8. Eight Hours Old #2
“She suggested a lot of things.” Flat, the voice of a woman armoring.
Then, through the bond, I felt her decide to keep going.
“Three years ago I saw a boy in danger. Clear as anything I’ve ever seen, the room, the person, the timing.
I went to Miriam. She listened with that patient face and suggested I was experiencing stress-related anxiety.
Had I considered talking to someone about the pressure of the job. ”
“She didn’t believe you.”
“She made sure I didn’t believe me.“ Her hand found the mark at her shoulder, tracing it like an anchor.
“The boy was hurt two days later. Exactly the way I saw it. And Miriam sat with me while I cried and suggested that survivors of near-misses often feel responsible. Did I need a referral for additional support.”
The bond carried her anger, old, buried, still glowing underneath like the coals in the grate. My wolf rose with it, wanting a direction.
“She taught me that being right was not the same as being believed. She taught me to make my voice smaller before anyone else could do it for me. Three years of it’s probably nothing, Miriam built that.
” She looked up at me. “And now her face is in a vision that has nothing to do with my school and everything to do with Elias Thorne’s network. ”
I sat with it. The implications were not subtle.
“You think she’s theirs.”
“I think someone flagged my bloodline before I ever reported a vision. I think the reduced caseload, the referrals, the careful erosion of my confidence. I think it was strategy. I think I was being kept. Docile and doubting and findable, until they were ready to collect.”
My wolf wanted to find Miriam Vale and conduct an interview she would remember. I kept it out of my voice, mostly.
“We send it to Gideon the moment the signal comes back. The face, the context, your institutional history. He runs it against the archive, and Tara’s already standing in it with your full sequence.
” I touched her face, tilted it up so she could see me clearly.
“You don’t have to be in the room for what happens after.
You did your part. You reported what you saw, and this time someone listened. ”
Her eyes searched mine. Through the bond, grief and anger and something that might have been relief, all tangled.
“You believed me,” she said. “From the first night. Before I had a name for what I was. Why?”
I gave her the truth, because the bond made anything less feel like a lie.
“Seven years ago I ran a safehouse for a seer whose visions I was told to manage rather than act on. She died because the agency trusted protocol over her warning. I rebuilt myself around a single principle. I stay, I believe, I don’t let process replace a person.
” I held her gaze. “You walked into my life and my wolf knew in three seconds. But the believing was there before the bond, Ivy. The believing was the first thing I gave you.”
She was quiet. Then she leaned up and kissed me, not urgent, not desperate. The kiss of a woman saying something she hadn’t found words for yet.
When she pulled back, the bond blazed between us. Steady. Present. Ours.
“Okay,” she said. “Gideon. The moment the signal’s back.”
I kissed her forehead (a gesture I’d never given anyone, that my wolf apparently required) and stood. “I’m checking the perimeter. Physical check. I need eyes on the east tree line.”
“How long?”
“Twenty minutes. Thirty.”
Through the bond I felt her settle into the couch, her resolve to stay awake until I came back, the warmth of knowing she’d be waiting. It had been eleven years since I had been waited on. I pulled on my jacket before the meaning of that could reach me.
At the door, I stopped. “Ivy.”
She looked up.
“If anything changes in what you feel from me through the bond, anything that isn’t steady, you go to the interior room and you don’t open a door.”
“Understood.”
One more second of her eyes. Then I stepped into the storm.
The cold hit sharp and clarifying, wind driving snow sideways. The tree line was a suggestion of darkness at the property’s edge. I moved toward the east approach with my wolf fully awake beneath my skin.
He was out here. Not close enough to engage. Watching.
At the east marker I crouched and read the snow. Nothing fresh: the storm was erasing tracks faster than they could be made. But the silence was wrong. Too complete. The absence of small-animal sound that means something large moved through recently.
My wolf pressed hard against my control, wanting the shift, wanting to run this perimeter in his own body and find exactly where Elias Thorne had stood at four a.m. looking at a house with my mate inside it.
I held it. Barely.
The radio crackled, Jace, degraded by storm but functional. “East ridge is clear. He pulled back to the north boundary. I’m tracking, but the storm’s covering him.”
“Copy. Maintain position. Do not engage without support.”
“If he moves on the house—”
“He meets me. Stay on tracking. I need his approach vector.”
Static. Then: “Copy.”
I stood in the snow and looked back at the safe house, lights off, the fire a dim orange glow through the kitchen window, Ivy inside, waiting for me.
The bond pulsed warm against everything cold.
She chose you, my wolf said. Now keep her.
I turned back toward the house. The storm pushed at my back. Somewhere in the dark trees, Elias Thorne was calculating his next move.
So was I.