Chapter 3 Across the River
Liza POV
The wipers couldn’t keep up.
Snow hit the windshield in fat, wind-driven clumps, and I drove too fast for conditions because I knew these roads and because slowing down felt like turning around.
The truck’s heater blew stale air against my face.
Under the engine noise I could feel Everett—faint, like hearing music through a wall.
I passed the turnoff to my cabin without touching the brakes.
My rental sat at the base of the East Valley ski area, tucked between two other patrol cabins in a row of identical boxes with brown siding, metal roofs, and propane tanks.
It was a small, old hill with two lifts, and East Valley wolves ran most of it.
My locker was in the patrol shack. My clothes, my boots, my spare radio, the framed photo of my mother on the nightstand, and the coffee mug I’d stolen from Rosa’s kitchen three years ago were all on the East side.
Everything I had left behind was under the authority of the man who had just told his pack that my face was a distraction.
I kept driving.
The road switchbacked down through stands of aspen, their bare branches catching headlights and throwing them back as pale streaks.
I had maybe a quarter tank of gas. My emergency pack sat behind the passenger seat where I always kept it, stocked with a first aid kit, a space blanket, protein bars, a change of base layers, and a headlamp.
Patrol habit. You don’t work mountain rescue without keeping a bag ready.
I’d never imagined using it to run from my own pack.
Former pack.
I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and breathed through the throb in my chest.
The valley floor opened up as the road leveled out, and far off through the snow the lights of town were a blur.
To the left, the dark line of the river cut between snowfields, its banks crusted with ice that caught the faint glow of clouds.
The bridge was less than a mile ahead. I could see the road straighten toward it, could see—
Headlights.
Two trucks stood angled across the bridge approach, high beams blazing into the snow.
I eased off the gas and let my truck coast closer, squinting against the glare.
The vehicles were dark-colored pickups, the kind the East Valley enforcers drove, and as I rolled to a stop I could see two men standing in the narrow gap between them, arms crossed against the cold.
I put my truck in park and sat there for a second with the engine running.
He sent them ahead of me.
Of course he did. Everett had watched me walk out of his lodge and then sent enforcers to block the road as if I were livestock that had jumped a fence. He didn’t want me, but he sure as hell didn’t want me going somewhere he couldn’t reach.
I grabbed my pack from behind the seat, zipped my jacket to my throat, and got out, leaving the keys in the ignition and the engine running.
Cold air stung my face. The snow had thickened since I’d left the lodge, coating my hair and eyelashes the instant I stepped clear of the cab.
One of the enforcers straightened when he saw me.
I recognized Craig Lutz, a broad, heavy man in his mid-thirties and one of Kurt Lamb’s regular patrol guys.
The other was younger, someone I’d seen around but couldn’t name.
“Liza.” Craig held up a hand like he was directing traffic. “Alpha says you’re not to cross.”
“Alpha threw me away in front of the whole pack twenty minutes ago.” I slung the pack over one shoulder and kept walking toward the bridge. “He doesn’t get to tell me where I can go.”
“He gave the order.” Craig shifted his weight, blocking more of the road. His breath plumed in the cold. “No East wolves cross into West territory tonight. That includes you.”
“Then I’m making it easy for him.” I stopped about ten feet from the trucks.
The younger enforcer hadn’t said a word, and he wouldn’t look at me directly.
He kept glancing at Craig like he wanted permission to be somewhere else.
“He rejected me. I rejected him. He made it clear I don’t represent this pack.
So what am I to you right now, Craig? A packmate?
A Luna? Or just a woman with a face he doesn’t want standing next to him? ”
Craig’s jaw worked. He was a decent wolf, neither clever nor cruel, who followed orders because that was simpler than thinking. I’d run drills with him on the ski hill. He’d lent me his thermos once during a long extraction. He didn’t want to be here any more than the kid beside him.
“I’m sorry about what happened,” he said. His voice dropped, and for a second I saw something real in his expression. “That wasn’t right, what he did.”
