Chapter 22
LOGAN
Igive her an hour.
She needs it, and I know she needs it. So after the cabin empties out—Mateo and Nora and Lila filing back into the morning with the particular quiet of people who understand that some things need space after they've been said—I make Harper a second cup of tea.
I go sit on the porch steps, and I give her an hour to be alone with it.
My wolf is very still.
I think about the investors on the south road and the search pattern tightening from two directions, and the particular urgency of a situation that has been patient long enough.
I need to move.
I send the message to the pack before the morning has fully settled.
Main lodge. One hour. Everyone.
By the time the hour is up, the lodge is full in the way it gets when something significant has happened, and the pack already knows it before anyone has said the words out loud.
They settle into the room with the focused quiet I've come to recognize as their version of readiness—present, attentive, waiting.
Steady in the way that only comes from having chosen this place and these people deliberately.
Harper is at the cabin with Lila. I'd asked Lila specifically—she's the one person in this pack who went through her own version of this morning, who sat with her own cup of tea, and who heard the same truth and came out the other side of it intact.
If anyone can sit with Harper right now and make the space feel navigable, it's Lila.
I stand at the front of the room and look at the faces I've known for years, and I tell them.
"Harper Collins knows about the pack," I announce, plainly and without preamble. "She witnessed a shift during this morning's patrol. I've explained everything to her. She's staying."
The room holds the information for a moment.
Then Declan, from his usual spot near the back, raises one hand with the particular energy like he’s been waiting to say something for a long time now. "So we can stop pretending to be normal people?"
"You never managed that particularly convincingly," Nora quips from across the room.
A sound moves through the group that is somewhere between relief and laughter. I let it run for a moment because it's genuine and it's earned, and the pack has been carrying the weight of the secret alongside me without complaint.
"She asked good questions," Mateo adds, quieter, to the room. "She processed it the way you'd want someone to. Without panic, without running. She stayed in the room, and she asked for evidence, and when she got it, she accepted it." He pauses. "She's going to be alright."
"She's been alright," Declan corrects, and there's genuine warmth underneath the usual irreverence. "She's been more than alright. She's been one of us since she stepped foot on the territory; we were merely the only ones who knew it."
"Finally, the Alpha's mate knows the whole truth," Nora announces, making no effort to hide her satisfaction—she has been longing for this exact development, and everyone in the room knows it. "Things are going to be considerably less complicated around here."
A murmur of agreement moves through the room.
Someone near the back says something I don't catch that makes the people around them laugh, and I feel the pack's collective exhale—all this time of careful management, partial truths, and deliberate silences, and now all of it lifting in the particular way things lift when the thing you've been bracing for turns out to be the thing you were hoping for.
I hold the room's attention for a moment longer, letting the welcome settle.
"There's more," I announce.
The room refocuses.
I nod to Mateo, who steps forward with the particular directness he brings to intelligence reports—no padding, exclusively the shape of what he knows.
"Private investigators have been active in the nearby towns for the past several days," he reports.
"We've confirmed two separate firms. They're questioning locals—gas stations, diners, the hardware stores that see through traffic.
The specific question they're asking is whether anyone saw a woman in a wedding dress or an abandoned white Subaru near the mountain road.
" He pauses. "They have photographs. One of them matches Harper. One of them matches her car."
The room is very quiet.
"How close are they to the logging road access?" Garrett inquires from his usual spot near the wall.
"The south town is the most active," Mateo answers. "If they're working systematically, the logging road access is their next logical step. The southern approach is the most likely route they'll take."
"Then we make sure they don't find it useful," I state. "Garrett. I need cameras on every logging road entrance. All of them. Motion-activated, feeding to the main monitor. If a vehicle we don't recognize turns onto this mountain, I want to know about it before it reaches the bridge."
Garrett nods once, already calculating. "I can have the south entrance done by tonight. The east access will take until tomorrow morning."
"Do the south first," I confirm. "That's the approach."
I turn to Nora. "Southern ridge patrol teams. I want rotating coverage—younger wolves, fresh legs, people who know that terrain in both forms. Day and night rotation. The southern ridge is where we're most exposed and where investigators will probably enter from, and I want it covered properly."
Nora is already pulling out her phone, pulling up the schedule she's been running in her head since the moment I started talking. "I've got six people I can put on that rotation right now," she announces. "I can have a full schedule built by noon."
"Build it," I instruct. "And Nora, make sure everyone on the southern teams knows what they're doing and why. I want eyes, not confrontation. If investigators reach the ridgeline, we document, and we withdraw. Nobody shifts anywhere near a camera."
"Understood," Nora confirms, already typing.
"Expanded patrols on the east trail and the logging road itself," I continue, moving through the logistics the way I have moved through them for six years — efficiently, without wasted motion.
"Mateo will coordinate the schedule. Any unfamiliar vehicles, any unfamiliar faces on the approach roads, any investigators making contact with anyone connected to this property—I want to know within ten minutes. "
The pack absorbs this without resistance. That's the thing about the Greybacks—they don't argue with a clear threat and a clear plan. They execute. It's one of the things I love most about them and have relied on most heavily in the years since my father put this territory in my hands.
