Chapter 13
Conner
I take her to the swimming hole on Tuesday.
It’s a shit idea. The swimming hole is mine.
The one place I haven’t brought anyone since Maren.
But for some reason, I’ve wanted to show her ever since I told her about it.
I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
So here I am at the motel at nine in the morning like some lovesick pup, telling myself it’s just a day trip.
My wolf knows better. He’s been restless since I woke up, pacing within me, pushing heat into my hands, making my skin feel too tight.
The closer I get to her, the worse it gets.
When she comes out of the motel room in jeans and a tank top with her hair in a braid, I feel my canines start to lengthen.
I lock him down, but not before a low sound rumbles out of me; not quite a growl, not quite anything I can explain.
She hears it. Her eyes snap to mine. Something behind them flickers… recognition, maybe. Like she knows exactly what that sound means.
“Morning,” she says, climbing into the truck.
“Morning.” My voice comes out rough. I clear my throat. “Ready?”
“You’re not going to tell me where we’re going?”
“I told you where we’re going. The swimming hole.”
“You told me it’s not on any map and you can’t find it from the road. That’s not directions. That’s a kidnapping disclaimer.”
“You want directions? Head south on the county road for six miles. Turn left at the dead oak with the fence post through it. Follow the creek bed for a quarter mile. Look for the gap in the trees where the rock shelf drops. Climb down. Try not to break your ankle.”
“Charming.”
“I do my best.”
We drive south with the windows down. She’s got her arm on the window frame, face turned to the wind, and in the side mirror I catch her expression: open, unguarded, the tension she carries in her shoulders eased back for the first time since I’ve known her.
My wolf settles at the sight. Not calm… watching. The stillness of an animal that’s found something worth being patient for.
“So,” she says, turning back to me. “Your brother runs the ranch. What’s your job? Officially.”
“Enforcer.”
“Which means what, exactly?”
“No different from any other pack. When somebody’s squatting on our boundary, or a stray wolf is making trouble, or Garrett needs a situation handled without it becoming a political shit-show, I’m the one who goes.”
“The muscle.”
“The muscle with a brain. Garrett’s the politician. I’m the one who actually gets his boots dirty.”
“You sound thrilled about that.”
“Garrett’s good at what he does. He keeps the pack stable, manages the politics, handles the outside world. I don’t have the patience for that crap. I’d rather be on the ground.”
“Do you like it, though?”
I glance at her. “Like what?”
“Being the enforcer. Is it something you chose, or something that happened to you?”
Nobody’s asked me that before. Not in those words. Garrett assigned the role. I filled it. The question of choosing it never came up.
“Both, I guess. After Maren died, I needed something to do with….” I tap my chest. “With all of this. The anger. The grief. Being an enforcer gave me a way to use it. Protect the territory. Make sure what happened to her doesn’t happen to anyone else.”
“So the job is the grief.”
The observation surprises me. I feel my wolf stir, not defensive but raw, the animal responding to a truth the man doesn’t want to acknowledge.
“That’s one way to put it,” I say.
“What’s another way?”
“That I’m good at reading terrain, I can track a wolf across dry rock, and I hit hard enough to end most fights in one move. Not everything has to be psychological, Willow.”
“Sure.” She’s almost smiling. “And the grief has nothing to do with it.”
“You always this much of a pain in the ass?”
“Only with people I like.”
The admission—casual, thrown away like it doesn’t matter—makes my wolf surge so close to the surface that I feel the heat bloom across my shoulders. The shift wants to start. My knuckles ache, the bones trying to reshape, and I grip the steering wheel until the impulse passes.
She’s watching my hands. I don’t know if she can see the tension in them or if she’s just looking, but something in her expression shifts, a flicker of awareness, quickly suppressed.
We reach the dead oak. I turn left onto the track, the truck bouncing over exposed rock. The trees close in on both sides, branches scraping the mirrors.
“Here.” I park in the shade of a massive live oak. We get out, and I lead her down the creek bed. It’s dry this time of year, the rock smooth underfoot. The air smells different down here: damp stone, moss, the fresh tang of spring water.
“Watch the drop,” I say at the gap in the rock shelf. The limestone steps down about ten feet into the basin. I go first, picking the route by memory. She follows… sure-footed, fast, reading the terrain without hesitation.
The pool opens below us. Thirty feet across, fed by a spring that seeps through the rock in a steady flow.
