Chapter 14
MIA
For a long moment, neither Nash nor I move. The hollow is quiet. The morning light continues its cold, indifferent march across the ground. Lena Voss is still at the base of her tree and still dead, and none of the conversation changed that.
Echo climbs slowly up my leg to my shoulder and sits there. For once, his little klepto hands are empty.
“He’s going to use it,” I say. My voice sounds like mine again. Just barely. “What he just saw. You and me. He’s going to use it.”
“How?” Nash asks.
“I don’t know. But he’ll find a way to hurt one of us with it. Or someone else.”
“I don’t doubt he’ll try.”
“Which means you’re a target now.”
“I was already a target. I said no to him first, remember?”
I shake my head. “It’s not the same. Now, you’re a way to hurt me.”
He turns to look at me. “Mia—”
“We need to call Grey.” I reach for my phone.
Hands steady. Mind already moving into the next thing and the next thing because that’s the only way any of this is survivable.
“We need to report the body. And discuss the leak. It can’t be Lena.
She left before we did, which means she can’t have known we’d be here. We need—”
“Mia.”
“—to pack up camp and—”
“Mia.” He says my name loud and sharp. I stop talking. “Look at me.”
I look at him.
“What happened to Lena wasn’t your fault,” he says quietly.
The words find the exact crack I’ve been mortaring over for the last twenty minutes.
I look at Lena.
I look at Nash.
“I know,” I say.
Which is not the same as believing it. And he knows that too. But he doesn’t push it. He just nods once and reaches out and puts his hand briefly over mine—warm and solid and gone again before I can decide what to do with it.
We photograph everything first. Lena, the tree, the buttons, the disturbed leaves, the tracks around her body.
Then Nash shifts, and I watch as he does the hard work of digging a grave, knowing I should probably help but unable to make myself move.
Echo sits on my shoulder in the cold morning light, and somewhere in the trees, Ramsey is walking away on his own terms again, and the day has barely started, and it already weighs a thousand pounds.
We reach the car around midmorning. I shift, dress, and get in the driver’s seat. Nash doesn’t argue. He loads the packs into the back, circles to the passenger side, and folds himself in. Echo scurries into the backseat just before Nash shuts the door.
I pull onto the road before I’m finished with my seatbelt, dialing Grey while I drive.
Grey picks up on the second ring.
“Hey, how’s it going out there?” he asks.
“We’re coming back,” I say.
His tone changes instantly at the sound of mine. “What happened?”
“Call a meeting with Lexi, Andy, and the guys. But no one else.”
“Donahue?”
I hesitate. “No. Better keep the circle small for now.”
“What’s going on, Mia?”
I tell him about Lena first. His silence when I describe where we found her—at the base of a tree, arranged, her jacket missing three buttons that a raccoon has been depositing at our feet for two days—has a particular quality to it. Like someone who feels responsible.
I know exactly how he feels.
“Nash buried her to keep animals from…” I swallow and start over. “The body needs to be recovered,” I say. “Carefully. I’ll loop Donahue in for that part so he can put a team together.”
“I’ll contact her family. Have Andy put a service together.” His voice is controlled but tight. “What else?”
I tell him about Ramsey. The wolves he brought. The recruitment pitch delivered in the middle of the woods over Lena’s body like it was a perfectly reasonable place for a business meeting. The threat about Grey and Lexi not being safe inside the estate.
“Nash was right about his wolf.”
“The serum?”
“It has to be. But it’s not just that,” I say. “He has hex magic, Grey. Active, operational hex magic.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“For starters? His confidence wasn’t bluster. I know Ramsey, and he wasn’t bluffing. But also, the wards are compromised, Grey. We drove right through them on our way out here.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
“How confident are you that he has a hex witch helping him?”
“I’d stake the pack on it.” I take a curve without slowing. Nash reaches out and steadies my coffee cup in the cupholder without being asked. I don’t look at him. “Someone with real ability is working for him.”
“Davina,” Grey says.
“That’s my first thought too. But I don’t know. It could be someone we’ve never heard of.” I pause. “There’s something else. Something I need to tell you in person.”
A pause where he absorbs that. “How long until you get here?”
I glance at the GPS. It says almost three hours. “Two hours,” I say, pressing harder on the gas.
“We’ll be ready,” he says and ends the call.