The meeting runs another twenty minutes through specifics—communication protocols, what to do if contact is made, and who covers which approach in which shift. By the time it breaks up, the room has the particular settled energy of people who know exactly what they're doing and why.
As the pack files out, I catch Mateo's arm.
"Stay," I murmur.
He does.
We wait until the lodge empties, and then Mateo leans against the table with his arms crossed and looks at me with the intensity that means he already knows what I'm about to raise and has already formed his position on it.
"I want to consider moving Harper out of the territory," I open, keeping my voice level. "Get Garrett to take her somewhere quiet—a town they haven't reached yet, somewhere she can sit tight while we deal with Dawson's people."
Mateo stays hushed for a brief second. "Where are you thinking?"
"North of here. There are two or three towns that haven't shown any investigative activity yet. If we move her before they tighten the search pattern—"
"Logan." He says it with the particular weight of a man who is about to tell me something I'm not going to like.
"The towns they haven't reached yet are the towns they're moving toward.
The search pattern is working north and east. Any town we send her to today could have investigators in it by tomorrow.
" He refuses to look away. "Moving her out of the territory right now puts her in a car on mountain roads between two active search zones.
That's not safer. That's simply a different kind of exposed. "
I press two fingers to the bridge of my nose and breathe through it.
He's right. I know he's right. I've been running the same calculation since the meeting started and arriving at the same uncomfortable answer, but I wanted someone else to confirm it before I closed the door on it.
"So she stays," I concede.
"She stays," Mateo concedes. "This territory is still the best cover she has. We know every approach. We can see them coming." He pauses. "She's safer here than anywhere Garrett could drive her to tonight."
I nod once. It's not the answer I wanted, but it's the one that holds up.
"I'll tell her tonight," I state.
"She's with Lila," Mateo comments. "From what I could tell when I checked in an hour ago, they were talking. Actually talking." He pauses. "Lila's good for this. She knows what it's like to be on the receiving end of this particular morning."
"I know," I reply. "That's why I left her there."
Mateo nods and heads for the door.
I give Harper the rest of the afternoon.
She's been through enough for one day, and she doesn't need me hovering.
If there is one thing I have learned about this woman, it's that she processes best when she has room to do so without an audience.
So I spend the afternoon checking in with Garrett on the camera installations, running the south trail once with Declan to assess sight lines, and doing the kind of practical, physical work that has always been how I manage the things I can't solve by thinking about them harder.
By evening, I go to find her.
I find Harper on the cabin porch after dinner, sitting on the steps with her second cup of tea, watching the treeline in the particular way she watches everything—like she's reading it, building a picture from it, and filing what it tells her.
She looks up when she hears me coming and shifts to make room, and I sit beside her, and we look at the mountain for a moment without speaking.
"I need to talk to you about something," I open.
"I know," she replies. "I've been watching Nora run schedules on her phone for three hours. Something's escalating."
I look at her. "I considered having Garrett take you somewhere tonight," I say, plainly. "Get you out of the territory, somewhere the investigators haven't reached yet."
She goes very still.
"Mateo talked me out of it," I continue before she can respond.
"He's right that moving you tonight creates more exposure, not less.
The search pattern is tightening from the south.
Any town I could send you to is likely to have investigators in it by tomorrow.
" I hold her gaze. "But I wanted you to know I considered it.
Because your safety is the priority, not—"
"No," she interrupts, firmly and without heat.
I wait.
"No," she repeats, quieter this time but no less certain.
"I understand why you thought about it, and I understand why Mateo was right, and I agree with the logic.
" She looks at me steadily. "But I also want to be clear that even if the logic had been different—even if sending me north made perfect tactical sense—I would not have gone.
" She pauses. "Dawson already chased me out of my own wedding.
He ran me off a mountain road. He's been building a story about me in public since the moment I left.
" Her jaw sets into the particular line it gets when she has decided something and is done revising it.
"He does not get to chase me out of another place I've chosen. Not this one."
I slowly drink her in.
The evening light is doing what it does at this hour, warm and long through the pines, and it's catching the green in her hazel eyes and the particular set of her jaw, and the woman who quickly hightailed it away from a wedding in a ruined dress and ended up here has decided, without drama and without performance, that here is where she stays.
My wolf goes very still.
Not the alert-still. The other kind. The kind that means this. Right here. This is what I've been waiting for.
"Okay," I say quietly.
She looks at me. "That's it? Okay?"
"You've made your position clear," I reply. "I respect your position."
The humor reaches her eyes before her mouth decides what to do with it. "You're infuriating, you know that?"
"You've mentioned it," I agree.
She looks back at the treeline. So do I. And we sit in the evening quiet together, the pack running its patrols somewhere out in the dark, Dawson's people working their way toward a mountain they don't know nearly well enough, and Harper, beside me on these steps, choosing, again, to stay.
My wolf settles.
Some things, it turns out, are worth every bit of the wait.