“Then let me walk.”
He looked at the younger enforcer. The younger enforcer looked at the snow. Craig exhaled through his nose, and his shoulders settled, and he stepped aside without another word. After a hesitation, the younger man followed him, clearing the gap between the trucks.
I walked through.
The bridge was old concrete, wide enough for two lanes, with rusted metal railings and a surface that hadn’t been plowed since the snow started.
My boots crunched through fresh accumulation.
Below, the river ran black and fast between shelves of shore ice, and its low, constant rush swallowed every other noise.
The wind hit harder out here without the trees to break it.
Snow drove sideways across the bridge deck.
Halfway across, I stopped.
I didn’t plan to. My feet just quit moving, and I stood there with my pack on my shoulder and the river roaring underneath me and the cold eating through my jacket, and I looked back.
The headlights of the enforcers’ trucks still blazed on the East approach.
Beyond them, the road climbed into darkness toward the lodge and the ski area and every piece of the life I’d built.
My cabin. My patrol shifts. The runs I knew by heart, every rock and drop and wind-loaded slope committed to muscle memory.
The kitchen where Rosa made cinnamon rolls on lodge nights.
The people who had watched me bleed for them and then watched me get thrown away and said nothing.
Crossing could cost me every familiar thing I had.
Staying would make what Everett had done to me the first stone of his reign.
The bond pulsed. Everett’s anger had dimmed to a dense, churning heat. I doubted it was guilt. It felt more like a man trying to convince himself he’d done the right thing.
You feel that? I thought, not caring whether the bond could carry words. That’s me, leaving. Get used to it.
I turned my back on the East side and walked the rest of the bridge.
The closed West gate stood where the road met the tree line on the far bank, its heavy wooden barrier set between concrete posts.
A small guard shelter sat back from the road, and a floodlight mounted on a pole turned the falling snow into a bright curtain of white.
A figure stood beside the shelter with his hands in his pockets, watching me come off the bridge.
I recognized Shane Tolliver before I could see his face clearly.
He had a way of standing that looked relaxed even in the cold, weight on one hip, shoulders easy, like he’d wandered out here by accident and might wander off again.
But his eyes were sharp in the floodlight, and he didn’t move from the gate.
“Evening,” he called when I was close enough.
His voice carried a note of casual surprise that I didn’t buy for a second.
Nothing casual about an East wolf walking across the bridge alone, on foot, in a snowstorm, on the night of an Alpha ascension.
He knew exactly what this was. He just wasn’t going to say it first.
“I need to come through,” I said.
Shane tilted his head. Light brown hair fell across his forehead, shaggy and damp with snow. Green eyes, assessing. He had an easy grin that he wasn’t using right now, and I respected him more for that. “Liza Mallory, right? East Valley patrol.”
“Just Liza tonight.”
His gaze dropped to my jacket. To the place where the insignia had been, now just a rough patch of torn threads above my heart. He looked at it for a beat, then back at my face, and I saw the exact moment he understood.
“You want to tell me what happened over there?” he asked.
“Your Alpha’s going to hear about it by morning regardless.
” My voice came out rougher than I intended.
The cold was in my throat. The bond ached.
I was tired in a way that went deeper than muscle.
“Everett Pryce rejected me as his mate at his ascension. I rejected him back. Neither of us accepted. I left.”
Shane’s eyebrows went up just enough to show I’d surprised him. “Both rejected, neither accepted. So the bond’s still live.”
“Yes.”
“And you walked across the bridge alone.”
“Craig Lutz and some kid were blocking the approach. They let me through.”
Shane blew out a breath that clouded in the floodlight.
He looked past me toward the bridge, toward the fading glow of the enforcers’ headlights on the far side, and I could see him calculating.
An East wolf seeking shelter in West territory wasn’t a small thing.
Relations between the packs had been cold for years because of territorial disputes, arguments over resources, and Kurt’s loud opinions about where the boundary should sit.
Taking me in could look like provocation.