The mountain road unspools ahead of us. The trees press in from both sides, and the sky above them is a hard blue, and everything looks exactly the same as it did when we drove up two days ago, and nothing is the same at all.
I call Donahue next. Give him the coordinates for Lena’s location and the specific instructions for how the recovery needs to happen; who goes, what they look for, how they document it before anything is moved. He listens without interrupting, which is one of the things I value most about him.
Before we hang up, we restructure three patrol routes to prioritize checking ward lines around the estate.
Then Lexi calls me, and I tell her everything I told Grey. She’s already heard it, so she mostly asks if we’re okay and whether or not she should call my dad.
“I appreciate the sentiment, but no,” I tell her. “I’ll catch up with him when I’m back.”
“Let me know if there’s anything else you need,” she says, and I know she just wants to feel useful.
“I will,” I promise her. “If Violet remembers anything else, let me know.”
“You’ll be my first call.”
By the time I hang up from that, we’re forty minutes from the city, and I have temporarily run out of calls to make. The silence that fills the car is different from the silence on the drive up. That kind of quiet had been soft. Anticipatory. Full of things neither of us had said yet.
This one has edges.
And I know, without having to ask, that none of it has to do with Lena or Ramsey or pack threats. This is about us. What happened last night. And what I said about it afterward.
Nash is looking out the passenger window. His elbow rests against the door, his jaw in his hand, and he’s watching the trees with an expression I can’t see from this angle but suggests brooding.
I focus on the road.
This is the right call, I tell myself. You have a pack to protect and a war to win, and whatever happened in those woods stays in those woods, and that is the only version of this that makes any sense.
My wolf makes a sound that is not agreement.
Stay out of it, I tell her.
She goes quiet. But she turns her face away from me, which is its own commentary.
Twenty minutes from the city, Nash says, without preamble: “The leak had to have known the exact coordinates for that camp.”
“Yes.” My voice sounds raw as I say it.
“Which means it was someone in that meeting or someone who had access to Donahue’s notes afterward.”
“The coordinates weren’t in the general patrol brief,” I say and let the rest of the sentence remain unspoken.
I can feel him looking at me then, trying to gauge my mental state as we both process the truth of it. Someone inside that conference room is the leak.
Nash says nothing, but I can’t let the roiling in my stomach win out. So eventually, I say, “I’ve been through everyone in that room. I keep getting stuck.”
“Because that would mean it’s someone you trust.”
“Of course it’s someone I trust.” The words come out sharper than I intend.
He nods. Doesn’t offer solutions or platitudes, which I appreciate.
This isn’t a problem that gets solved in a moving car.
It gets solved by going home and looking everyone in the face and using every instinct I have.
Determining the mole might not be as hard as I think, once I look them all in the eye.
The hardest part will be what I’ll have to do with that information once I have it.
I tighten my hands on the wheel.
The city appears ahead of us. Indigo Hills rising out of the basin in its glittering stubborn way, beautiful and brutal and mine.
I feel the transition physically. The moment the city closes around us like a hand.
The woods falling away. The person I was inside them, the one who said it wasn’t nothing for me either in the dark, the one who let him lay her down in the grass, the one who said okay and meant it with her whole body, receding like something I dreamed.
Good, I tell myself.
My wolf says nothing. She’s still giving me the silent treatment.
We pull into the estate just over two hours after leaving the trailhead. The gates open. Guards nod. Everything is exactly where I left it, but nothing is the same. Least of all me.
I park and cut the engine.
For one moment, we just sit there. The estate rising before us. The morning going on without us. Inside those walls, a room full of people I need to brief and decisions I need to make and a pack that needs its strategist to have her head entirely in the game.
“Mia,” Nash says.
“Don’t,” I say. Quietly. Not unkindly. “Not right now.”
A beat.
“Okay,” he says.
I get out of the car.
By the time Nash has grabbed his bag, Echo is somehow already sitting on the hood of the vehicle parked next to ours. He watches me get out with his small dark eyes and his folded hands and his expression of a creature who knows things he’s not going to share.
“Thank you,” I tell him because I don’t think I said it before. “For the buttons.”
He blinks.
I straighten my jacket. Square my shoulders. Walk toward the estate doors.
Behind me, I hear Nash following. His footsteps on the gravel, unhurried as always. And then, so quietly I almost miss it, he says, “I'll be here when you’re ready.”
I don’t turn around.
I walk through the doors and let them close behind me, and I go to work.