Chapter Twenty-Three
ARIS
Comfort, I am discovering, is a sedative.
When you're cold, hungry, and being hunted, your senses are razor-sharp. You hear every twig snap, smell every shift in the wind. You exist in a state of vibrating alertness where survival is the only metric that matters.
But when you're warm, fed, and tangled up in flannel sheets with the man you love, the world narrows down to the size of this bed.
You forget that there is anything outside the window except scenery.
You forget that nature isn't just a backdrop for romance.
It's a living, breathing entity that doesn't care about your happy ending.
I wake up slowly, stretching into the warmth of Nash's body. The sun is barely over the tree line, but it's found the gap in the blinds—the low, hard winter light that comes in sideways and paints stripes across the duvet.
"We slept in," I murmur, burying my face in the crook of his shoulder. He smells like sleep and soap and him.
"Mmm," Nash grunts, his arm tightening around my waist, pulling me back against him. "Define 'slept.' I think we passed out around four in the morning."
The memory of last night is still warm on my skin.
There was plenty of sex, but mostly it was about reclaiming the time we lost—talking until our voices were hoarse, planning the summer, arguing about whether or not we needed a new generator (Nash says yes; I say no, mostly because I like winning), and simply existing in the same space without a countdown clock hanging over our heads.
"I want bacon," I say, sniffing the air hopefully. "Why doesn't this house smell like bacon yet?"
"Because the cook is still in bed," Nash says. He kisses the top of my head. "He runs on batteries. And spite."
He rolls over, checking the clock on the nightstand. "10:30. Finn will hear about this and be insufferable for a week. Stamina jokes. Compensating for lost time. Kingfisher jokes about mail runs. Bring the earplugs."
"Let him," I say, tracing the line of his bicep. "I can handle a little heckling from a lodge owner."
Nash sits up, the quilt falling to his waist. He stretches, the muscles in his back flexing, scars and strength I now know by heart. I take a second to appreciate the view. This is my life now: this man, this house, this wild, messy, beautiful chaos.
"Coffee," he decides, standing up and pulling on his jeans. "And then I want to check the smokehouse before it gets any later. That's my winter meat hanging in there, and I haven't laid eyes on it since before we rode out."
"The smokehouse," I repeat, sitting up too. "Educate me."
"Little cedar shed out back," Nash says, pulling a wool shirt over his head. "Where the year's venison is curing. Padlocked, mesh door, cedar smoke on a timer. It's supposed to be foolproof, but foolproof is a challenge, not a promise."
"Sounds like something I need to see."
"You need to eat first. You're going to lose interest halfway through the tour if I don't feed you."
I roll out of the bed and reach for the closest layer—one of his flannels, the soft plaid one, hanging on the back of the chair. It swallows me. The sleeves come to my knuckles.
"You are wearing my shirt."
"I look better in it."
"You do."
We dress fast, stealing kisses between layers. The mood is light, playful. The danger of the box canyon feels a million miles away. The terror of the scree slope is a story to tell at parties.
We walk out into the main room. The house is cold, so Nash feeds the woodstove while I fry bacon and start the coffee.
"Looks like we have the place to ourselves," I say, eating a piece of bacon straight from the pan. It's crispy, perfect.
"We always have the place to ourselves." Nash grins. He pours two mugs from the pot. "Let's go take a look at the meat house. Then we can discuss how to utilize this empty kitchen."
We step out the front door.
The cold air hits us, crisp and startling. It's a beautiful day, blue sky, no wind, the snow sparkling like crushed diamonds. It's an Alaskan morning that makes you believe the world is innocent.
The smokehouse sits about forty yards across the yard, tucked against the dark tree line—a small cedar shed with a peaked roof and a mesh screen door I can see even from here. Nash tells me it's supposed to smell like woodsmoke from a hundred feet away this time of year.
Today, I don't smell anything.
Nash stops on the porch steps. He freezes, the coffee mug halfway to his mouth.
"Nash?" I ask, sensing the shift in him instantly. "What is it?"
"The smoke," he says softly. "There's no smoke."
"Maybe it just went out."
"The stove's on a timer. It doesn't go out on its own." His voice is different. Flatter. "And the door's crooked."
I look. Even from the porch I can see it—the mesh screen door doesn't sit right in the frame. It's off its top hinge. The whole rectangle is tilted, hanging by one screw.
Nash sets the mug down on the railing. His movements are suddenly precise, efficient. The lover is gone; the guide is back.
