Chapter 31 Storm Warning
Wade POV
The boatyard phone rang while I was logging the haul manifest.
Two days had passed since the sleet knocked out the generator and Jules jury-rigged the solenoid.
The sky had been wrong all morning, a low gray ceiling pressing down on Superior until the lake went the color of spent ammunition.
Pressure had been dropping since dawn. My ears felt it, and the harbor buoys were already pitching in swells that had no business rolling this early in the season.
The first real winter gale was building somewhere out past the Keweenaw, and every fisherman with a radio knew it.
Nora was under the hydraulic lift, flat on her back on the concrete with her legs sticking out past the base plate.
She’d been checking the mount bolt she’d replaced after the fight, running her fingers along the weld and muttering about hairline stress fractures.
Her jacket was draped over the workbench with her phone in the pocket, and she couldn’t hear the office line from where she lay.
I picked up on the third ring.
“Karlsson Boatyard.”
“Is Nora there?” A young woman’s voice, tight and breathless. “This is Delia Keane.”
I knew the name. I remembered her from the ceremony ground, where she’d stood beside Gordon with tears on her face while Rafe told both packs what her family had done.
The sister who helped arrange Nora’s humiliation and then drove all that way to apologize for it.
The woman Rafe chose and could not touch.
“She’s under a lift,” I said. “This is Wade.”
A pause. I heard her swallow. “Then I’m telling you. Please listen.”
I sat down in Bette’s desk chair and listened.
What Delia said took less than two minutes and changed everything that followed.
A friend from the treaty visits, a young female wolf who’d stayed loyal to Delia despite Conrad’s influence, had called from a gas station outside Copper Point an hour earlier.
Conrad had loaded his truck before dawn with three of his most reliable enforcers.
He’d emptied the pack garage of field medical supplies, fuel cans, heavy tarps, and the lockbox where Copper Point kept its emergency cash.
He told the remaining pack he was checking the eastern boundary line, which nobody believed because Conrad hadn’t personally walked a boundary since Rafe was a teenager.
“He’s coming for Nora,” Delia said. Her voice shook, but the words were clear.
“After what happened at the gathering, he told two of his inner circle that the bond has to end, and if Nora won’t accept, she’s a threat to Copper Point that has to be removed.
He means it, Wade. He doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean. ”
My wolf rose fast. I pressed my palm flat against the desk to keep my hand from shaking.
“How many wolves?”
“Three that my friend saw in the truck. But Lyle Pelto wasn’t at the gas station or the house, and two others from the first group he sent are also missing. So maybe six. Maybe more.”
I thought about the seven who’d come before. Pine Harbor had beaten them, but it had cost us blood. My forearm ached every morning when I closed my fist.
“When?” I asked.
“He left before dawn. With the storm coming, the roads are already bad. My friend says he was heading east on the shore road, not the highway. He’ll use the weather.”
Conrad was smart enough to arrive during the worst of it, when visibility dropped and the wind covered engine noise and footfalls.
“Your father?”
Delia’s breath caught. “Dad refused to hand Nora over. He told Conrad last night that he was done cooperating, that the treaty doesn’t require sacrificing his daughter’s life.
Conrad hung up on him.” She paused. “Dad left Iron River this morning with four wolves. He’s driving east, trying to get ahead of Conrad or at least arrive at the same time.
But Iron River is farther away, and the roads from our territory hit the worst of the storm first. I don’t think he’ll make it before Conrad does. ”
Gordon Keane, who had let Nora walk into that ceremony blind, was driving into a gale to protect the daughter he’d failed.
“Delia.” I kept my voice level because that was what I did, even when the ground was moving. “Thank you. I’ll tell Nora.”
“Tell her I’m sorry,” Delia said, and the line went dead.
? ? ?
I found Nora still under the lift. Her work light threw a yellow circle on the concrete around her boots, and I could hear her ratchet clicking in a steady rhythm.
I crouched beside the base plate and waited until she slid out.
Grease on her jaw. Hair escaping the knot.
Eyes reading my face before I said a word.
“What happened?”
“Delia called. Conrad left Copper Point before dawn with enforcers. She says he’s coming here.”
Nora sat up on the concrete. I watched the information move through her, watched her hands go still on the ratchet, watched her jaw set.
“How many?”
