Chapter 8 #2
“That’s not a man who wants territory,” she says quietly. “That's not a man at all. That’s a monster who wants to cause pain.”
“Territory and pain,” I say. “Both can be true.”
She looks at me. “I guess Franco and Vincenzo were proof of that.”
“You managed to stop them,” I point out.
“This feels different. Ramsey and I…we were friends. Family even. This hits harder. It’s personal.”
“Is that why he’s targeting you?”
She blinks. “What do you mean?” In that instant, whatever’s behind her eyes shutters, and I know she knows.
“He didn’t call the alphas, Mia. He called you.”
She sighs. “Yeah. He thinks I’m the weak link.”
“I don’t believe that for a second, and neither do you.”
“It could be true,” she protests. “Take out the strategist and—”
“Uh-uh. You forget I’ve seen you in action. It only took me one night to see what a force you are to be reckoned with.”
Her eyes soften. In them, I see that night we shared. The promise I made when I walked away. Mia needed to fight that war on her own. But I made no such promises about this one.
“He wants you to work for his side, doesn’t he?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer, but we both know I’m right.
“Ramsey’s had a lifetime to see your strength,” I add. “That he chose you to target—to recruit—speaks volumes.”
“When we were kids, he was always a live wire, but… back then, I could wrangle him,” she says quietly.
There’s pain and nostalgia in her eyes now, like she both loves and hates these memories she shares with him.
“If he went too far, I could yank him back. Sometimes with a lecture. Sometimes with a kick in the ass. But this is going to be harder than that.”
“Harder because of that,” I say.
“Yes. And the serum will make him more difficult.”
“But it won’t last forever,” I tell her, and my tone makes her straighten.
“What do you mean?”
“Artificial dominance without the psychological foundation to support it does things to a wolf’s aggression that are hard to predict and harder to control.”
“We saw that,” she admits. “With Grey.”
That gives me pause. “It’s hard to believe Grey would take something like that.”
“He didn’t. He absorbed it when he—” She breaks off, looking quickly away.
“When he killed Franco?” I finish, brows raised.
Her head whips up. “You know.”
“Darling, everyone knows.”
She looks sheepish. “We kept it quiet for Lexi’s sake. Until the pack accepted her as the heir.”
“She seems pretty solid to me,” I say.
“Yeah, they’ve really come around, especially after how she’s dismantled the old hierarchy. We’re having elections for city leadership.”
“Progressive. And Grey? He seems okay now.”
She nods. “He and Lexi had to merge their alpha power to hold it without it killing them or driving them mad. But Ramsey doesn’t have a mate to merge with. And even if he did, he’s not a born alpha, so I doubt that would even help.”
“I agree. And from what I’ve seen, if there’s nowhere for that power to go, his wolf will deteriorate pretty fast.”
“You sound like you have experience with this. I thought you hadn’t heard of the serum.”
“Not a serum. But a few years ago, a wolf acquired alpha status through a hex rather than natural ascension. He lasted eight months before his own pack couldn’t manage him anymore.”
“What happened to him?”
“His second put him down.”
She’s quiet for a moment.
“So, Ramsey’s on a timer,” she says.
“Possibly. Which makes him more dangerous in the short term, not less. A wolf who knows he’s running out of time—"
“Takes bigger swings.” She picks up her wine again. “We need to find him before he takes one we can’t recover from.”
“Yes.” I pause. “I've been thinking about the abandoned camp your scouts found. The one with the human girl’s ID.”
“From the pictures, it looks like he established himself there pretty well before moving on,” she says.
“I think he used it as a meeting point for recruits. He would have needed a place he could stay in long enough to put out the call and have them arrive to meet him.”
“Do you think more recruits might still show up there?”
“It’s possible. If they didn’t get the change of venue in time. But more importantly, someone from Ramsey’s side might drop in to see if anyone arrived there by mistake.”
“It’s a long shot,” she says, sitting forward slightly. The strategist clicking back into place behind her eyes. “Very possible no one ever shows up. Which makes it a waste of resources for scout patrols. Especially when we still have so much ground to cover elsewhere.”
“But if someone from Ramsey’s side does decide to check it out…”
“They could lead us back to his camp.”
I don’t answer, waiting for her to think it through. This only works if she comes to it on her own.
“It might be days before anyone shows,” she says at last. “You’re talking about a stakeout.”
“Yes.”
She looks at me. I look back. We both know what a mission like that together means, and neither of us is going to say it right now because right now it’s strategy.
“I can’t afford to lose any patrols for that long,” she says.
“Neither can I.”
“But it needs to be someone we can trust. Considering the possible leak.”
“Agreed.”
She licks her lips, and my cock hardens at the sight. For a second, I forget about Ramsey and war. All I can think of is tasting her again.
“You think it should be us,” she says, gaze steady on mine.
“What do you think?” I ask.
Coward. I can’t even bring myself to admit that’s what I desperately want. Her and me. Alone in the woods. For days. Nothing else to do but—
Echo shifts between us on the couch. His eyes flash open, right at me in a pointed glare as if to say, “Not on my watch,” and I wonder if the little shit can read minds.
Mia reaches out absently and scratches behind his ears. He leans into it with his eyes half closed again. She softens with affection, and I doubt she even realizes she’s done it. Or notices the fact that she’s stopped thinking about what happened tonight for just a moment.
I notice.
I notice everything about her, the problem being that the more I see, the less interested I am in keeping this professional, as she insisted.
“We'll talk to Grey about it tomorrow,” she says. But she doesn't reach for a reason to send me home either.
So, I stay a bit longer.
The wine gets finished. A pizza gets delivered.
The conversation drifts off strategy, off Ramsey, off everything, heavy into the quieter territory of people who are getting to know each other without meaning to.
I tell her about Crossvale and what it looked like when I inherited it and what it took to build the war college from an underfunded training ground into something real.
She tells me about the first time she ran a solo operation at seventeen to expose a carjacking ring and how badly it went and how she rebuilt the plan from scratch and ran it again three weeks later and got it right.
She laughs twice more before midnight. Real laughs, not the controlled social ones.
My wolf is insufferably smug about this.
At some point, Echo migrates from the couch to her lap, and she falls quiet, one hand resting on his back, looking out at the city. The night is deep now. The glittering lights of the city look like stars.
“Thank you,” she says. “For staying. For letting it just be this.”
I hold her gaze. “I'll always stay if you let me.”
I can’t promise I’ll just let it be this, though.
She studies me for a moment before looking back at the window. She doesn’t deflect. Doesn’t build a wall around my words. Just lets them sit there in the room with us, which, from Mia, is its own kind of answer.
I stand eventually. Find my jacket. Echo watches me from her lap with his dark eyes like a small judgmental god.
At the door, I pause. She’s still on the couch, legs tucked beneath her, looking at the city.
“Get some sleep,” I say.
“I'll try,” she says.
Which, from her, I'm learning, is as close to, I’ll do what you say as she gets.