The Midnight Wolf's Secret Mate (Hotshot Wolves #4)

1 Kaia

I lifted my two fingers from the pulse point beneath my jaw and stepped directly into Warden Miller’s path before his grip could close around the dormant woman’s elbow a second time.

Across the bay, Marisol met my eyes and gave a subtle, encouraging nod, also stepping closer to shield the young woman from the other Wardens’ sightlines.

“Warden.” I kept my voice at a respectful register. “Your hand.”

“She’s stalling the line.” Miller didn’t release her.

The woman—intake number forty-one, twenty-three years old, flagged for auditory disturbances—had gone rigid in his grip, tears cutting tracks through the dust on her face.

The white sleeve of her Cleansing Garment had already twisted up past her elbow, and his fingers were leaving marks the color of crushed plums on her skin.

The smell of her fear came through even the lavender oil. Sour, animal, the smell of a person afraid and looking for help from a kind hand after a long van ride. I had burned the oil in every brazier in this room precisely so I wouldn’t have to know that smell. It found me anyway.

Vigilance is the highest form of mercy.

“Provision Eleven, subsection four.” I drew my tablet from against my ribs and angled the screen toward him, unhurried, as though we were discussing seating charts.

“Bruised fruit yields a ruined harvest. Any visible contusion on an intake within the first seventy-two hours triggers an automatic handling review. The review attaches to the Warden’s record, not the Steward’s.

” I let one beat pass. “The Inner Circle walks this floor at dawn, Warden Miller. They will be reading records.”

His jaw worked. He let go.

“Pretty mouth on you, Thorne,” he muttered, stepping back just far enough to clear my desk, though his fingers still twitched toward the baton at his thigh. “Run your patients through. But I’m standing right here. First one that breaks—”

I drew my tablet to me, squaring its edge to the desk’s lip with a slow, deliberate scrape.

“Then you’ll be standing a long while. We don’t break here, Warden.

We mend.” Behind me, Kyle and Livia, two of our junior processors, quietly stepped up to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Marisol, their silent presence forming a united wall of witnesses that forced Miller to shift his weight and look away.

“Forty-one.” I turned to the woman and softened nothing in my face—softness frightened them more, softness meant something had gone wrong—but I lowered my voice until it belonged only to her.

“Station three. Marisol will bring you a clean garment and a warm cloth before processing. You have time. The schedule serves you, not the other way around.”

Marisol stepped forward with a gentle, reassuring touch on the woman’s shoulder, throwing a quick, grateful smile back at me.

She stumbled toward station three. Marisol caught her by the shoulders before her knees could finish failing.

I logged the incident in four lines of clean, citation-anchored prose, and did not write the fifth line, the true line, which was that I had once spent forty minutes alone on my knees cleaning a woman’s vomit off the welcome mat after Miller’s “liquid calm” had been administered at twice the sanctioned dose, and that the report I filed afterward had vanished as completely as if I’d written it on water.

Sloane, our senior Enforcer who kept her sharp, pale eyes on the security feeds, had been the one to pull me aside in the corridor that evening, warning me that the Wardens had shredded the log.

We had built a silent, steel-tough understanding in the six months since.

Trust the system. The system is the shape of mercy.

The words weren’t mine. They belonged to High Alchemist Joss, the architect of our salvation.

I had never spoken to him, of course—Stewards did not speak to the Inner Circle—but I had seen him once, from a distance, standing on a second-story veranda looking down at the processing floor.

I had seen the way the brilliant, terrible weight of his mind seemed to press against the physical world.

I had seen his eyes. The glowing, weeping blue light that ran from them constantly, sizzling where it hit the stone, the physical manifestation of a man so overwhelmed by the holy burden of purifying the demon wolves out of us that his own biology wept with the strain of it. It was beautiful, in a terrifying way.

Sixty-four. I found the pulse point under my jaw with two fingers. Sixty-four. Holy. Steady. The wild rose must be trimmed.

I repeated the words silently, letting them press flat against the heat.

The wild rose must be trimmed. It was the catechism of control.

I put my back to it and pushed, reciting the mantra until the thing under my ribs stopped thrashing and lay back down in the dark.

It took three seconds. Three seconds where I was not Steward Thorne, but something else entirely, something straining at a chain.

