Chapter 10 #2
“Actually, the story behind the pitch is that everyone told me to sell the land and walk away. That it was a liability. That I should take the money and relocate my pack somewhere we could start fresh.” I pause.
“But I’d spent five years before that running operations for three different packs as a contracted soldier.
I was good at it. I was also watching good wolves get killed because they’d never been taught how to survive an op. ”
“So, you built the school.”
“I built the school.” I glance at her. “And I filled it with runaways and rejects.”
“I didn’t know that part.”
“Not many do. Our allies don’t need to know who our soldiers were before. Only what they’re capable of now.”
“That’s the pitch,” she says with a smile.
“That’s the pitch,” I agree. “It cost everything I had for the first four years. There were two winters where I genuinely didn’t know if we’d make it to spring.
I taught most of the classes myself because I couldn’t afford to hire anyone.
” Something in me loosens at the admission.
I don’t usually tell people about those winters.
No heat. Minimal rations. A leaky roof. A lot of outcast wolves who took their frustrations out on each other.
“My first year, I had eleven students. Three of them are now alphas of their own packs. Marcus is my second in command. Two are on the Black Moon Pack alpha’s security detail. ”
“No shit.” She’s watching me now instead of the road. Just briefly. “You’re proud of them.”
“More than anything else I’ve done.”
“More than the alliances? The territory? The reputation?”
I can’t help lifting a brow at that. “You mean the reputation that made you call me a monster the first time we met?”
She grins. “Fine. Not a monster. Prepotente.”
I shake my head, fairly certain I don’t want to know the meaning of that word.
So, I just say, “Everything else I’ve achieved was downstream of those eleven wolves,” I say.
“Everything I have now came from deciding not to sell. To see it through with them. And from us not killing each other,” I add.
She looks back at the road. Something in her expression has changed; the professional mask replaced by something more unguarded. Like she’s seeing something in me she didn’t know existed and isn’t sure yet what to do with it.
“The night we met,” I begin.
She stills.
“You made me vow to leave the city without harming Franco. All to protect the innocents that might get hurt in the crossfire. You were willing to give up your own happiness to protect them.”
A beat. Then: “You remember that.”
“I remember everything about that night.”
“It was two years ago.”
“I’m aware of how long ago it was, Mia.” I let that sit for a moment.
“I remember the way your dress tied at the back of your neck. The way your skin shone in the light when I took it off you. The way you said my name as you came. I remember you told me Indigo Hills was worth saving. And I agreed because you were worth it to me.”
She’s staring at the road with the focused intensity of someone who is working hard at not reacting. But I can hear her heartbeat. Smell her arousal.
“I remember,” I say quietly, “that you made me promise to leave and never come back. And I remember deciding on the drive back to Crossvale that it was the last promise of that kind I’d ever make you.”
The road ahead curves into deep shadow under the canopy. She takes the curve without slowing.
“Nash,” she says. Her voice is careful. Controlled. But fraying at the edges.
“I’m not asking you for anything,” I say. “I just wanted you to know it wasn’t nothing. That night. For me.”
She doesn’t say anything for a long moment.
Then, so quietly I almost miss it: “It wasn’t nothing for me either.”
My wolf goes very, very still. I look back at the tree line, terrified of spooking her. I don’t push. I just let those words exist between us, real and unhurried, all the way to the other side of the mountain.
According to the GPS, we’re twenty minutes out when I hear it. A sound from the backseat. Small. Shuffling. Followed by what is unmistakably the crinkling of a wrapper.
I turn around.
Echo is sitting in the center of the backseat amid the packs and gear with a protein bar he has apparently liberated from the outer pocket of my bag and is eating it with the tranquil satisfaction of a small child with a sweet treat.
He looks at me.
I look at him.
“How long have you been back there?” I ask.
He blinks once.
“The whole time,” Mia says. She hasn’t turned around. Her shoulders are shaking slightly. “He was under my coat when I loaded the car. I felt him get in.”
“And you didn’t think that information was worth sharing?”