“At least three confirmed. Possibly six or more, including Lyle.”
“The storm.”
“He’s using it for cover. Shore road, not the highway.”
Nora looked past me toward the bay doors, where the first gusts were starting to rattle the metal frames. The harbor was disappearing behind a curtain of gray. Superior had gone dark and ugly, with whitecaps sheeting sideways off the rollers.
“Gordon?” she asked.
“On the road behind him. Delia says he refused to deliver you and he’s bringing Iron River wolves, but he’s farther out and the storm hits his route first.”
Something older and sadder crossed her face, the look of a woman recognizing that the man who failed her was finally trying to do the right thing and knowing it might not matter.
“Okay,” she said. She stood up, brushed concrete dust off her jeans, and looked at me with the direct focus that had made me want her from the first morning she crawled under Toivo’s hauler with a cracked fuel line and no patience for anyone. “What do we do?”
I reached for the mind link and pushed.
The call went out, silent to human ears but felt by every Pine Harbor wolf inside the territory.
Come in. Now. All of you. Hank answered first from the western road, then Arvid from the hill.
Bette’s acknowledgment came sharp and immediate from the office next door.
Jules felt it from the pack house kitchen, where he’d been making soup, and his response carried the focused calm of a Beta who had trained for exactly this.
“We close the yard,” I said. “Everything comes inside or gets lashed down. The pack house is too exposed, so everyone moves to the lower level under the office. It’s reinforced.
Concrete foundation, no windows facing the water, one door that locks from inside.
We put anyone who can’t fight down there. ”
“Bette and Hank,” Nora said.
“Bette, yes. Hank stays topside if his hip allows it.” I hated asking it of him with that bad hip, but he was a wolf who’d survived whatever had given him those frozen ears, and he’d rather bleed than hide.
Nora looked at me. Through the bond, I felt her fear beneath the resolve. She feared for Pine Harbor and the pack that had taken her in, fed her, and let her fix their broken things.
“Wade.” She touched my arm. “I’m staying in the yard.”
“I’m driving you inland. There’s an empty cabin beyond the territory line where you can wait this out.”
“The lifts, the doors, the generator. If the power goes out during the gale, you lose the bay doors and the emergency lights. I’m the only one who can keep them running.”
“The generator ran on Jules’s bypass two days ago. We can reconnect it if the power drops.”
“For a normal power drop, maybe. For a full gale with hostile wolves cutting cables and using the storm? You need someone who knows every circuit in this building.” She met my eyes. “I’m not being hidden in my own town.”
The bond between us blazed. My wolf wanted to pick her up and carry her to the truck and drive her inland to the nearest empty cabin and lock the door and stand in front of it until Conrad Sutherland rotted on the shore road.
Every protective instinct urged me to remove her from danger.
She was my mate. The Goddess had confirmed it, and I felt that truth in my body.
But she was also the woman who had walked away from two Alphas, a treaty, and a fated mate because nobody asked her what she wanted. If I overruled her now, I became exactly what she’d left.
“Damn it, Nora.”
“I know.”
I pulled her against me and held her hard enough that she made a small sound against my chest. The bond carried the fear I couldn’t hide while the wind was picking up and the pack was coming in and there wasn’t time for the conversation I wanted to have.
She was the most important thing in my life.
Losing her would break something in me that Pine Harbor needed whole.
She held on. Her calloused fingers dug into my back through the flannel.
“I’ll be careful,” she said.
“You’ll be more than careful. You help secure the yard, then you stay inside the bay unless I call for you. If I tell you to run, you run.”
“Wade.”
“That’s the deal. You keep the systems running, but once those doors are shut, you do not go outside unless I say so. Not for a cable, not for a cradle, not for anything.”
She pulled back enough to look at me. Her eyes were bright and furious and full of the stubborn, practical courage that made her Nora.
“Fine,” she said.
? ? ?
Jules arrived first, still wearing the apron he’d been cooking in, which he stripped off and left on the office doorknob as he came through.
Rafe was thirty seconds behind him, moving fast from the bunkhouse with his healing shoulder held stiffly against the wind.
Hank limped in from the western road with sleet already whitening his jacket.
Arvid came down the hill. Bette began moving the cash box, the manifest binder, and the first-aid kit to the reinforced lower level without being asked.