"Stay here," he says.
"What? No." I put my mug down too. "I'm coming."
He moves. He walks fast toward the smokehouse, boots crunching loudly in the snow. I stay half a step behind him, because I'm not eight years old and I'm not staying on the porch.
As we get closer, I see why the door won't sit right.
Something pried it.
Long gouges rake down the cedar where the mesh used to seal against the frame. The padlock is intact—still hanging on its hasp, still locked—but the hasp itself has been ripped clean out of the wood on the other side. The door swings loose on the one hinge that's left.
Nash pushes it open with two fingers.
The inside of the smokehouse is a horror show.
Four cured haunches hang from a beam. Two more are on the floor, one still trailing part of its rope, the meat torn open in long, ragged strips.
A rack of jerky lies knocked sideways, stripped bare.
There's no blood—cured meat doesn't bleed—only grease smears and drag marks through the sawdust, out the door, toward the trees.
"That was a year of meat," Nash says behind me, so quietly it's worse than shouting.
And everywhere, everywhere, on the floor of the smokehouse, on the trampled snow outside the broken door, on the churned drift bank at the tree line—paw prints.
Massive ones.
"No," Nash whispers.
He steps back out of the smokehouse and crouches in the snow beside a print. He puts his hand next to it. His hand is not small. The print is bigger.
"The gray wolf," I whisper. "The one from the canyon."
"He followed us," Nash says. He stands, scanning the tree line. His face is pale with a cold, hard rage. "He didn't stay in the high country. He followed the trail back."
"But wolves don't attack settlements," I argue, my scientist brain trying to find a logic that fits the data. "Not unless they're starving. And there was plenty of food in the canyon. We saw them kill the bull."
"This isn't about food," Nash says. "Not just food. He knows this is my winter meat. He knows this is my territory. He came to strip it."
A low growl rumbles from the trees.
It's a sound that vibrates in your chest, deeper than any dog. It's primal.
We both spin around.
Standing at the edge of the forest, not twenty yards from the smokehouse, is a wolf.
It's not the big gray male. It's a black one, smaller, leaner, with yellow eyes that lock onto us with terrifying intelligence. It's not running or hiding. It's watching.
"Get back," Nash says, stepping in front of me. "Slowly. Toward the house."
"Nash, look," I whisper, pointing to the right.
Another wolf steps out from behind a spruce tree. Then another.
They are forming a semi-circle. They aren't just in the woods. They're in the yard.
"They're not scared of us," I say, the realization hitting me like a fist. "Nash, they're not scared at all."
"They've lost their fear," Nash agrees. His voice is calm, but it's the terrifying calm of a man calculating his own odds of survival. "We need the rifle."
"It's inside," I say.
"Run," Nash says.
"What?"
"I'll hold them here," he says, grabbing a heavy aluminum snow shovel leaning against the smokehouse wall. "You run to the house. Get the rifle. And the shotgun."
"I'm not leaving you!"
"Aris, go!" he roars. "They're packing up!"
As if on cue, the black wolf takes a step forward. His ears flatten.
I turn and run.
I sprint through the snow, my boots slipping on the icy path. I hear Nash shouting behind me, banging the shovel against the smokehouse wall to make noise. I hear the wolves—one of them yelps in surprise, one of them growls back.
I hit the porch steps and stumble, scraping my shin against the wood, but I scramble up. I burst into the kitchen.
Gun cabinet. Gun cabinet. Gun cabinet.
It's in the mudroom. I yank the handle. Locked. Of course it's locked.
"Where is the key?" I scream to the empty house. "Where is the damn key?"
Top of the fridge. I filed it away my first night here without letting myself think about why I was doing it.
I climb onto the counter, knocking over a jar of flour. It explodes in a white cloud, covering the floor, but I ignore it. My hand gropes blindly along the top of the refrigerator.
Dust. Grease. Metal.
I grab the key. I jump down, landing in the flour, sliding slightly.
I run to the mudroom. I jam the key into the cabinet lock. My hands are shaking so hard I can barely turn it.
Click.
I throw the door open.
The .300 Win Mag, the one I learned on, the one I shot the stump with, is there. I grab it. It feels heavy, cold, and lethal. I grab a box of ammo from the shelf, tearing the cardboard open.
I run for the front door.
I throw it open just in time to see the nightmare.
The wolves have crossed the open ground. Three of them are inside the yard.
