Chapter 28
LOGAN
The positions go in overnight.
I don't sleep much. Neither does Mateo, from the sound of his boots on the lodge porch at two in the morning when I'm already outside running the southern sightlines in my head for the fourth time.
We don't say anything to each other—we don't need to.
He goes east. I go south. We walk every approach route in the dark, checking angles, checking cover, checking everything that needs checking before the light comes up and makes all of it real.
By dawn, the operation is in place.
Mateo and Declan are posted at two separate points along the main logging road—far enough apart to cover both the primary approach and the secondary cutoff and close enough that radio communication between them is instant.
They're in the treeline, both of them, invisible from the road and from any vehicle coming up it.
Declan had accepted the assignment with the particular quiet that comes over him when something serious is actually happening, and the humor has been set completely aside.
"You want eyes only?" he'd confirmed before he went.
"Eyes only," I confirmed. "You see them, you radio, you hold position. Nothing else."
He'd nodded once and gone.
Nora had taken the western ridge patrol with six wolves and had spent twenty minutes the night before running me through her coverage plan—she had clearly been building it since the meeting ended and had arrived with nothing left to revise.
The western ridge approach is longer and less direct than the logging road, but it's the route someone would take if they wanted to come in without being seen from the main access.
I didn't think Dawson would use it. Dawson wouldn't know it existed.
But Nora had covered it anyway, because that's who Nora is, and I'd let her because she was right.
Garrett had handled the bridge sensors before I'd finished my coffee.
The bridge is the only vehicle access point to the core territory—a single-lane crossing over the creek that runs along the southern boundary, wide enough for one vehicle at a time and narrow enough that anyone trying to cross it has to commit to it fully before they can see what's on the other side.
It is, in territorial terms, the most defensible point on the property.
I found Garrett already on his knees in the mud below the eastern support beam at half past six in the morning, running sensor wire with the methodical efficiency of a task that received one instruction and is now simply being completed.
"Motion sensors," he states, without looking at me, when I crouch beside him. "Two on each support. Wide-angle coverage. If anything crosses this bridge, I'll know about it before the tires are halfway over."
"How's the feed?"
"Running to my phone and to the lodge monitor," he reports. "You'll get an alert on yours too."
I grip his shoulder for a moment, stand back up, and left him to it.
We are ready. Every approach was covered, every angle considered, every person in their position. Whatever comes up this mountain today will find us waiting.
The afternoon runs quietly until it doesn't.
I'm at the lodge with Harper, going through the most recent camera footage from the south entrance—another pass from an SUV we don't recognize, with different plates than the previous ones, which tells me Dawson has more vehicles in rotation than we'd initially counted—when my radio goes.
Mateo's voice comes through clear and level. Something significant is happening. He has already decided to be calm about it, which is how I know.
"Three vehicles," he states. "Black SUVs. Coming up the main logging road. Moving at a steady pace, not rushing." A pause. "They're not turning around."
I set down what I'm holding.
Harper, across the table, looks up.
"How far out?" I press into the radio.
"Seven minutes to the bridge," Mateo adds. "Maybe eight."
I key the radio. "All positions, hold. Nobody moves until I give the word. Treeline only—I don't want anyone visible from the road." I pause. "Nobody shifts unless it becomes unavoidable. Understood?"
Confirmations come back one by one. Mateo. Declan. Nora from the ridge. Two more from the outer positions.
Understood. Understood. Understood.
I look at Harper across the table for a moment longer than is strictly necessary.
She is already standing, already composed, and already the version of herself that she has been since she walked into this pack and started doing the work—practical, clear-eyed, and entirely present. She has her jacket on before I say another word.
"Stay close," I instruct. "And stay in the treeline until I signal."
She nods, without argument, without the particular stubbornness she reserves for things she actually disagrees with. This she understands. This is tactical, not protective, and she knows the difference.
We go.
The walk from the lodge to the clearing takes four minutes.
I use them.
I think about the three vehicles climbing the logging road and the man in the tailored jacket who stepped out of one of them on our camera footage, and I think about the investigators and press statements and surveillance passes that preceded this moment.
I think about the particular patience it takes to wait for something to arrive when you know it's coming, and you can't stop it, only prepare for it.
We are prepared.
The observation posts are in place. The bridge sensors are live.
The western ridge is covered. Every approach to this territory that can be monitored is monitored.
Every pack member who can be positioned is positioned.
The clearing at the end of the main logging road—the natural terminus of the only vehicle route onto core Greyback territory—has been chosen deliberately as the point of contact.
Dawson will reach the clearing and find us.
He will not reach the cabins.
That was the decision I made at three in the morning, walking the southern sightlines, and it is the right decision. The cabins are Harper's space, mine, and the pack's private ground. Whatever Dawson Whitaker brings onto this mountain, he does not get to bring it there.
I position myself at the clearing edge where the main trail meets the open ground, the lodge visible behind me at the far end, and the treeline dense on both sides.
Four wolves take the flanks—invisible in the pines, close enough to respond in seconds.
Mateo takes the right side. Declan takes the left.
I look back into the treeline.
Harper is ten feet in, merely past the first dense stand of pine, far enough that she won't be the first thing Dawson sees when he gets out of his vehicle.
She has her phone in her hand—recording, already, because of course she is—and she meets my eyes through the trees with the particular steady attention that I have come to rely on more than I have words for.
I hold up one hand. Stay.
She nods once.
I turn back to the clearing.
The pack is invisible. The territory is still. The afternoon light is coming through the pines at the long angle it gets in the late hours, and the clearing looks exactly like what it is—the entrance to a place that belongs to people who know exactly what they're protecting.
We are ready.
The bridge sensors go off at fourteen minutes past four.
My phone vibrates in my jacket pocket—Garrett's alert, exactly as promised—and thirty seconds later I can hear them.
Three heavy engines are working their way up the final grade of the logging road, the sound carrying through the afternoon air with the particular clarity that comes when the mountain is paying attention.
The pack in the treeline goes completely still.
This is what years of territorial discipline looks like. Wolves in the pines, none of them visible, none of them moving, all of them waiting with the patience of people who understand that the moment you reveal yourself determines everything.
The first SUV comes through the gap at the clearing's edge.
Then the second.
Then the third.
They stop in a line—engines still running, which tells me something about intent—and for a moment, nothing moves.
The vehicles sit in the late afternoon light, dark and deliberate, and I understand exactly how the clearing must look from inside those tinted windows: open ground, a lodge visible at the far end, no one in sight.
They don't know we're here.
The doors don't open.
Not yet.
I watch the vehicles through the afternoon light and feel my wolf running its quiet, absolute certainty underneath everything—clean and steady, the way it runs when something important is about to happen and the preparation is already done.
I think about the night Harper appeared on my porch in a ruined dress.
I think about every careful, patient decision I have made since then—the order of disclosure, the freedom I insisted on giving her, the moments of watching her build herself into this place without pushing her toward any of it.
I think about her standing in my cabin three nights ago and saying I choose you.
I choose to be your mate with the full force of who she is and without a single qualification.
I think about Dawson Whitaker's press statements. His investigators. His surveillance vehicles. His forty-minute drive up from a resort hotel with his lawyers and his security and his certainty that he can come onto this mountain and take back something that was never really his.
His patience has run out.
So has mine.
I step out of the treeline and into the clearing, ready to go head-to-head with Harper’s ex.