Chapter 6 West Valley Work #2
“Don’t thank me. You showed me what you can do. That’s all I needed.” He paused. “Salvi was right about you, for the record. But I’d have come to the same conclusion without his call.”
“I know,” I said.
A hint of approval touched his face. “Yeah. I think you do.”
He went back inside, and I stood in the cold outside the base lodge and breathed.
I had a job. The ground under me felt like something I could stand on.
? ? ?
Dominic was leaning against the hood of a truck near the edge of the base lodge parking lot when I came down from the patrol base. He had kept enough distance to avoid watching the assessment, but not enough to pretend he hadn’t been waiting.
He straightened when he saw me, and I watched his eyes move over my face the way they had yesterday morning on the stairs. His gaze didn’t stop at the scar or skip past it. He looked at me like I was a whole person and nothing about what he saw needed fixing.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
“Zeller hired me. Full season.”
“Good.”
That was it. No follow-up about the bond, no questions about how I felt about him, no attempt to claim credit for the introduction. Just good, like he’d expected exactly this outcome and was satisfied to hear it confirmed.
I leaned against the truck beside him, leaving enough space between us that our arms didn’t touch. The afternoon light was fading into early-winter gray. My legs ached from the skiing and my hands still smelled like the medical tape from Joel’s splint.
“There was an incident,” I said. “Tourist went past the boundary ropes and broke his leg in the rocks.”
“I heard the radio traffic,” Dominic said. “Sounded like you handled it.”
“Zeller was right behind me.”
“But you got there first.”
I looked at him sideways. “Are you keeping score?”
The corner of his mouth turned up in a restrained smile, as if he’d caught himself enjoying a conversation he hadn’t expected to have.
“Just paying attention,” he said.
We stood there for a while without talking.
The lifts were slowing for the day, and the last skiers were making their way down the lower runs in long, lazy turns.
Snow machines hummed somewhere above us, and the smell of diesel and pine drifted across the lot.
The whole base area quieted at the end of the working day, and the cold settled in.
“The upper chute,” I said. “The one above the river road. That cornice needs control work before the next temperature swing. Wind slab underneath, probably two layers deep. If it releases naturally, the runout goes all the way to the highway.”
Dominic’s attention sharpened, the way an Alpha listens when someone tells him something about his territory that matters.
“You saw that today?”
“Zeller tested me on it. I told him what I saw. He said most applicants tell him the snow looks fine.”
“Most applicants aren’t you.”
I felt the heat rise in my face and turned away before he could see it. Damn him. He was just saying what he thought, without even trying to be charming, and somehow that was worse, because I couldn’t dismiss it as flattery.
“I’ll call Zeller about scheduling control work,” he said. “Tomorrow, if the weather holds.”
“Good.”
We drove back to the lodge separately. I followed his truck along the winding road through the pines, watching the headlights cut through the early dark.
The new bond hummed between us despite the distance, and I didn’t push it away.
Everett’s bond had come with the whole hall watching, all spectacle and everything it meant for the pack.
With Dominic, I felt a low, even warmth and no demand for an answer.
At the lodge, I ate dinner in the common room with a handful of West Valley wolves who nodded at me and went back to their food.
A woman with dark hair asked me to pass the bread, and when I did, she said thanks and told me her name was Gina.
That was the entire interaction, and it meant more than she knew.
I was finishing my coffee when Everett’s anger came through.
The feeling was duller than it had been the night of the rejection, when his fury had reached me even through the faint side of the bond.
Now a slow burn pulsed beneath my breastbone.
I could feel his resentment, and underneath it something that might have been loneliness if he’d had the honesty to name it.
I set down my mug and breathed through it.
He felt me more than I felt him. That was the price of rejecting first. The rest of the price was his as well.
Whatever the bond did to his body across the river, it had no claim on mine.
But I still caught the edges of what he carried, especially at night, when he was probably sitting alone in those Alpha’s quarters thinking about what he’d thrown away.
I washed my mug in the kitchen, walked back to my room, and closed the door. The bed was narrow and the blanket was wool and the window showed nothing but dark pines and the first stars breaking through the clouds.
I lay there and thought about the mountain.
About the wind slab on the upper chute and the way Zeller had listened when I read it correctly.
About Joel grabbing my hand and meaning it when he said thank you.
About Kristen asking what radio system I’d used, like the answer mattered more than where I’d used it.
About the quiet certainty in Dominic’s praise, and the way he hadn’t reached for my hand even though I could tell he wanted to.
I pulled the blanket up and closed my eyes. The mountain had tested me all day and never once cared about the scar on my face.
It was the best day I’d had in a long time.