Chapter 24
LOGAN
The northern ridge patrol runs clean for the first forty minutes.
Mateo and I move through the upper trail in the companionable quiet of a partnership long enough established that communication has reduced to small signals—a gesture toward a sound, a pause at a scent, and the particular stillness that means wait—without either of us having to say it.
The morning has burned off into a clear afternoon, and the light through the pines is the long, warm kind that makes the territory look exactly like what it is: worth protecting.
I'm reading the eastern treeline when Mateo stops.
I stop too, immediately, without asking why.
He points. Two fingers, directed north along the logging road where it curves behind the ridge before descending toward the valley.
A dark SUV is parked on the shoulder. Engine off. No visible movement from where we stand, but we are positioned with a sight line that takes in a significant stretch of the upper territory—including, if you knew where to look, the roofline of the main lodge.
My wolf goes very still.
"How long," I murmur, low enough to carry only to Mateo.
"Just saw it," he breathes back. "Wasn't there on the way up."
He pulls the binoculars from his jacket and raises them, adjusting the focus on the vehicle. He holds them steady for a long moment, scanning the driver's side, the windshield, and the road around it.
Then he lowers them and hands them to me without a word.
I raise them and find the driver immediately. Mid-forties, sitting with the patient stillness of a craft that requires waiting and has been practiced long enough that the waiting has become comfortable. Gray jacket. A notebook open on his knee.
"I know him," Mateo says quietly beside me.
"He was in the mechanics' shop in the south town three days ago.
The shop owner mentioned him when I stopped in—mid-forties, in a gray jacket, asking specific questions about a white Subaru with coolant damage.
Wanted to know if anyone had brought one in for repair.
" He pauses. "The owner didn't have anything useful for him, and he left. Now he's on our ridge line."
I lower the binoculars.
"We move," I say.
We split without discussing it.
The signal passes between us in a glance—Mateo's chin dipping toward the road, my hand dropping to indicate the upper treeline—and then we're moving in opposite directions, the choreography automatic the way it gets when a partnership has been running the same terrain long enough.
Mateo takes the lower route, skirting the eastern edge of the ridge where the treeline runs close enough to the road that he can work his way toward the vehicle without being visible from the driver's seat.
His job is the plate. He'll get it, and he'll be gone before the man in the SUV has any reason to know he was there.
I take the high ground.
The upper trail above the logging road is dense pine, the kind that swallows sound and light both, and I move through it the way I move through everything on this territory at full attention—each footfall placed, each branch accounted for, and nothing disturbed that doesn't need to be.
My wolf is running at a low, focused hum, reading the air ahead of me, tracking the human presence that has no business being this far up the mountain.
I reach a position in the treeline above and behind the SUV within seven minutes.
From here, I can observe without being seen.
The driver's-side window is cracked slightly—he's been sitting a while, which means he arrived before our patrol started, which means he timed this, which means he has been building an approach to this territory with more patience than I'd attributed to him.
He has binoculars on the dash and a journal open on his knee.
He's not taking photographs. He's sketching something—a rough map, from the angle of his hand movements, marking positions on the page in the particular way of someone building a surveillance record rather than gathering evidence for an immediate presentation.
Professional. Methodical.
I watch him work for eleven minutes. He makes two phone calls, both brief, both conducted in a low voice I can hear but not fully parse at this distance. After the second call, he closes the notebook and looks at the territory for a long moment before starting the engine.
I track his movement down the road until the sound of the engine disappears into the valley.
Then I wait another four minutes to make certain he doesn't double back.
He doesn't.
Mateo is waiting at the ridge fork when I come back down.
"Got the plate," he acknowledges, already typing on his phone.
"Running the plate?" I press.
"Already sent it to two contacts," he states. "Give it ten minutes."
We walk the ridge back in silence. I think about the book the man had been writing in, the careful way he'd been marking positions, the two phone calls. He's reporting back. Whatever he saw today, someone is already receiving it.
The reply comes through before we reach the main trail.
Mateo reads it and turns the phone toward me without comment.
The vehicle is registered to a private investigations firm—incorporated less than two years ago, operating address in the same city as Dawson's development company headquarters.
A second message arrives thirty seconds later from Mateo's other contact, a paralegal who has done quiet work for the pack before: the firm's retaining client, confirmed through a financial disclosure connected to a recent legal filing, is Dawson Whitaker personally.
