Chapter 33
HARPER
Ifind him at the ridge right before the light goes.
Mateo and I had worked through the secondary evidence package for most of the afternoon—building the timeline of Dawson's business intimidation practices, cross-referencing names and dates, and pulling threads from the internal business emails I'd quietly saved during our engagement.
Harper Collins from eight months ago or even five years ago would never have had the context to weaponize them, but Harper Collins right now can follow them all the way to their ends.
By the time we had something worth handing to Ray's department alongside the camera footage, the light outside the pack office windows had gone amber and long.
I close the laptop, stretch my hands, and go look for Logan.
I know where to find him. He goes to the ridge when he needs to think, when the lodge feels too close and the cabin is too still, and when he needs the elevation and the sight lines and the mountain air that I have come to understand is, for Logan, what other people get from silence.
I've watched him go there enough times now to know what it means when he does.
He's standing at the northern edge of the ridge outcropping, looking out over the territory with the focused attention of a man who has never once looked at this land and seen anything other than responsibility, running his patrol calculations, or checking the sight lines from the observation posts currently occupied by wolves I've met and eaten dinner with and watched play cards in the lodge kitchen.
He hears me before I reach him, because he always does, and he turns enough to let me know he knows I'm there without making it a thing.
I come to stand beside him.
The territory spreads below us in the last of the evening light—the pines, the logging road winding south, the bridge with its sensors, and the clearing where three days ago we stood together and watched Dawson Whitaker drive away. It looks exactly like what it is. It looks like home.
"You've been up here for an hour," I comment.
"Patrol check," he offers.
"The patrol radio is in the lodge," I counter.
The smile doesn't arrive, but the intention of it does. "Habit."
For some time, I study his features—the broad set of his shoulders carrying something he hasn't said yet—and I make a decision. We are going to have the real conversation, the one he's been circling, and we are going to have it now.
"What you did in that clearing," I begin, keeping my voice even.
"Stepping in front of me. Shifting—even partially—in front of Dawson's security team and his cameras.
" I hold his gaze. "You risked exposure for the entire pack.
Everything you and your father and your grandfather built on this mountain, everything you've spent your life protecting—you put all of it on the line. "
Logan looks at me steadily. "Yes."
"That's what I'm confronting you about," I continue.
"Not the outcome. The risk." I take a step toward him.
"I need you to understand that I know what that cost. I know what it could have cost. And I need you to know that I—" I stop, finding the honest center of it.
"I don't want you to lose everything you've worked for because of me.
I don't want you to get hurt because of me. "
The managed neutrality gives way, and what's left underneath it is raw and unassembled and entirely unlike anything he has shown me before.
"Harper," he says quietly. "Come here."
I close the remaining distance between us, and he turns fully to face me, takes both my hands in his, and I feel his comforting warmth, the solidity of him, and the specific quality of presence that this man has, which makes everything feel navigable.
"The pack stands behind me," he states. "Every wolf on this mountain made the choice to be in that treeline.
That wasn't my risk alone—it was a decision we made together, the way we make everything.
" He is watching me closely. "And yes. I stepped in front of you.
I will always step in front of you. You don't need me to—I am fully aware of that.
But standing back when something comes for you is simply not something I am capable of.
" He pauses. "Because you are my mate, and this is my territory, and when someone tries to take what belongs here, I step in front of it. Every time."
I hang onto it all. Even if it’s simply for a brief second.
"Protecting you and protecting this pack are the same thing," he continues, quiet and entirely certain.
"There is no version of that equation where I weigh the cost and decide otherwise.
It doesn't work that way." His thumb traces across my knuckles.
"You have been part of this territory since you knocked on my door.
That means you are mine to protect. The same as all of them. The same as this land."
Something in my chest opens up, which is what Logan's simple, true things do, and have done since the first night.
"I want to stay," I tell him. "And I mean after.
Once this is resolved, once it's safe and clean and everything is settled.
" I look up at him in the dimming of the light.
"Permanently. Whatever that looks like for a wolf and his human mate on a mountain in the middle of nowhere—I want that.
The pack, the territory, the ceremony you described.
" I pause. "You. Permanently. That's what I want. "
Logan locks eyes with me, and the world seems to stop.
Then he leans down and kisses me—slow and certain, his hand cupping the side of my face, his thumb tracing my cheekbone—and I feel it from the top of my head to my feet.
His tongue traces my lower lip, and I open for him, and the kiss deepens into something that is considerably less careful than how it started, and he is warm and solid and real against me, and I grip his jacket with both fists and hold on.
When he pulls back, I am holding his jacket with both fists, and my heart is doing something considerable.
"Logan," I breathe.
"Yeah," he murmurs against my mouth, low and rough, like the word costs him something.
His hands find my waist and pull me closer, and I tilt my chin up, and he kisses me again—less slow this time, more honest—his tongue meeting mine with particular unhurried certainty, knowing exactly where this is going and intending to take his time getting there.
I press into him and feel the full solid reality of him against me, and something catches between us that has outlasted every effort to be reasonable about it and is done waiting.
His mouth moves to my jaw and my throat, and I grip the front of his jacket harder.
"Logan," I pull back enough to breathe. "We're on a ridge."
"I know," he says against my neck.
"The patrol team—"
"I know," he repeats, and then he pulls back, and those gray eyes find mine—darker than usual, entirely focused, more direct than I have ever seen them. "I'm not sharing this with the patrol team."
Then he bends and lifts me—one arm under my knees, one across my back, the easy strength of him that still catches me off guard every time—and I wrap my arms around his neck, and he carries me down from the ridge toward the cabin, and I laugh against his shoulder, and he says nothing, but I feel him smile.
The fire is low when we get inside.
Logan kicks the door shut behind us and sets me down, and I barely have my feet under me before he's kissing me again, and I think briefly about the fire needing logs and then decide the fire can manage itself.
He pulls back enough to look at me, and I can see exactly where the patience went. He spent it on the walk down from the ridge, and what's in his face now is what was underneath it the entire time.
Finish what we started. The thought is written clearly across every line of his face.
I reach up and pull him back down by the collar, and he comes willingly, and we move toward the bedroom with the particular momentum of two people who have made a decision and are done making it slowly.
He takes his time. He always takes his time, and I have stopped finding it frustrating and started finding it one of the most specific things I love about him—the deliberateness of it, the way he treats every moment like it deserves his full attention.
He works me out of my clothes with unhurried hands, his eyes moving over me in the firelight with an appreciation that bypasses self-consciousness entirely. I have never felt more looked at in my life than I do when Logan looks at me, and I mean that in every possible good way.
We end up on the bed the way we always end up on the bed—nothing declared, nothing performed, solely two people moving toward the same thing at the same time.
I push his flannel off his shoulders and let my hands move over him—the broad chest, the stomach, the mountain-earned build that belongs entirely to the work and the land and the life—and I feel him go still in the particular way he goes still when I'm paying attention to him rather than letting him direct everything.
"Your turn," I tell him.
He looks at me with those gray eyes. "My turn for what?"
I answer by pressing him back against the headboard and swinging my leg over to straddle his thighs, and I work my way down.
I take my time with his jaw, his throat, his chest, and the flat plane of his stomach—and I feel his hands tighten in my hair, the discipline holding right up until it doesn't, fraying at the edges the way it does when something reaches past it.
When I pull his jeans off and find him—hard and wanting, his cock thick and already beading at the tip—he exhales something that is not a word, and his hand in my hair goes very still.