Chapter 11
MIA
Iwake to the soft light of dawn with pine needles in my fur.
Echo, who spent the night snuggled against my back, has already slunk off in search of his own shenanigans.
Despite the light layer of frost on the ground, I’m perfectly warm.
It’s partly the reason I opted to sleep in wolf form.
The other part is that I’m not sure I trusted myself around Nash as a human.
Nash is still sleeping under the oak twenty feet away.
His wolf is large and dark, barely visible against the shadows and the tree roots, breathing slow and even.
I know the exact moment I became aware of him during the night—sometime around two a.m. when his wolf shifted in his sleep and mine lifted her head and tracked him automatically before I could stop her.
Don’t, I’d told her.
She’d put her head back down. But she’d kept her ears angled toward him for the rest of the night.
Traitor.
I shift back to human, pull on my clothes, and take stock.
The hollow is undisturbed. The supply route is silent.
I check my phone and find a text from my dad, asking when I was planning to tell him I’d gotten him a babysitter.
Whoops. I fire off a reply with apologies and exclamation points, but I also know he won’t hold it against me in the end.
He understands the risk of collateral damage more than anyone.
My heart aches, and I put the phone away.
Nash’s wolf stirs. Not awake yet but close.
I move quickly.
My pack is at the base of the pine I slept under. I find the Null vial in the inner pocket where I always keep it when traveling—small, dark glass, the hex magic inside it faintly warm against my fingertips. I uncork it. Tip it toward my mouth.
And stop.
I’m not sure how long I hesitate. Long enough for the pre-dawn grey to shift almost imperceptibly toward something lighter. Long enough for my wolf to notice what I’m holding and go stiff with an opinion she’s not keeping to herself.
It’s just that out here, it feels different. In my apartment, in the city, with the pack and the meetings and the constant noise of everything that needs doing, taking the Null is maintenance. Practical. Like vitamins.
Out here, it feels like a choice I’m making against something specific.
Against him.
I take it anyway.
Cork the vial. Tuck it back into its hiding place. Tell my wolf to mind her business.
She doesn’t, but that’s nothing new.
By the time Nash shifts and gets dressed, I have a fire built and a reason to be looking at something that isn’t him. The morning light is coming through the canopy in long gold shafts, and the woods smell like cold earth and woodsmoke, and I am completely, professionally fine.
I hear him moving behind me.
Then nothing for a few minutes. He’s gone into the trees, I realize, and comes back carrying something that turns out to be a rabbit he’s apparently already cleaned and dressed, because of course he has. Nash Cross woke up in the woods, and his first instinct was to provide.
My wolf notices this with entirely too much enthusiasm.
Stop it, I tell her.
She merely smirks—and preens.
“Hungry?” he asks.
“Depends on what you expect me to do with that. I don’t do bunny sushi.”
He snorts and produces a small folding pan from his pack with the matter-of-fact efficiency of someone who has done this a hundred times and settles it over the fire. “Give me twenty minutes.”
I watch him cook, noting the sinewy muscle along his forearm as he handles the pan, and try to locate the professional detachment I arrived here with. It seems to have wandered off somewhere around mile four of yesterday’s run and hasn’t come back.
This is fine, I tell myself. You’re an adult. He’s a colleague. You’ve worked alongside attractive men before, without completely losing your mind.
My wolf makes a sound that is not agreement.
Twenty minutes later, the rabbit smells extraordinary. He’s done something to it; sprinkled it with herbs from I don’t know where. And the smell of it in the cold morning air is aggressively good.
“I have to admit I’m impressed,” I say.
He looks up.
“People don’t often cook for me.” I wrap both hands around my terrible instant coffee that’s still better than none at all. “I mean, Crow does sometimes. But that’s Crow. He force-feeds everyone, and you can’t stop him.” I pause. “The point is it’s a short list.”
Nash’s expression is warm. “I’ll consider it an honor.”
“Don't make it into something.”
“I’m not.” But the corner of his mouth does.
He hands me a plate—he brought a plate. Of course he did— and I take a piece of the rabbit and bite into it, and it’s so good that the sound I make is entirely involuntary, and also, I realize approximately half a second too late, sounds nothing like someone eating breakfast.
Nash stares at me intently from across the fire.
I keep my eyes on my plate as a flush creeps into my cheeks. “It’s good,” I say. Neutral. Informational. Or it would have been if I hadn’t completely undermined that neutrality by the previous three seconds.