“I wanted to see how long it would take you to notice.”
I face forward. The fact that I didn’t notice is deeply unsettling. “I’m starting to wonder if the raccoon is more than he seems.”
“He does what he wants,” she says, laughing at whatever expression I’m wearing. “You get used to it.”
Echo finishes the protein bar and deposits the wrapper on the center console between us with the deliberate care of someone leaving a receipt.
Or a calling card. Then he climbs forward onto the console itself, surveys the dash screen showing our coordinates, and makes a small sound I choose to interpret as approval of the route.
“He’s navigating now,” I say.
“Don’t give him ideas.”
The trailhead is a gravel pullout off a fire road twelve miles from the nearest paved surface.
If Mia’s concerned about off-roading in her nice car, she doesn’t show it.
Nor does she slow down nearly as much as I would have expected when we leave the asphalt behind.
In a cloud of dust, we park, load our packs, and I check the coordinates against the scout report one final time while Mia stretches her arms over her head and looks at the tree line with an expression I’ve never seen on her before.
Yearning. Hungry.
And I realize with a pull low in my gut that I want her to look at me like that.
Echo drops from her shoulder to the ground, sniffs the air with great authority, and disappears into the undergrowth.
“He'll find camp,” she says.
“You trust a raccoon to navigate old-growth forest?”
“I trust Echo to do whatever he decides to do and for it to somehow work out.” She looks at me sideways. “We have about eight miles to cover. The light’s good for another few hours. Care to stretch your legs a bit before heading to our destination?”
“Lead the way.”
She holds my gaze for one moment. Something passes through her expression that I don’t quite catch before she turns to face the trees.
And strips.
She peels out of her leggings before I can fully check myself and look away. The sight of her curved ass is enough to make me instantly hard. I jerk my head to the right and concentrate on pulling my shirt off. Then my pants.
When I’m done, I stuff my clothes into my pack and zip it again. From the sounds of it, Mia’s already done the same.
I dare another glance at her just in time to watch her shift.
One moment, she’s standing at the trailhead with her pack at her feet, and the next, her wolf is there—deep red, almost auburn in the light, bigger than I expected, though that’s somehow not surprising at all.
She shakes herself once, looks back at me over her shoulder with pale green eyes that are entirely her, grabs her pack in her teeth, and takes off at a run.
I shift, my wolf practically bursting out of me, and follow at her heels.
Eight miles through dense forest with Mia’s wolf is an experience I don’t have adequate language for.
She’s fast. Faster than me over the first mile, which costs her nothing and me a great deal of fucking pride.
My wolf pushes harder to close the gap, and she feels it and pushes back, and for a long stretch, we’re just running full out; no mission, no strategy, nothing but speed and the mountain air and the forest floor under our paws.
Her wolf is extraordinary. Wild in a way her human self keeps carefully contained, joyful in a way I suspect she’d deny if she could. She takes a creek crossing in one leap that should have been impossible for anyone else.
But it’s not the speed or the joy that undoes me.
It's the moment, somewhere around mile four, when her wolf slows beside mine and simply runs beside me. Close enough that I can feel the warmth of her. Her wolf turns her head and looks at mine with an expression that isn’t strategy or careful management of what she’s willing to give.
It’s recognition.
My wolf knows it immediately. This wolf. This one specifically. Something that has nothing to do with reason and everything to do with a force older than either of us, pressing up through the ground like roots finding water.
Not a mate bond. But nearly.
She feels it too. I know because she runs slightly ahead again after that. Not far. Just enough.
And not for the first time since I met Mia Reyes, I am utterly confused that she’s not my fated mate. And I desperately want her to be.
We find Ramsey’s abandoned camp in a natural hollow in the hillside just below the supply route.
I bypass it and climb the hillside, looking for higher ground with better sight line.
Near the top, I find a spot with natural cover that’s close enough to the thick trees for us to disappear quickly if we need to.
Echo is already there when we arrive, sitting on a flat rock near the center of the hollow with a silver button deposited in front of him like an offering on an altar.