Chapter 5
Chapter Five
REESE
Two weeks. Fourteen mornings waking up with Gabi Laurent's cold skin pressed against my chest. Her bear runs cool the way mine runs hot, so we meet somewhere in the middle that feels like the exact right temperature for sleeping, for living, for anything.
She writes in the morning. I hike up to the tower for my shift, glass the ridgelines, check the radio, come back at dusk.
Somewhere in there the days started feeling like a shape I recognize.
Coffee before dawn. Her pen scratching in the notebook while I lace my boots.
The walk back down the mountain getting faster every afternoon because my bear can't stand the distance anymore.
Nash would call me whipped. Nash can go to hell.
Sterling texted yesterday. Just a question mark, which from Sterling means he's heard something and he's waiting for me to explain. Mabel, probably. That woman has a network the CIA would envy.
Sterling
***
I'm fine.
Sterling
Wasn't asking if you're fine. Mabel says there's a woman.
Mabel needs a hobby.
Sterling
She also says the woman's scent is unusual. Porter picked it up at the diner last week. Says it's not any sleuth he knows.
That one sat in my gut for a while. Porter's nose is sharp. If he picked up Gabi's scent from whatever she left on a diner booth, the whole sleuth knows by now that there's an unknown shifter on Ridgewood territory.
She's not a threat.
Sterling
Didn't say she was. But I need to know what she is, Reese. That's not optional.
He's right. The Alpha doesn't get to have unknown shifters in his territory, especially not after the Crescent mess. Sterling lost years off his life during that confrontation. He's not going to let something slide just because his nephew caught feelings.
I'll tell him. Soon. When Gabi's ready to be known.
Tonight I come down the mountain early because the sky looks wrong. Clouds building purple over the San Juans, wind shifting west. Storm coming. The cabin windows glow warm in the gray light, and when I push through the door, Gabi's at the table with her notebook open and her reading glasses on.
She looks up. Smiles. My bear does the thing where he lies down flat inside my chest, content, done for the day.
"Early."
"Storm's coming." I hang my jacket on the hook by the door, next to hers. Our boots sit in a row on the mat. Our mugs on the shelf. Small domestic things that make my throat tight every time I notice them. "You eat?"
"There's soup."
I ladle a bowl. Sit across from her at the table. Her notebook is spread open and the page is dense with her handwriting, small and tilted left. French and English mixed together on the same line.
"What're you working on?"
She takes her glasses off. Sets them on the table, folds her hands on top of the notebook. "The last chapter."
The soup goes thick in my throat. "Last."
"The book is almost done, Reese."
She says it plain. Not sad, not dramatic.
A fact delivered in the steady voice she uses when she's trying not to feel something too hard.
The book is almost done. The whole reason she came to this mountain, the only reason she rented this cabin, the project that brought her into my scent range and changed every single thing about my life.
"And when it's done?"
Her eyes hold mine. Pale and clear. "The lease runs through October."
October is six weeks away. The Settling starts in November. My bear will start pulling toward the Long Sleep, toward the den, toward the mate he's already chosen whether the paperwork is done or not.
"Six weeks."
"That's the lease."
Something cold moves through me, and for once it isn't her scent. "What happens after the lease."
Gabi picks up her glasses. Puts them back on. Looks at her notebook. "I go back to Montreal. Find a publisher. Try to get the stories into the world so somebody, somewhere, knows my family existed."
The words are rehearsed. She's been saying them to herself for months, probably. Long before I showed up on her porch with an owl carved from bone. This was always the plan. Come, write, leave. Put the dead into print and then go home to an empty apartment and be the last of something forever.
My bowl scrapes against the table as I push it back.
"So this is temporary."
"Reese."
"You came here to write an ending. That's what the book is. A record that says your people were real and now they're gone." The words taste wrong coming out. "You're writing your own extinction."
She stands up. The chair scrapes the floor. "My mother died choosing extinction because there was nobody left. My grandmother died the same way. What am I supposed to do, pretend there's another option?"
"There is another option."
"What, this?" She gestures between us. Her jaw is set.
The grief is right there, so close to the surface I can smell it mixing with her scent, salt and ice and something broken underneath.
"A grizzly and a polar bear? My bloodline doesn't survive that.
My children wouldn't be what I am. The line ends either way. "
The sentence lands in my chest like an axe.
Because she's right.
I'm grizzly. She's polar. Whatever cubs we'd have, they wouldn't be polar bears.
Her grandmother's stories would live in a book, but the thing itself, the white bear in moonlight, the bloodline that came south from the Arctic and survived alone for a hundred years, that dies with Gabi Laurent regardless of what I do about it.
She's been carrying this. The whole time. Through the firewood and the carvings and the sex and the mornings where she pressed her face into my neck and breathed. She's been carrying the fact that choosing me means choosing the end of her kind.
"I didn't come here to fall in love." Her voice cracks. The first time I've heard it crack. "I came here to finish the record. To write it down. To make sure somebody knows, and then to go home and be alone because that's what the last of something does."
"That's not what the last of something does."
"You don't get to tell me that." Her eyes are bright. Wet. Furious. "You have thirty bears in a valley. You have brothers and an Alpha and a sleuth that's been whole for a hundred and forty years. You don't know what it's like to be the only one."
The cabin goes quiet except for the wind picking up outside. Rain starting. Tapping the glass.
She's right. Again. About all of it.
My bear is howling inside me, raging at the idea of her leaving, of six weeks becoming a countdown.
He wants to mark her. Claim her. Drag her to Sterling's clearing and make it permanent before she can talk herself into walking away.
He's furious, possessive, every territorial instinct firing at once, and none of that is useful right now.
"Gabi."
"Don't." She wipes her eyes with the heel of her hand. Hard. Angry at herself for crying. "Don't stand there looking at me like you can fix this. You can't fix it. Nobody can fix it. There aren't enough of us left to fix."
I stand very still. My hands are in fists at my sides, not from anger but from the effort of not reaching for her when she's told me not to.
"You're right that I don't know what it's like." My voice comes out lower than I mean it to. Rougher. "You're right about the bloodline. You're right that I can't make you something you're not."
She watches me with her arms crossed over her chest, hugging herself.
"But you're wrong about the record." I grab my jacket off the hook. Shove my arms through the sleeves. "A record of who your people were isn't an ending. It's a gift. And the woman who writes it gets to decide if she's the last chapter or the first one."
Her mouth opens. Nothing comes out.
I walk out into the rain.
The trail up to the tower is mud and loose rock in the dark.
I take it at a pace that's punishment for my knees and not nearly enough punishment for the rest of me.
Rain soaks through my jacket. My bear rages underneath my ribs, clawing, demanding I turn around, go back, put my mouth on the place where her shoulder meets her neck and make it so she can't leave.
I don't turn around.
At the tower I strip soaked. Stand on the catwalk in the rain and let the cold beat some sense into my skin. Below me, a mile down the slope, her light burns steady through the storm.
She's leaving. In six weeks she'll pack her notebooks and her reading glasses and the bone owl I carved her, and she'll drive down off this mountain, and my bear will never recover from it.
I stand in the rain until I can't feel my hands. Then I go inside, lie on my cot, and don't sleep until the light in her window finally goes dark at four in the morning.