I can’t remember the last time I blushed. Or was this unsure of myself. It’s excruciating.
“Thank you,” he says. His voice is extremely controlled.
I take another bite and am careful to remain mute through the process.
I chew and swallow, then ask, “You cook like this often?”
“When I’m in the field, yes.” A pause. His mouth tilts up. “I find it’s a good argument for bringing me along.”
“Consider it made.” I take another bite with significantly more composure. “Don’t let it go to your head.”
He looks at me across the fire with an expression that’s somewhere between amused and something else entirely. “I want to be that for you, you know.”
“Be what for me?” I ask, startled.
“The guy who proves a man can want you without trying to own you.”
I don’t answer.
Is this what deer feel like when headlights paralyze them?
“You grew up surrounded by men who took and demanded and didn’t ask or apologize,” he says quietly. It’s not a question. Just a statement of something he’s observed. “I know that’s not all of it. But I know it’s part of why you keep everyone at arm’s length.”
The words land somewhere he was never supposed to have access to.
“Nash—”
“I'm not asking you to trust me because I say so,” he continues. "I'm asking for the chance to show you the difference.” He holds my gaze. “That’s all. Just the chance.”
I look at my plate.
This is the problem, I think. This right here. He doesn’t push. He just shows up, proving himself, and then waits.
And I don’t know what to do with a man who does that. My entire defensive architecture was built to withstand men who think they’re entitled to a woman. I have no fortifications against one who simply offers.
“Eat your rabbit,” I say finally.
He smiles. Looks back at his plate. Like he knows he made headway in whatever ground assault he’s quietly waging on my defenses.
And somehow that’s worse than if he’d pushed.
We split up for the morning patrol as planned.
I take the eastern ridge, he takes the western, and we agree to meet back at camp for midday.
I opt to patrol in wolf form and spend the next three hours alone in the trees doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing: searching for tracks, checking the supply route from different angles, noting the places where Ramsey’s wolves would logically cache supplies if they were still using this area.
I find nothing.
What I do find, approximately forty minutes in, is that, without Nash nearby, instead of feeling more like myself again, I feel off balance.
You miss him, my wolf observes.
I do not.
You've checked the direction of camp four times.
That’s situational awareness.
You’re adorable.
Go chase a squirrel.
Nash is already at camp when I return, both of us back in human form. He’s built the fire back up and has water heating in a small pot. He looks up when I come through the tree line, and my heart gives a little triple-beat rhythm at the sight of his handsome face. Something in my stomach flutters.
Hunger, I tell myself.
“Anything?” he asks.
“Nothing. You?”
“Nothing.” He hands me a cup of hot water and a packet of something that turns out to be decent tea. “Told you it might take a few days.”
“You were right.”
“I’m going to need you to say that again.”
“I will absolutely not.”
He grins. I drink my tea.
Echo materializes from somewhere in the canopy above us and drops directly onto Nash’s shoulder with a thump that would have startled most people. Nash doesn’t flinch. Just reaches up and lets Echo sniff his hand.
“He’s accepted you,” I say.
“I’m honored.”
“Don’t be. He once accepted a park ranger’s granola bar and then stole her wedding ring in exchange.”
“Efficient,” Nash says.
Echo deposits something small and shiny into Nash’s palm—a button, silver—and then leaps away, chittering as he disappears into the brush.
After a lunch of instant noodles, we settle in to watch and wait. Objectively, it should be boring.
It isn’t.
We talk for a while. About the scouting reports, about Ramsey’s likely movement patterns, about whether the absence of activity means he’s truly abandoned this area or is simply being careful.
I tell him about Ramsey using Lexi as a double agent. Or trying to.
He tells me about his aunt Jenna. The rugged highlands of Ontario where he grew up. How he learned to trap rabbits from her.
After that, we stop talking and just watch.
An hour in, I notice he’s shifted slightly closer to me.
I don’t say anything.
Another hour and our shoulders are almost touching.
I look down at the supply route, forcing myself to focus on that instead of Nash’s closeness. But now, my shoulder is approximately two inches from his, and inside, my wolf is sitting up straight with an air of tremendous satisfaction that I am choosing to ignore.
He moved closer, she points out.
I know.
You didn’t move away.
I'm observing the route.
You haven’t looked at the route in eleven minutes.