Nash is swinging the shovel like a medieval weapon. He hits the black wolf, sending it yelping back, but the others are circling him. They're snapping at his legs, trying to hamstring him, trying to bring him down.
One of them gets him. I hear the shout more than I see the bite. His right leg buckles for a half-second and comes back under him. He keeps swinging.
They move on him like a coordinated military unit.
"Nash!" I scream.
I raise the rifle.
It's heavy. My breath is coming in ragged gasps. I try to find a sight picture, but they are moving too fast. Nash is in the middle of the swirl. If I shoot, I might hit him.
"Shoot!" Nash yells, not looking at me. He slams the shovel into the ground, blocking a lunge. "Aris, shoot!"
I can't shoot into the melee.
I aim high. I aim for the tree trunk just above the chaos.
CRACK.
The sound is thunderous.
The wolves flinch. They scatter for a split second, startled by the noise.
It gives Nash an opening. He backs up, putting his back against the smokehouse, wielding the shovel like a shield.
"Again!" he yells. "Shoot to kill!"
The gray male, the leader, steps out from behind the corner of the smokehouse. He looks at me. He looks right at me standing on the porch.
He doesn't run. He snarls, baring teeth that look impossibly long.
And then he charges. Not at Nash.
At me.
He tears across the open snow between the smokehouse and the porch. He's fast. Impossibly fast. He covers half the yard in two seconds.
I have maybe three seconds before he reaches the steps.
Stance is everything, Nash's voice echoes in my head. Lean into it. Squeeze, don't pull.
I plant my feet in the flour my boots have tracked across the porch boards. I shoulder the rifle. I take a breath.
I don't look at the teeth or the yellow eyes. I look at the center of the chest.
I squeeze.
CRACK.
The recoil punches my shoulder.
The wolf drops.
He crumples mid-stride, and his own momentum carries him forward, sliding him to a stop five feet from the bottom step.
He doesn't move.
Silence falls over the yard.
The other wolves freeze. They look at their fallen leader. They look at me, the woman standing on the porch with the smoking rifle.
Then, as one, they turn and melt back into the trees. They don't run in panic. They retreat. It's a tactical withdrawal.
I stand there, the rifle smoking in the cold air. My ears are ringing. My pulse slams at the base of my throat.
Nash is staring at me from the yard. He lowers the shovel. He looks at the wolves retreating into the woods, then at the dead Alpha at the foot of the stairs.
He walks across the churned snow. He's limping. His right pant leg is dark from the knee down and it isn't melt water. He steps past the dead wolf without so much as a glance and climbs the stairs to me.
He takes the rifle from my hands, engages the safety, and sets it gently against the wall.
Then he pulls me into his arms.
I don't cry or shake. I feel cold, hard, and absolutely lethal.
"You got him," Nash whispers into my hair. His voice is shaking, even if mine isn't. "Aris, you got him."
"He was coming for the house," I say. The words sound distant, like they're coming from someone else. "He was coming for me."
"I know."
"Nash," I say, pulling back to look at him. "This isn't over. The pack is still out there. And we just killed the Alpha."
"Yeah," Nash says, looking at the dead wolf. "Which means the rest of them are going to be confused. And angry. And they know where we live."
He looks at me, and the softness of the morning is gone. The partner look is back.
"Get inside," he says. "We need to secure the perimeter. And we need to raise Finn on the radio."
"Or we get on the machine and run," I say. "The lodge is twenty minutes. Town is forty. We could be behind Finn's door before the coffee goes cold."
"With my leg leaking into my boot, on a trail with drift chokepoints, against a pack that just proved it can plan an ambush?" He shakes his head once. "If the machine bogs even once, we're meat in the open. Here we have walls. We patch the leg, we raise Finn, and we hold the house."
I look at the blood in the snow. I look at the flour covering the kitchen floor. I look at the dead wolf staining the pristine white step.
He gave me no choice, and still something in my chest cracks for him.
I have spent my career fighting for animals like him, defending apex predators to rooms full of skeptics, arguing that the problem is never the wolf.
He was magnificent. He was starving. And the same broken country that emptied his range of prey is what drove him down to my door.
I wait for the guilt. It doesn't come. He crossed that yard to kill me, and I chose us. Thaddeus would have run the numbers without flinching: one habituated wolf against two human lives and every byte of data we carried out of that basin. No version of the math ends with me lowering the rifle.
The honeymoon is officially over.
"Okay," I say, picking up the box of ammo. "Let's get to work."