Then the medication kicked in, a cold heavy blanket dropping over the heat, and I was myself again, pruned and bloodless.

A gray uniform. A steady pulse. A woman who logged incidents and did not cause them.

That was the Order’s gift. That was my gift.

They came to us broken open by their own biology, and we gave them a name for it, a structure, a cuff, a bed. Help.

I processed eleven more potential dormants in fifty minutes.

Pulse, pupils, the standard battery of questions about sensory disturbance and sinful impulse, the cuff seated two fingers loose with the stone centered over the pulse.

Eleven times, the hex-thread bit down, and eleven faces went slack with relief as the noise in their veins finally, mercifully quieted.

Kyle and Livia moved in perfect, quiet sync beside me, exchanging soft murmurs of encouragement as we worked through the rush, their steady efficiency keeping the Wardens at bay.

Then the twelfth file loaded onto my screen.

THOMAS. Late addition, California intake. Flagged twice for excessive verbalization.

A shadow fell over the console as Sloane stepped up to my desk, her athletic frame relaxed but coiled, short dark hair dusting her uniform. Her pale eyes swept the room, checking the exits with her usual fluid efficiency before she leaned in close enough for only me to hear.

“Miller’s pacing is erratic,” Sloane said, her voice dry, dry as sawdust. “He’s looking for a reason to report a delay before the dawn audit. I’ll keep him occupied.”

“Thank you, Sloane,” I murmured, keeping my eyes on the roster.

She gave a single, microscopic nod and drifted back toward the security console.

“Next.”

Thomas didn’t walk to my desk the way the others did.

The others approached like the floor might be wired.

This one ambled, hands loose at his sides, taking in the acoustic paneling and the braziers and the brass dials on the far wall with the bright, roving attention of a tourist who’d booked the wrong cruise and decided to enjoy it anyway.

He was large. That was the first, undeniable fact of him.

The worn cotton flannel he wore stretched tight across broad, heavily muscled shoulders, pulled at the seams with every casual movement.

His hands, resting loosely on his thighs as he dropped into the intake chair, were rough and heavily calloused.

Dark, unruly hair fell over a pair of startlingly warm, whiskey-brown eyes that were taking in every inch of the room.

And despite the goofy, theatrical wince he gave when the chair creaked under his weight, there was a coiled energy humming just beneath his skin.

The loose-limbed grace of a predator pretending to be a house cat.

“Sorry. That was the chair, not me. I want that on the record.” He paused, his nostrils twitching as he took a shallow, tentative breath, his brow furrowing with a puzzled look at the air between us before he rubbed the bridge of his nose with a knuckle.

“And is it just me, or does it smell like...” He shook his head. “I was promised lavender.”

“Name?”

“Thomas.” He leaned forward to squint at my tablet, upside down. “Which it says right there, so this is more of a trust exercise, right? Like when the barista asks your name and you both know they have your order number.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-nine. Thirty in October, which I’ve been told is a Scorpio thing, which apparently explains a lot about my—”

The scent reached me.

Crushed green—the smell of a hillside the first morning after a storm breaks, when everything that survived the dry months drinks at once. Under it, stone holding the day’s sun long after dark. Under that, a fire. Banked, fed, tended by someone who knew exactly how much to give it.

A sudden, sharp heat bloomed in my belly, settling low and heavy in a way that had nothing to do with liturgy. My back teeth ached, all of them at once, a deep ache down in the roots like I’d been clenching them for hours. The vial rack on my desk doubled, swam, resolved.

I set my stylus down with extraordinary care.

Contamination presents first to the senses. The senses are the door the infection knocks on. My mother’s voice. I’d recited it through three adolescent fevers with IV lines in both arms. Do not answer the door.

Nausea. That was all this was. Two hundred intakes, six vans, hours and hours of burning oil in a sealed bay. Carbon dioxide and exhaustion and a missed meal.

“—and also I should mention,” Thomas continued, “I have a complicated relationship with inanimate objects. Doors specifically. If a door in this facility breaks near me, statistically speaking, it was already broken. I’ve done studies.”

He leaned in slightly, his nose twitching again, and for a fraction of a second his eyes lost their tourist shine.

“Actually, do you smell—” He cut himself off, shaking his head again with a quiet, dry cough.

“Never mind. Must be the van ride. My sinuses are acting like they’ve been packed in wood shavings. ”