Turning me away could look like indifference.
“I’m not asking for anything permanent,” I said. “Just tonight. Somewhere warm. I’ll figure the rest out in the morning.”
He studied me for another second. Then the calculation left his expression, replaced by a straightforward decision. He wasn’t going to leave a lone wolf standing in a blizzard while he deliberated. “Wait here. I’ll send word to my Alpha.”
He took a radio from inside his coat and spoke quietly into it. “Dom, I need you at the West gate. Liza Mallory crossed alone, asking for shelter for the night.”
A clipped answer came through the static. Shane listened, then lowered the radio. Before he could speak, the wind shifted.
It swept down the dark road beyond the gate, rattling the pines and throwing snow from their branches, carrying a scent that rooted me where I stood.
Cedar. Woodsmoke. Cold iron. Beneath it all, something gripped me low in the belly and pulled at the part of me that Everett had torn open less than an hour ago. My wolf, who had been curled silent and wounded since the rejection, lifted her head and listened.
No.
My fingers tightened on the strap of my pack. My pulse kicked up so hard I could feel it in my wrists.
This couldn’t be happening. Not here, tonight.
Footsteps. Heavy, deliberate, coming from the direction of the lodge.
A figure emerged from the snowy dark beyond the gate, broad across the shoulders and tall enough that the pines didn’t dwarf him.
Winter coat, work boots, the kind of man who filled a road just by walking down it.
Light from the lodge caught only part of him, but I could see enough.
Dark hair. Dark beard. A nose that had been broken and healed crooked.
And eyes that found mine across the distance and held.
Dominic Salvi halted.
My breath caught.
His scent of cedar and iron grew stronger. My wolf strained toward him the way a compass needle strains toward north. This new pull was lower and heavier than the bright electric snap I’d felt when I touched Everett. It started in my gut and spread outward like heat from a banked fire.
Mate?
Again. A second possibility.
Dominic’s nostrils flared. His chest expanded with a breath he seemed to take against his will. Surprise crossed his face before he blinked hard and tried to bring his expression under control. His hands, hanging at his sides, curled into fists.
We stood maybe fifteen feet apart with the gate between us and the wind carrying that impossible scent back and forth, and neither of us moved closer.
I didn’t trust my legs. I didn’t trust what would happen if our skin touched and the jolt confirmed what the scent suggested.
No wolf I’d ever met had carried two fated bonds.
Shane looked at me. Looked at Dominic. Looked back at me. His easy manner had gone very still.
“Dom,” he said carefully.
Dominic didn’t answer. His dark eyes were fixed on mine, and the intensity in them was nothing like Everett’s polished composure. Shock and hunger remained plain on his face. He felt the same desperate pull I did, and the honesty of it loosened the tension in my chest.
“You smell it too,” Dominic said. His voice was low and rough, the kind of voice that carried without being raised. He was talking to me, not to Shane.
My wolf pressed harder. My skin felt too tight. The cold didn’t touch me anymore.
“I do.”
We stayed where we were. The snow fell between us. His fists stayed at his sides. My hand stayed on my pack strap. We both understood that closing the distance would change everything again. One mate had already recognized and rejected me tonight. I wasn’t ready to test the possibility of another.
Shane broke the silence, all business now. “She’s asking for one night.”
Dominic held my eyes for one more breath, then gave Shane a single nod.
Shane turned to the gate mechanism and hauled the barrier open. The wood groaned against the snow packed at its base. “There’s a spare bunkroom over the snowmobile garage, same floor as my apartment. You can have it tonight. We’ll sort out the rest in the morning.”
I stepped through onto West Valley ground, keeping my distance from Dominic. We passed without touching, leaving the possible bond unconfirmed. His scent still pulled at me, strong and insistent, while Everett’s open bond ached beneath my breastbone.
Shane closed the gate behind me. The old barrier settled into place between me and the bridge, and for the first time since Everett had spoken the words, I could breathe without feeling East Valley at my back.