Chapter 5 Second Jolt
Dominic POV
I didn’t sleep. I spent most of the night at the kitchen table in my cabin with a cold cup of coffee and the radio tuned low to the patrol channel, listening to my wolves check in from the boundary fencing while the storm blew itself out.
Every time the wind shifted and came from the east, I remembered her scent of pine smoke, snow, and something bright and clean underneath, and my wolf lunged so hard I had to grip the edge of the table.
I knew what it was. I’d known the second the wind put her in my nose.
A possible mate scent that strong didn’t leave room for ambiguity.
The only question was whether contact would confirm it, and I’d kept my hands to myself at the gate because confirming it in front of Shane with a woman who’d just walked away from one bond was the worst thing I could do to her.
But I’d carried her scent in my head all night. My wolf strained toward the garage whenever I thought of it, and eventually I stopped trying to settle him.
By dawn, the snow had quit and the sky had gone from black to that flat iron gray that means the cold is settling in.
I pulled on my boots and coat and walked across to the snowmobile garage.
The exterior stairs to the bunkroom above were crusted with ice where the storm had laid a layer of wet snow that froze overnight.
I could see the light on through the small window.
She was awake.
I knocked and waited. The door opened, and Liza Mallory stood there looking like a woman who’d been ready for this conversation since before sunrise.
Her black hair was pulled back off her face, still damp from the sink.
She wore the same patrol jacket and base layers she’d worn the night before, and she’d squared her shoulders and planted her feet like she expected me to start asking questions she didn’t want to answer.
Good. I had questions. But not the ones she was braced for.
“Did anyone follow you across the boundary?” I asked.
She blinked. Whatever she’d rehearsed, that wasn’t it. “No.”
“Are you sure? No East wolves followed you onto the bridge or crossed to the west bank?”
“Two enforcers blocked the approach,” she said. “They let me through. Nobody followed.”
I nodded. That was the security answer I needed. If Everett Pryce had sent wolves after a woman he’d publicly rejected, I’d have a different problem on my hands than the one I already had.
“Shane said Pryce rejected you at his ascension.”
Her jaw tightened. In the gray morning light through the window, the scar stood raised and pale against her skin. She didn’t turn away from it.
“He did,” she said. “In front of the entire pack.”
“Did he say why?”
Her gaze hardened. “He said a Luna can’t be a distraction. Then he looked at my face.”
I understood. The anger that came up through me was immediate and blunt, the kind that wanted to cross a river and teach Pryce what an Alpha’s judgment was actually for. I kept it off my face. She didn’t need my anger right now. She needed to know where she stood.
“Shane said you rejected him back.”
“I did.”
“Why? You could have accepted his rejection and walked away clean.”
She didn’t answer right away. Her dark blue eyes held the steady defiance of someone who’d already survived too much to bend now.
“Because he doesn’t get to throw me away and keep anything of mine,” she said. “Not even a clean ending.”
We held each other’s gaze.
There were things I should have said. Diplomatic things about the bond between our packs, about what it meant for an East wolf to shelter in West territory, about the complications her unresolved rejection created for my position as Alpha.
I’d thought through all of it during the night, weighed the angles, and considered what Kurt Lamb and Everett Pryce would do with my decision.
East’s message had come over the channel before midnight.
West Valley was harboring one of their wolves without authorization, and East expected her returned. I’d let it sit.
What I said was: “Come on. I’ll show you where you’re staying.”
The exterior stairs were worse than they’d looked from the ground.
Clear ice covered the treads, refrozen after the storm, and the railing was just as slick.
I went first. Halfway down, her boot skidded with a short, sharp scrape on the ice.
I turned and offered my hand. I knew exactly what I was offering.
She looked at it. Looked at me.
We both knew what would happen.
Liza reached down and took my hand.
The jolt hit me square in the chest, and recognition came before thought. Light flashed between our palms, pale and bright in the gray morning, visible to anyone watching. My wolf surged with enough force to nearly buckle my knees.
Her hand tightened on mine. Her eyes widened in shock, heat flushed her face, and the pull between us drew her half a step down the stairs toward me before she caught herself on the railing.
Fated mate. Confirmed.
After everything she’d survived, after the bond she’d walked away from, after crossing the river in a storm with nothing but an emergency pack, the Goddess had put this woman in my path.
I didn’t let go of her hand.
I wanted to pull her down those stairs and into me, wanted to press my face against her throat where the scar ended and breathe her in until the need in my wolf settled. I tightened my grip before I caught myself, and her pulse raced beneath my fingers.
But Pryce had rejected her in front of her pack the night before. She didn’t need me to reach for her before she’d had time to recover.
I loosened my grip. Let her decide how long to hold on.
She held on for another beat. Then she pulled her hand back and gripped the railing with both hands instead. Her breathing was uneven. So was mine.
“Well,” Shane said from the bottom of the stairs.