The water is so clear the bottom looks painted on—pale stone, dark green moss, the dart and flicker of perch.
Ancient trees ring the basin, their canopy filtering the light into shifting patterns.
The sound is the spring, a low, constant murmur that fills the canyon.
She stops at the edge. Doesn’t speak.
“So?” I say.
“Conner.” She’s staring at the water. “This is… magical.” She looks at me.
“I know.” I nod, watching her face as she takes it all in.
“The light on the bottom. It looks like—”
“Like the water’s breathing. Yeah. It does that in the morning when the sun’s at the right angle.”
“How did you find this place?”
“Maren found it. She was twelve. Came home soaking wet and wouldn’t tell anyone where she’d been for three hours.
” I sit on the rock ledge, legs over the edge.
“She brought me the next day. Made me swear not to tell Garrett because she said he’d turn it into a training exercise. She was probably right.”
Willow sits beside me, our shoulders an inch apart. The heat of her is a line down my left side that my wolf tracks with unusual focus.
“She sounds like she was something,” Willow says.
“She was a pain in the ass. Fearless. Faster than me, which she never let me forget. She wanted to see everything, go everywhere, know everyone.” I pick up a piece of loose rock and turn it in my fingers. “She’d have been hell on wheels if she’d grown up.”
“You miss her.”
“Every goddamn day.”
Willow is quiet for a moment. Then: “I had someone like that. A cousin. He’s… he’s still alive. But for a while, I didn’t know if he would be. He was taken from us. Hurt badly. When we got him back, he was different. The kid he’d been was gone.” She frowns as she focuses on a point in the distance.
I frown. “How old?”
“Seventeen.”
“Christ.”
“Yeah.” She picks up her own piece of rock. Turns it the same way I’m turning mine. “He’s healing now. He’s with people who love him. But you don’t get that time back. You don’t undo what was done.”
The grief in her voice is specific, intimate. Not secondhand. She held this kid together, whoever he is, and the cost of that is written in the lines around her eyes.
“The people who took him,” I say. “They pay for it?”
“Some of them. Not enough.”
“They will.”
She looks at me. An unsettling stare, direct and assessing. “You sound sure about that.”
“Because I know what it looks like when a wolf decides someone’s going to pay. And you’ve got that look right now.”
Something crosses her face; not surprise, but the jolt of being seen clearly.
Her wolf pushes forward in her eyes for just a second.
I see it: a flash of something wild behind the human expression.
My own wolf responds with a rumble deep in my chest, an instinctive acknowledgment that makes the air between us feel charged.
She blinks. The wildness recedes. “You see a lot,” she says quietly.
“Yeah. Curse of the job.”
“Does it ever make you tired? Seeing everything?”
“All the damn time.” I toss the rock fragment into the pool. It drops through the clear water, hits bottom, and sends up a small cloud of silt. “But the alternative is missing something that matters. And I’d rather be tired than blind.”
She nods slowly. Then she says, “This is just like the place I told you about when we spoke before. A pool at the base of a waterfall, tucked into a hollow between two ridges.”
“Tell me about it.”
She turns toward me. Tucks one leg under her. The posture is open, unguarded.
“The hollow was narrow. Maybe fifty feet across at the widest. The waterfall wasn’t big—maybe fifteen feet—but in spring, when the snow melt came down, the sound of it filled the whole hollow. You could feel it in your chest.”
“Cold water?”
“Freezing. You’d lose feeling in your feet after ten minutes. But the pool was deep. Deep enough to dive from the ledge, which was stupid, and we did it anyway.”
“We?”
“Me and my—” She pauses. Resets. “The kids I grew up with. We used to dare each other. Highest point on the rock face was about twenty feet up. One of the boys did a backflip off it once and almost broke his neck.”
“Sounds like a good way to grow up.”
“It was.” The warmth in her voice is real, and then it dims. “Until it wasn’t.”
“What happened?”
“Raids.” The word comes out stripped of everything except fact. “We held on as long as we could. Eventually, the settlement wasn’t safe anymore. We lost the hollow. Lost everything around it.”
“Wolves?”
“Wolves who thought we didn’t belong.”
Something coils inside me. The hackles I can’t physically raise in human form are up. The statement—wolves who thought we didn’t belong—feels personal and old and furious, and the anger in her voice is controlled so tightly that I can feel the pressure of it myself.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Stop apologizing. It’s not yours to be sorry for.”
“I know. But I’m sorry anyway.”