Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
CASSIAN
Soren was on the couch when I came back through, and the orange juice was gone. He had his eyes closed. Not asleep—his breathing was too shallow for sleep, and his hand was still moving in slow circles over his belly—but resting, which was the next best thing, I guess.
I stood in the doorway for a moment and then went upstairs to my room. I opened the window a crack to stir the air, then changed the sheets and blankets before coming back down.
“You can keep my bedroom,” I said, and Soren opened his eyes. “It has the attached bathroom, the fire is good, and the bed will be better for your back. Only if that doesn’t upset your cat. I’ve changed the sheets, but the scent might still—”
“No,” he said. “That’s fine. Thank you.”
I rushed ahead before he argued with me. “I won’t come into your room at any point unless you ask me to.”
He pushed himself upright with a groan, but he didn’t ask for my help, so I stayed still. I was a grown-ass man who wasn’t going to listen to my wolf, who was suddenly insisting we should carry him. The fuck?
“Where will you sleep.”
“In my fur,” I said, matter of fact. “There’s a closet at the top of the stairs,” I continued.
“Extra blankets, pillows. Take whatever you need to build a nest if you want one, I mean if that is something your cat… I don’t know…
maybe I read it somewhere and…” I stopped, embarrassed. “Just help yourself to whatever.”
“Okay.” He was standing now, one hand on the back of the couch. “I’m going to go to the room.”
I nodded toward the stairs. “Go. I’ll find everything I can on Brec’s list.”
Soren went toward the hall and then stopped, seeming nervous, before pulling his shoulders back. “The door key is hard to get to work,” he said.
My chest hurt. My wolf was affronted that the omega didn’t trust us, but I shoved him back.
“Lift the key a little while you turn it,” I said. “Until you feel it catch. Then it locks. There’s only one key. I won’t come in unless there’s an emergency and believe me I’d have to break the door down to kill that lock.”
He nodded. Didn’t say anything else. Went upstairs.
I stood in the living room and listened to his footsteps on the landing—slow, careful—and the sound of the closet opening, a pause, the rustle of blankets.
Then my bedroom door opening and closing, and the turn of the key.
I spent an hour reading through what Brec sent me, but my wolf was scratchy and annoyed with me, and waiting to run off the excess energy from all this emotion, worry, and fear.
“All right,” I said. “Give me a minute.”
The cold hit me, and my wolf surged up the second the night air reached him.
The shift came faster than it had in months, because he’d been coiled tight all day and he was done waiting on four paws and fur.
Scents hit first: pine and frost and the deep cold of a mountain in winter, and underneath it the newer things, the things that had been there less than twenty-four hours.
Engine oil and fear-sweat and warmer peach, cat-and-omega, already threaded through the ground floor of my house and the living room and the landing and the room upstairs where Soren had just locked the door against whatever might come through it.
My wolf held onto Soren’s scent for a moment. Then he ran.
East tree line to the fence, along the fence to the north corner, down to the road and back, a loop that took twenty minutes at a steady pace, and he ran it properly tonight, not the perfunctory check of a wolf who knew everything was clear but the full, deliberate sweep of an animal who was on guard.
He took his time on the road, reading the snow—no new tracks since yesterday, nothing that didn’t belong.
The wrecked car was still at the bottom of the slope, half-buried now, and he circled it once and came away, but we knew it needed to be relocated at some point or at least camouflaged so it wasn’t visible.
Right now, the snow was hiding it well enough, but if it was still there when there was a thaw, things would change.
I let him work. This was what he was good at, what he’d always been good at, and the arrangement we’d had for three years was that the land was his, and I stayed out of it.
He didn’t need direction out here, and he came to Raff’s grave and stopped at the edge of the clearing and sat his furry butt in the snow.
I pushed forward enough to share it with him. That was the agreement at the grave—we did it together, the man and the wolf, neither of us pretending we were past it.
There was a lot in my head tonight.
My wolf had been different today, acting as he had in the field—running extractions, getting omegas out of situations they shouldn’t have been in—the protective instinct was wired into the animal, and it wasn’t personal; it was just what my wolf did around a frightened omega in danger. I’d felt it a hundred times.