We both looked down. He was leaning against the snowmobile garage door with two travel mugs of coffee, his shaggy hair sticking up on one side where he’d slept on it, his expression caught somewhere between amusement and the careful blankness of a man deciding how much trouble he was willing to be in.
“Knew I should’ve salted the stairs,” he said, lifting one of the mugs. “Brought coffee instead.”
Liza let out a breath that was almost a laugh. Almost. It broke something in the air between us, enough that my hands stopped shaking and my lungs remembered how to work.
We came down the rest of the stairs without touching.
Shane handed Liza a coffee, then held the second mug out to me.
“Guess this one’s yours, Alpha.” He gave me a look that said everything he wasn’t going to say out loud.
I ignored it. He’d seen the flash. He knew what it meant.
We’d talk about the politics of it later, when she wasn’t standing there with ice on her boots and her jacket still missing its patch.
I walked her across the snowy ground to the West lodge.
The morning was cold and still, the kind of mountain quiet that comes after a big storm when the snow has absorbed every sound and the trees are bent under white weight.
Liza walked beside me with a deliberate gap between us and studied the guarded gate, the lodge, the road toward the resort, and the tree line.
She was reading the land the way a patroller reads a mountain, taking the terrain in without being told.
Inside the lodge, the common area smelled like woodsmoke and bacon from the kitchen. A few West wolves were eating breakfast and looked up when we came in. Their eyes went to Liza, then to the torn spot over her heart, then to me. Nobody said anything.
I took her down a back hallway to one of the guest rooms. It was small and clean, with a bed, a dresser, and a window facing the pines. It was better than the bunkroom over the garage.
“This is yours for now,” I said. “I’ll tell the quartermaster to pull patrol gear in your size. Jacket, layers, pack, radio.”
She stared at me.
“You crossed the river with one emergency pack and the clothes on your back. You need gear if you’re going to work.”
That stopped her. She looked at me as if she were trying to find the catch.
“I intend to work,” she said. “And pay for what I use.”
I nodded. Her directness impressed me. “What size boots?”
“Eight.”
“Glen Zeller runs ski patrol at the resort. I run the rest of it. He knows the mountain better than anyone, and he doesn’t care where you came from or who you’re bonded to. He cares whether you can do the job. I’ll introduce you.”
“I can introduce myself.”
“You can. But Zeller trusts my judgment on people, and a word from me saves you a week of proving you’re not here to cause problems. I’ll call ahead and tell him you’re coming.”
The corner of her mouth twitched, the first hint of a smile.
“Fine,” she said.
I leaned against the doorframe while she set her emergency pack on the bed and looked around. The room offered little beyond a wool blanket and a pillow. It was the kind of spare, clean space that said you can stay here without saying this is home. She seemed okay with that.
“How’d you get the scar?” I asked.
She turned to face me and let me look without flinching or angling her chin to hide it. Her refusal to be ashamed landed hard.
“I was seventeen,” she said. “Three rogues came through East Valley territory at night and got into the area near the den where six pups were sleeping. The youngest was four.” Her voice was even, like she was giving a patrol report.
“I was on a training rotation, the closest wolf to the den. I shifted and engaged all three. I killed two. The third one got my face open before the enforcers arrived.”
I followed the scar from beneath her left eye, down the slope of her cheek, across the line of her jaw, and into the left side of her throat. It was deep enough to have been a killing blow if it had gone a little farther.
“What happened to the rogue you didn’t kill?” I asked.
“Enforcers ran him down.”
“He was lucky they got to him first.” I held her eyes.
Something shifted in her face, too slight for me to name, and some of the tension left her eyes. She’d earned every inch of that scar and been punished for it by the man who should have honored it.
My wolf rose in me, fierce and possessive. I let him feel it. But I kept my voice even and my hands at my sides.
“I’ll have the gear sent over before noon,” I said.
I pulled a set of keys from my coat pocket and held them out.
The keys belonged to an older lodge truck that was reliable in the snow.
“Take this to the resort when you’re ready.
Tell Zeller I sent you. He’ll want to see you on the mountain before he commits to anything. ”
She took the keys. Our fingers didn’t touch. I made sure of that, and I could tell she did too. The mate bond was already loud enough without feeding it.
“Dominic,” she said.
It was the first time she’d used my name. My wolf stilled to listen.
“Thank you,” she said. “For not making this into something I have to fight.”
I wanted to tell her that no man with eyes and a functioning conscience would have looked at what Pryce did and called it leadership.
I wanted to tell her that the Goddess didn’t make mistakes, and that the scar on her face was worth more than every polished suit in Pryce’s closet.
I wanted to cross the distance between us and touch her and let the bond do what it was trying to do.
Instead I said, “You don’t have to fight me.”
I stepped into the hallway and left her with the keys. A few minutes later, the lodge truck started outside. Through the windows in the common room, I watched her turn toward the resort and drive away.
The new bond pulled after her. Every instinct I had told me to follow. I stayed where I was. She had asked for work, not a mate at her shoulder, and Zeller could judge her without his Alpha in the room.