.
"I'll take her to check the eastern cache.
She's been asking about the outer property anyway. " A pause. "How close is it getting?"
"Close enough," I confirm. "Don't say anything to her."
"I won't." She picks the clipboard back up. "Go do what you need to do."
By mid-afternoon, the lodge is full in a way it hasn't been in months.
All of them—the core, Mateo and Nora and Declan and Garrett, and the outer patrol wolves too, the perimeter crews and the logging operation ground crews, people who know this territory the way I know it, from years of moving through it in both forms. They fill the main room with the attentive quiet of people who have been called together and understand it's serious.
I stand at the front and tell them everything.
The investigators. The wedding dress. The white Subaru on the south road.
The systematic pattern is working toward the mountain from two directions—east and south, tightening.
Dawson Whitaker is not a man who takes public humiliation quietly; he's a man with money and influence and people who work for him whose only job is finding what he's lost.
"He's not looking because he misses her," I tell them plainly. "He's looking because she left on his wedding day, and he hasn't controlled the story completely, and that bothers him more than she does." I let that land. "Which means he's not going to stop."
"How much time are we looking at?" Declan asks from the back, the easy humor entirely absent. This is the version of Declan that shows up when something real is on the table—direct, clear, and already thinking three steps ahead.
"Days," Mateo answers. "Possibly less. They've identified the car. They have a direction. They're methodical."
"What's the south road situation?" Nora presses, arms crossed, amber eyes sharp. "That's the only vehicle approach that makes sense if they've traced the car."
"We lock it down with eyes first," I tell her. "Nothing comes up that road without us knowing."
I look around the room. "I want the outer perimeter doubled," I continue.
"South ridge, east trail, the logging road access.
Rotating shifts—I don't want anyone running ragged before we even know what we're dealing with.
Mateo has the schedule." I pause. "If investigators come onto this territory, we document them.
We don't engage unless they force the issue.
We know who's on our land, and we make sure they know we know. "
"And if Dawson comes himself?" Nora asks. The question is careful, and she's watching me with particular attention, already knowing part of the answer.
"Then we deal with it as a pack," I tell her. "Together. The way we deal with everything."
The room holds that for a moment. What passes through it has nothing of fear in it—it's the opposite of fear, the specific gravity of people who made their choice about this territory and this pack a long time ago and are simply being reminded of it now.
"What about Harper?" Nora raises it carefully.