Chapter 5
Conner
I can still smell her on my skin. The shower’s running hot enough to fog the mirror, and it doesn’t matter.
She’s in my hands, on my shirt where it’s crumpled on the bathroom floor, caught in the collar where her fingers gripped the fabric.
Something warm and alive, like spring leaves and creek water, and underneath it a sweetness that isn’t perfume.
Skin. The way she tasted when my mouth was on her throat in that locked restroom with her legs around me, and neither of us pretending this was a good idea.
I stand under the water and try to think about anything else.
It doesn’t work. My wolf won’t let it. He’s pacing, agitated, fixated on a woman who walked out of the Railhead five hours ago and disappeared into the dark without giving me her number or her full name.
The fixation isn’t sexual… or not just sexual.
It’s deeper. A focus that doesn’t respond to logic.
I told him to stand down when I got home.
Told him again when I couldn’t sleep. Told him again at four in the morning when I gave up on sleep and sat on the porch instead, staring at the road as if she might walk up it.
He didn’t listen then. He’s not listening now.
I turn the water cold. Stand in it until the shock clears my head enough to function.
I dress. Jeans, boots, Henley. The leather bracelet—a thin cord, braided, the edges soft from a decade of wear. Maren made it for me when she was twelve. I haven’t taken it off since the day we buried her.
The drive to the compound takes twenty minutes on the ranch road. My truck could do it blind, which is useful because my focus keeps slipping. The look on her face afterward. Not satisfied. Not coy. Shaken. Like something had happened that she hadn’t expected and didn’t want.
I know the feeling.
Although I wanted it. I definitely wanted it.
The compound looks the way it’s looked my whole life.
The main house at the center—two stories of local rock and timber, wraparound porch, my grandfather’s design.
Bunkhouses flanking it. Equipment barn, meeting hall, training ground.
Twelve buildings laid out in concentric arcs, oriented for sight lines.
My grandfather built his home like a fortress and dressed it like a ranch.
Three generations later, we still maintain both functions.
I park at the main house and walk in through the kitchen. My mother’s at the stove, cooking eggs in the cast-iron skillet that’s older than I am. Sixty-two, still wiry, still seeing everything and commenting on ten percent of it.
“Morning,” she says without turning. “You look like you didn’t sleep.”
“Slept fine.”
“Hmm.” She plates the eggs. Doesn’t push, but I know she’s logged it. “Garrett’s in the study. Wants you before the morning round.”
I take coffee from the pot and head down the hall.
Past the pencil marks on the kitchen doorframe, three sets of lines tracking three kids’ heights.
The top one still reads MAREN: 5’1” FEB.
Four months before we lost her. I don’t pause at it.
I never pause at it. But my hand brushes the bracelet on my wrist as I pass, the way it does every time.
Garrett is behind the desk. Our father’s old room. Heavy wood, leather chair, ranch records on the shelves. Garrett fills the space the way our father never quite managed. Taller, broader, more settled. Same dark eyes as mine, but steadier.
“Sit down,” he says.
I drop into the chair opposite, ankle on knee. Garrett studies me for a beat, the automatic scan of an alpha reading his wolves.
“Two women arrived in town yesterday,” he says. “Driving a truck with out-of-state plates.”
I keep my expression neutral. “Okay.”
“One of them spent the day walking the main street. Went into a few shops, had coffee at Dutch’s, checked the notice board outside the hardware store.
Told the general store she was passing through on her way to Austin.
Then she spent the evening at the Railhead asking about ranch work.
” He pauses. Lets the silence do the work. “Jenny says you were there.”
Jenny. The bartender. The town’s unofficial intelligence network.
Fuck.
“I was,” I say. Because denying it would be stupid. “Talked to a few people.”
“Jenny says you talked to one person for most of the evening. Then you both disappeared toward the back for a while.”
The air in the study changes. Not a threat. Just a fact, laid down between us on our grandfather’s desk, and the fact is that Garrett knows exactly what happened in the back hallway of the Railhead, or close enough that the gap doesn’t matter.
“Was she one of the outsiders?” he asks.
“Could have been.” My voice comes out level, which costs me more than it should. “I’ll find out.”
Garrett holds my eyes for a beat. Then moves on. Not because he’s satisfied. Because he’s decided to deal with it later.
“The other woman spent the day in the hills. East of the compound.” He opens a folder on the desk—paper, because Garrett doesn’t trust anything with a screen. “Tate picked up a trail on the ridgeline after she’d already passed through.”
That gets my attention. “Hiking?”
“That’s what it looked like. Could be a recreational hiker who likes limestone country.” He pauses. “But she was on our ridgeline, Conner. The eastern approach. And she’s good enough that Tate didn’t catch her scent until she was already gone.”
I think about that. A tourist takes the marked trails. She doesn’t navigate along a pack compound’s eastern approach with enough skill to ghost past a sentry.
“So one’s asking about work in town, the other’s walking our perimeter,” I say.
“And you spent the evening with the first one.” Garrett doesn’t inflect it. Doesn’t need to. “I need to know who they are and why they’re here. Watch them. Quietly. Don’t confront.”
“You think they’re a threat?”
Garrett takes a moment, and when he speaks, the political alpha voice drops into something older. Something that lives closer to the bone.
“I think two strangers showed up in my territory, one of them asking questions and the other scouting my boundary, and the last time I ignored something that looked like coincidence, I buried our sister.”
The room goes quiet.
He doesn’t talk about Maren often. None of us does.
But Garrett carries her differently than I do.
I carry the memory of her last breath. He carries the weight of being the oldest. Twenty-one when it happened, old enough to have been watching her, old enough to have kept her off that trail.
