Chapter 16 Shelter, Not Welcome
Liza POV
Shane drove. Dominic rode shotgun with his left arm held against his body and his jaw set in a way that meant every bump in the road was costing him. I sat behind them, my injured calf stretched across the back seat to keep the pressure off the bandage. Everett rode in the truck bed.
Nobody had offered him the cab.
Everett had been in the bunkroom less than an hour when Dominic sent Shane to bring him back out. While daylight held, the damaged hut could tell us more about what Kurt had done and whom he’d brought than another argument inside the lodge.
Shane caught my eye in the mirror before every bad stretch and waited for my nod before taking the ruts slowly.
Once I held his look a beat past the nod, and I was the one who looked away first. After one hard jolt, Dominic glanced back, and I answered the question in his face the same way.
His right hand reached between the seats and closed briefly around my boot, well below the bandage.
Through the rear window, Everett watched the three of us understand one another without words. He said nothing.
The sun was dropping fast when we turned onto the boundary road.
Wind pushed loose powder across the windshield, and Shane kept both hands on the wheel while the tires fought for grip on the packed snow beneath.
Through the rear window I could see Everett braced against the tailgate with his coat collar up and his hands deep in his pockets.
He hadn’t complained. I wasn’t sure if that was dignity or the sickness stealing his voice.
Dominic tracked the tree line on both sides of the road, watching for movement as we neared the river.
The hut came into view around the last bend. In daylight, I could see the full extent of the damage.
The fencing gaped open across a stretch that would take a crew half a day to repair.
Posts leaned at ugly angles, and the chain link itself had been bitten through in places, the cut ends bright where teeth had sheared the galvanized coating.
Snow around the clearing was churned with mud and frozen blood.
Shane parked and killed the engine. For a moment, no one moved.
I got out first because I wasn’t going to let the leg make me last. The cold hit my face along with the scents of old blood, pine sap, and disturbed earth. Kurt’s scent lingered beneath them all, marking where he’d stood and shifted.
Dom climbed down carefully, one hand on the doorframe. He scanned the clearing without any change in his expression. Whatever he felt about seeing his own blood frozen into the snow, he kept it behind his eyes.
Everett dropped from the tailgate and landed badly. His knees buckled, and he caught himself on the truck’s quarter panel with both hands. Shane watched closely, ready to catch or restrain him.
“Take your time,” Shane said, and it wasn’t kindness.
Everett straightened. His face had gone gray beneath the cold, and his jaw muscles worked like he was swallowing something that wanted to come back up. But he walked to the fence line and stopped where the chain link had been torn widest, and he breathed in.
He flinched, let out a long breath, and closed his eyes.
“Kurt,” he said. “Three others I recognize, and one I don’t.” He opened his eyes and moved along the damaged fence, reading the scent trail. “All three were assigned directly to his rotation.”
Dominic looked at me. I nodded. Kurt favored young, angry enforcers eager to prove that following orders was the same thing as being strong.
“You assigned them to Kurt?” Dominic asked.
Everett steadied himself against the post. “Not directly. I didn’t pick their schedules. Kurt handled enforcement staffing. I signed off on it.”
“And you let it happen over and over,” I said.
He looked at me. The wind caught his hair and pushed it across his forehead, and for a second he looked young, almost boyish, until his eyes killed the illusion. Those blue eyes were tired and sick and carrying the weight of something he’d only recently learned to name.
“Yeah,” he said. “I did.”
We walked the perimeter together, four people spread across the clearing with enough space between them to feel the gaps.
Shane stayed close to Everett. I stayed close to Dom.
The hut’s door hung crooked on one hinge, and claw marks scored the wood from top to bottom where Kurt had tried to tear through it to reach Abe.
Inside was worse.
The bench was overturned. The radio shelf had come down, and the radio lay on the floor with its casing cracked and its antenna snapped.
Abe’s thermos sat against the far wall, dented beneath the fallen shelf.
The stove Abe had kept burning that night looked cold and dark in the corner, its pipe knocked loose from the ceiling.
Dominic stopped in the doorway and let his gaze move across the wreckage.
His right hand found the doorframe and gripped it, and I could see the muscles in his forearm flex under his coat sleeve.
Cold fury settled over his face as he looked at what had happened to one of his people in a place that was supposed to be safe.
“Abe hid behind the bench,” I said. “He told me afterward. He pushed it against the door and crouched behind it and whispered into the radio. He thought if he spoke too loud they’d hear him through the walls.”
“He was right,” Shane said from behind Everett.
Everett stood in the middle of the wrecked room and took it in. Guilt tightened his face and seemed to shorten every breath.
“Kurt’s been building this for months,” Everett said.
His voice was low, directed at the floor.
“Maybe longer. Since before I came back to take the pack. He framed West Valley the same way in every briefing and report, and every time he stood in my kitchen to lay out what they were doing along the fence. They’re testing you.
They’re pushing the line. The resort money sits on their bank and they know it, and if you don’t show them what the new Alpha looks like, they’ll take whatever they want. ”
He looked up. His eyes found mine first, then moved to Dominic.
“The resort, the tourism money, and the commercial leases are all on the West bank. Kurt has said for years that a real Alpha would move the line. He said the only thing stopping it was that my father was too comfortable and too old to fight for what East Valley deserved.”
“And you believed him,” Dominic said.
“I believed enough of it.” Everett’s hands shook at his sides. “I believed the part where a new Alpha needed to show strength. I believed the part where West Valley was watching to see what I’d do. I swallowed the rest because it fit the picture I wanted to see when I looked in the mirror.”