"He's found the region," I state.
"He's found the region," Mateo verifies.
I send Harper a message before I reach the lodge.
Staying at the lodge for a bit. Don't wait up for dinner.
Brief. Practical. The kind of message that doesn't announce anything because there's nothing to announce yet—merely a reason she won't be wondering where I am while I deal with what needs dealing with.
The pack is already filtering into the lodge by the time I arrive—word travels fast on Greyback territory, and Mateo had sent his own message ahead—and I find a room full of attentive, focused people waiting for information.
I give it to them straight.
"Dawson has found the region," I announce to the room.
"We confirmed a private investigator on the northern ridge this afternoon.
Vehicle registered to a firm directly connected to Dawson personally.
" I pause to let that land. "He's not in the dark anymore.
He knows she came to this mountain. He may not know exactly where we are yet, but he's close enough that the next logical step is a physical approach. "
The room is quiet in a particular way; it goes quiet when information is serious.
"Are we expecting a confrontation?" Declan asks, the humor entirely absent from his voice.
"We're preparing for one," I confirm. "That's not the same thing. Our goal is to see him coming long enough in advance that we control the terms of any engagement." I look at Garrett. "Camera status?"
"South entrance is live and running," Garrett confirms. "East access went up this morning."
"Good." I scan the room. "Nora, how are the southern ridge teams looking?"
"Six wolves on rotation, four-hour shifts," she reports. "I added two more to the midnight-to-four window after this afternoon's report. The approach from the south logging road has eyes on it around the clock."
"Good." I scan the room. "Everyone stays alert.
Any vehicle on the access roads that we don't recognize gets reported to Mateo immediately.
If investigators make contact with anyone connected to this property, I want to know before they've driven out of sight.
" I pause. "We are not escalating. We are not confronting.
We are watching, documenting, and staying three steps ahead. "
The pack disperses with the particular efficiency I have spent years building—no wasted motion, no unnecessary discussion, strictly people who trust the plan and trust each other to execute it.
Mateo is the last to go.
"Harper," he notes quietly.
"I'll tell her tonight," I confirm. "She needs to hear it from me directly."
He nods. "She's going to take it better than you think."
"She's going to take it exactly how she takes everything," I reply. "With complete composure and then a list."
Mateo's composure takes a brief, audible hit, and then he goes.
I find Harper outside the cabin a little after nine.
She's on the porch steps with a notebook rather than her phone, writing something longhand with the focused attention she gives everything that matters, and she looks up when she hears me on the path.
The evening light is doing what it does through the pines at this hour, warm and amber, and it catches the green in her hazel eyes that I have learned to read as her at full attention.
She waits while I come up the steps and sit beside her, and she does not pretend she hasn't noticed that something is coming.
"Tell me," she says simply.
"We spotted an investigator on the northern ridge this afternoon," I begin, keeping my voice even.
"Vehicle confirmed as registered to a firm connected to Dawson personally.
He was the same man who'd been asking questions in the mechanics' shop in the south town.
" I hold her gaze. "He had binoculars and a sight line to the upper territory. He was mapping it."
She absorbs that without visibly flinching. I watch her process it—the same methodical sequence I have watched her apply to every significant piece of information since she arrived, checking it against what she already knows, assessing the shape of it.
"So he knows I'm here," she concludes.
"He knows you came to this mountain," I confirm. "He may not know exactly where we are yet. But the gap between what he knows and where we are is smaller than it was this morning."
She nods slowly, looking out at the treeline.
"Harper." She turns. I hold her gaze with the full, unmanaged directness that I don't often let myself use because it tends to say more than I intend it to.
"Whatever he sends up this road, you stay.
The pack stands between you and Dawson, his investigators, every person he thinks he can use to move you.
No one takes you off this mountain against your will.
" I pause. "I stand between you and whatever he brings up this road. That is not a qualified statement."
She examines me with a long, intense focus. What I see in her face is past gratitude and past reassurance and into something that belongs to her alone, so I leave it there.
"I know," she says quietly.
The evening settles around us. Somewhere out in the dark, the pack runs its patrols. Garrett's cameras watch the access roads. The mountain goes to its listening quietude.
Harper looks back at her notebook, and I look at the treeline, and we sit in the particular quiet of two people who are ready for what's coming and are choosing, for this one hour, to simply be here before it arrives.