The guilt ate him alive for a year. When he took the alpha seat, he built the policy around it: no magic-blooded wolves in Forrester territory.
Zero tolerance. Not out of hatred. Out of the specific, terrible knowledge that magic kills, and it killed the person he was supposed to protect.
“I’ll find out who they are,” I say.
He straightens. The alpha slides back into place over the brother. “Do that. And Conner… whatever happened at the Railhead, keep your head clear. I need my enforcer on this, not a man thinking with his—”
“I hear you.”
He lets it go. Not finished with it—Garrett is never finished with anything—but done for now.
“One more thing. Dawes spotted drifters in the Brennan hollow. Family, unaffiliated, camped by the creek. Check them out when you get a chance.”
“Tomorrow work?”
“Tomorrow’s fine. They’re not going anywhere.”
I stand and walk out before anything else shows on my face.
The morning round helps. Fence lines, watch logs, the physical rhythm of checking a territory that I know in my bones. Muscle memory takes over where my mind won’t cooperate, and by the time I reach the eastern watch post, I’ve almost gone five minutes without thinking about her.
Almost.
Tate’s at the trail junction, pacing. Eighteen years old, three months on watch duty, and the look on his face when he sees my truck tells me he’s been dreading this conversation.
“Walk me through it,” I say.
“I was on the eastern loop, standard sweep. Didn’t catch anything on the first pass. Found the scent on my return. Female, wolf-blooded, already hours cold. Two partial prints on the rock shelf.”
“That’s it?”
“She stayed off the soft ground,” he says. “Moved clean. I didn’t find much else.”
The embarrassment is eating him. His ears are red, and he won’t quite meet my eye.
“You found the trail,” I tell him. “That’s the part that matters.”
“I should’ve caught it sooner.”
“Maybe. But you caught it. Plenty of wolves with more time on rotation would’ve walked right past it.” I let that sink in. “Keep your eyes open on the eastern stretch. Run it twice today if you can.”
He nods. Steadies a little.
I leave him to it and walk the rest of the ridge myself. Her prints are sparse. Light footfall, careful placement. Whoever this woman is, she’s had training, or she’s spent years in rough terrain. Either way, she knew she was near the compound, and she moved like she didn’t want to be found.
I make a mental note and keep the assessment open.
By mid-morning, I’m done with the ridge and heading back toward the ranch road. I need fencing staples from the hardware store—a section of the south line has been shedding them—and the errand gives me a reason to swing through town.
The main street is quiet. Sunday. Dutch’s has a few trucks in the lot. I park outside the hardware store and get out.
And there she is.
Twenty yards up the street. Stepping out of the general store with a brown paper bag tucked under her arm. Jeans. Boots. A fitted jacket over a dark shirt—practical, nothing showy. Her hair is pulled back, and the morning sun makes it blaze.
My wolf stops so hard my step falters.
Not aggressive. Not territorial. Something deeper, something that reaches into the foundation of what I am and pulls. Every muscle in my body locks. The pull converges into a single point of focus—her—and the intensity is staggering.
She looks different from last night. Younger without the dress.
Sharper without the bar light softening her edges.
In daylight, she’s all clean lines and controlled movement: the way she stands with her weight balanced, the way her eyes sweep the street even while she’s adjusting the bag under her arm.
Vigilance, if I were being professional about it.
I’m not being professional. I’m standing on a sidewalk trying to remember how breathing works.
She turns. As if she felt me the way I feel her. Her head comes around, and her eyes find mine across the width of the street with an accuracy that has nothing to do with chance.
Recognition hits her face, and I watch what follows. Not warmth. Not the softness you’d expect from someone you were inside a few hours ago. The initial jolt of seeing me, a flush she can’t quite hide, and then a rapid, visible effort to contain it all.
Her chin lifts. Her weight shifts to the balls of her feet. The posture of a woman deciding how this is going to go.
Three seconds. Maybe four. It feels longer. The street between us might as well be a canyon.
The sun is on her face, highlighting her cheekbones.
I’m thinking about the sounds she made in that restroom.
I’m thinking about the way she bolted afterward.
I’m thinking that whatever this is—this thing that makes my wolf strain and my hands unsteady—it didn’t start in that restroom.
It started the second I saw her at the bar.
I should cross the street. Talk to her. Be the enforcer doing his job: who are you, why are you here, what do you want in my territory? Garrett gave me an assignment this morning. She’s standing right there. It would be so easy.
Nothing about this woman is easy.
I give her a nod. Small. Acknowledging.
She returns it—neutral, nothing—and turns away. Walks toward her truck without looking back. Dismisses me as if I’m a stranger she has no reason to acknowledge.
The rejection lands harder than it should.
My wolf makes a sound in my chest that I kill before it reaches my throat.
The shift crawls up my forearms, fur threatening under the skin, and I breathe through it the way I’ve breathed through a thousand shifts: slow in, slow out, forcing the animal down by will alone.
I keep walking. Don’t stop. Don’t approach. Don’t look back.
She’s one of the outsiders. My brother wants her watched. My wolf won’t let me stop thinking about her. And whatever happened between us last night wasn’t just a hookup, because I’ve had hookups, and none of them left me standing on a sidewalk with the ground shifting under my boots.
I get in my truck. Close the door. Sit with the engine off.
In the side mirror, I can see her loading the bag into her truck bed. She hasn’t left yet. And her hand is on her chest—right over the heart—a gesture so unconscious, so unguarded, that it tells me everything her face didn’t.
She feels it too.
I start the engine and pull away. My wolf watches her in the mirror until the road curves, and she disappears from view, and even then, he doesn’t stop looking.
And that scares me more than anything.