But never as strong as this.
I knew what it felt like when a wolf chose.
The bond I had with him hadn’t been like falling—it’d been recognition, the animal half of me saying “this one” before I’d had any say in the matter, and Raff had felt it at the same moment across the table in a safehouse in Baltimore, and we’d stared at each other, and then laughed, because what else could we have done?
That was how it worked. One recognition.
One mate. A bond was singular and permanent, and when it broke, you were supposed to follow it into the ground because that was what wolves did.
I’d not followed it into the ground yet, because Raff wanted this place finished.
Until forty-eight hours ago, my wolf hadn’t shown any interest in a person who wasn’t Raff. So why now?
I told myself what I was feeling was the protective instinct. Triggered by an omega in danger. Purely functional. The same thing I’d have felt in the field for any omega we’d helped.
I stood at the grave and tried to be honest about how I was feeling.
Ronan had sent Soren here. Out of everyone in the ORT network, every contact, every safe house, every place an omega could vanish without leaving a trail, he’d put Soren behind the wheel with one destination. My mountain. My address.
Ronan knew exactly what I’d become after Raff died.
He knew my bond had shattered. He knew I’d walked away from the ORT because I couldn’t trust myself to lead, couldn’t trust the wolf that had almost gone feral with grief.
He knew I’d come up here to survive one day at a time, half man, half ghost.
And he’d sent Soren to me anyway.
That wasn’t chance. It wasn’t convenient. It meant every other option had already failed or been ruled out. It meant Ronan had known I was a broken alpha with a fractured soul and decided I was still the safest place left in the world for an omega carrying an unborn child.
My wolf pressed his nose briefly to the cold stone.
Then there was the baby.
I’d been trying not to think too hard about that part. There was going to be a baby here, in my house, miles from anywhere, with the roads buried under snow. And Soren was scared and I knew nothing about babies.
Brec had delivered babies in the field—he’d told me once, years ago, two of them, both fine—and I’d read through his notes and the warning signs and what to watch for with a cat shifter specifically, and I’d taken my own notes as if I were prepping an extraction because it was the only way I could handle any of it.
But notes were just the start, and what Soren needed, and what a baby needed, and what I would do with that kind of helplessness in my hands—I didn’t have that.
If Raff were here…
He’d said we should have a place that could help omegas like the ones we rescued, a sprawling house with rooms and children, and safety. Somewhere for babies.
But I’d put off the medical side of the house and the nursery because…
Just, because…
I wish you were here. You’d have given me a job to keep me from being useless, and then you’d have laughed at me for being terrified of something that small.
The wind moved through the trees and the snow kept falling, and above the clearing, the clouds had thinned enough to show one strip of dark sky with stars behind it.
Raff had liked the stars. Had pointed them out on missions more than once, lying in the dark waiting for a signal, tilting his head back and naming them all.
I hadn’t checked out the stars in three years.
I’m empty.
I looked up now. Held still in the clearing while my wolf breathed slow and the cold worked through the fur and the strip of sky remained, narrow and clear.
Soren’s daughter was going to need things I didn’t know how to give.
Not the birthing stuff—that was logistics and solvable—and I had a library of information I could read.
The other things, and not just the fact that so much had to happen in Soren’s body for a baby to be born, and there’d be pain, and there could be danger during the birth.
There was a reason so few pregnancies even went to term, let alone result in a live birth.
I didn’t know how to build anything like safety for an omega and his baby.
But I knew how to hold a perimeter, and I knew how to stand between a threat and what needed protecting.
That much I could give Soren.
We stood for a moment in the clearing, and then he turned us back toward the house, steady and unhurried.
Home.
Back to Soren and his kit.
But the worries wouldn’t leave. Ronan had known this address, and he’d pointed a frightened omega toward a mountain I’d chosen with Raff specifically because nobody was supposed to find it.
My name was still on the old network, tied to an address in the northeastern territories I’d been careful never to update—but careful wasn’t invisible, and I’d spent three years assuming that was enough.
Trust no one, don’t tell ORT.
Was somebody in the ORT command structure working both sides? Is that what Ronan knew?
Enemy, my wolf whispered.