“Kurt played you,” Shane said, his voice without sympathy.
“I made it easy for him,” Everett said.
I leaned against the wall near the stove, taking the weight off my left leg. The bandage was holding, but the ache had deepened into the kind of pain that made you aware of every heartbeat in the damaged tissue.
“You want credit for seeing it now,” I said.
Everett looked at me.
“You don’t get credit for seeing it now.
Kurt used your vanity and your insecurity and your desperate need to be the Alpha your father wasn’t, and he aimed you at the West bank like a weapon.
But Kurt didn’t stand on that platform and tell everyone that my face made me unfit to be your Luna.
” I held his gaze. “That was you, Everett. The man who spoke those words was you.”
For a second I thought he would argue, would reach for the practiced explanation about image and perception and what a pack’s leadership required. But the argument didn’t come.
“I know,” he said.
Dominic shifted in the doorway, a controlled adjustment that favored his wounded side, and the movement pulled my attention. He measured Everett, weighing how much truth he could afford to accept from an enemy.
The stove gave a sharp pop, followed by a hiss that sent a curl of gray smoke rising from the disconnected pipe. I looked down and saw the glow: a live ember buried in ash at the bottom of the firebox beneath debris that had fallen through the broken pipe.
“Out,” I said. “Now.”
A gust through the open door fed it air. Dry pine needles, a scrap of insulation, and a piece of the felt underlayment from the roof lay over it. The debris flared, sending a tongue of flame up the inside of the stove and through the gap where the pipe had been knocked loose.
Shane grabbed Everett’s arm and hauled him toward the door.
Dominic was already moving, but the doorway was narrow and his injured side made him slow, and I pushed past the stove to grab the overturned bench and shove it clear of the spreading heat.
A burning piece of debris dropped from the ceiling gap and landed on Abe’s dented thermos.
Flame caught on the dry timber behind the stove.
“Snow!” I yelled. “Pack the wall!”
Shane was already outside, scooping armfuls of heavy wet snow from the drift against the hut’s foundation and throwing them through the door. Dominic tried to help and I saw his face go white when he reached with his left arm. I caught his shoulder.
“Stay on the right side. Scoop with your good arm.”
He didn’t argue. We worked the wall together, packing snow against the burning timber while the heat pushed back against our hands.
The flames climbed toward the gap where the stovepipe had passed through the roof.
The felt lining, old wooden shingles, and pine needles left by years of neglect went up fast and bright.
Everett appeared in the doorway with snow packed between his forearms. He staggered to the wall and dropped it against the base where the fire was eating into the lower logs.
His hands were shaking so badly that snow fell from his grip, but he went back and did it again, then again, too sick to move quickly and too stubborn to stop.
The roof was gone. We all knew it. Fire raced across the dry upper structure, and within minutes the ceiling was burning. Embers rained into the room. I pulled Dominic outside as a section of charred shingle crashed onto the spot where he’d been standing.
We kept working from the clearing, throwing snow through the doorway and packing it against the outside walls.
Burning shingles fell inward. Part of the roof frame gave way with a shower of sparks, but the wet logs below it refused to catch.
By the time the last flames above us died, the walls still stood.
The pale gray sky, streaked with smoke and already dimming toward evening, showed through the blackened rafters. Abe’s gear had burned or lay buried beneath the collapsed roof. The bench I’d shoved aside was scorched black along one edge. The stove sat in a ring of melted snow and char.
Shane stood in the middle of the roofless hut, breathing hard, his green eyes reflecting the last of the smoke.
“Well,” he said. “Shit.”
It was the first time all day I wanted to laugh.
Dominic sat on the edge of the hut’s foundation, his right hand pressed against his bandaged left side. He was pale, and sweat stood on his forehead despite the cold, and when I knelt beside him and checked the dressing through the gap in his coat, his hand found my wrist and held it.
“I’m all right,” he said.
“You’re bleeding through.”
I saved the argument until we could get him back to the lodge.
Everett leaned against the outside wall of the hut with his eyes closed and his chest heaving. The work had used up what little strength he had. His coat was soaked, his hands were raw and red, and the tremor in his body ran from his shoulders to his knees.
But he’d worked. He’d hauled snow until his arms gave out, and he’d done it without being asked and without stopping when his body tried to quit.
I stood in the ruined doorway and looked at the blackened rafters and the melted snow running down the surviving walls.
The hut would need a new roof, a new stovepipe, a new radio, and replacements for everything Abe had kept stocked inside.
Everett was still the man who had rejected me, but I could now also see a sick, frightened man beginning to understand what his terrible decision had cost.
“I won’t ask Dominic to send you back,” I said. “You can stay.”
Everett opened his eyes.
“This is shelter, Everett. It doesn’t mean you’re welcome. Do you understand the difference?”
Relief moved faintly through the bond, and I let it pass without answering.
“That’s fair,” he said. “I understand.”
Shane looked at me. Dominic looked at me. Shane’s mouth tightened, but he gave me one short nod. Dominic’s hand found my hip for one brief, solid second before he let go.
“Drive us back,” I told Shane.
Everett climbed into the truck bed without being told. Shane started the engine. Dominic eased himself into the passenger seat.
I sat behind them and watched the ruined hut shrink in the side mirror, its roofless walls dark against the snow, smoke still rising from the wreckage in thin gray threads.
I turned away from the mirror as Shane steered us back toward the lodge.