Chapter 20 Not Enough
Liza POV
Everett was shoveling snow off the lodge steps when I came across the yard from the garage.
He looked worse than the night before, which I wouldn’t have thought possible.
His skin had a gray cast beneath his damp golden hair, and his hands shook badly enough that the shovel blade scraped the wood in uneven bites.
He’d rolled up his sleeves despite the cold.
Every few strokes he paused and breathed through his mouth.
He wasn’t performing for me. His guard stood inside the lodge doorway, and the yard was otherwise empty, the sun barely clearing the eastern ridge. The only sound was the scrape of the blade and a jay screaming in the pines above the garage.
I pulled Shane’s jacket tighter and didn’t slow down.
“Liza.” Everett stopped shoveling and leaned on the handle. “I owe you an apology. For last night. For putting my hands on Shane.”
“You do,” I said.
“I’m sorry.” He didn’t dress it up. Then he went back to shoveling, and I watched the blade shake and thought about walking to the truck.
“Can I ask you something?” he said, without looking up.
I waited.
He stopped again and turned the shovel upright, resting both hands on the end of the handle like a man leaning on a cane. The morning light showed every hollow in his face.
“If I go back,” he said. “If I take Kurt’s rank and end this. If I make peace across the river and hold it. Would you—” He stopped. Swallowed. The motion looked like it hurt. “Could you consider me again?”
I’d known it was coming. Some version of it, sooner or later. The bargain. The offer of redemption in exchange for a second chance. He’d frame it as justice, and maybe he even meant it that way, but underneath it was the same thing it had always been. Tell me what I have to do to get you back.
“No,” I said.
He barely flinched. His mouth tightened and his shoulders dropped a fraction, and then he straightened and waited for whatever came next.
I could have left it there. One clean word and a walk to the truck. Instead I stayed. I wasn’t going to debate my answer, but he needed to understand what he was asking me to move past.
“There’s something you need to hear,” I said.
“You don’t have to explain.”
“Sit down, Everett.”
He sat on the edge of the cleared step. I stayed standing, and neither of us tried to close the distance.
“Do you remember what the room sounded like?” I asked.
He looked at me.
“Not what you said. I know you remember what you said. I mean the room. The sound it made when you looked at my face.”
He didn’t answer.
“It went quiet,” I said. “There was no surprise or anger. They were waiting. Every wolf in that hall held their breath at the same time, because they saw it in your eyes before you opened your mouth. They saw you look at the scar and decide. And they waited to hear how you were going to say it.”
My voice stayed level, but the room came back. The firelight. The pine boughs on the platform.
“Rosa’s two kids were standing in that room when you said it.”
Everett’s hands tightened on his knees.
“You called me a distraction.” The word scraped my throat raw. “The man the Goddess chose for me stood on a stage and told his whole pack that the woman who bled for their children was too ugly to stand beside him. And you said it in a voice you’d rehearsed.”
He closed his eyes.
“Rosa looked at the floor. Kurt looked satisfied. And you stood there with your good suit and your clean face and your brand-new title, and you felt proud of yourself for being honest.”
“I wasn’t proud,” he said. His voice came out rough.
“It showed on your face anyway.”
He didn’t argue.
I looked at him sitting on the cold step with the shovel propped beside him, and I felt sorry for him. The pity changed nothing.
“Kurt is your problem,” I said. “Not a gift to me. You don’t get to trade his removal for a chance at what you threw away.
If you take him down, you do it because it’s your duty as Alpha, because he attacked my people and yours.
You do it because it’s right. Not because you think it buys you something. ”
Everett opened his eyes and looked at me. Whatever he saw in my face, he took it.
“I understand,” he said.
I walked to Shane’s truck before my throat could tighten. Behind me, the shovel scraped the steps again, slow and steady and shaking. I kept walking.
? ? ?
My left calf held.
I tested it on the resort steps, putting my full weight on the bad leg as I climbed from the parking lot to the patrol base, and the deep ache the fence wire had left was gone.
The skin underneath the bandage had knit the way wolf wounds do, leaving a tight, pink line that would fade to nothing inside a week.
The wound on my face had been beyond even a wolf’s healing. This one would heal clean.
Shane kept pace beside me. The mark he’d given me sat above my collar on the right side of my neck, dark and permanent.
He moved through the base lodge door with the ease of a man who’d slept well and woken up happy, and when Kristen looked up from the weather board, her eyes went straight to the mark.
“About time,” she said.
Shane grinned at her and poured himself coffee with deliberate casualness. The mark made him quieter in his own skin. Settled. Sure.
Dominic was at the far end of the patrol base, reviewing avalanche-control reports with Zeller and a newer patroller I’d seen on Kristen’s rotation. He turned when we came in, and his dark eyes found the mark on my neck before they found my face.
Something hot and possessive crossed his expression, and his wolf pushed close enough to the surface that the brown of his irises went almost black for a beat.
He looked at Shane, then at me, and I held his gaze without apology.
I’d chosen Shane. I’d also chosen Dominic. Neither choice undid the other.
Dominic crossed the room in three strides, careful of his left side, and Shane turned to face him with his coffee in one hand and his spine straight. Conversation around us stopped.
Dominic clapped Shane on the back hard enough that Shane’s coffee slopped over the rim and his boots shifted on the floor. The sound of the open palm hitting his jacket echoed off the gear racks.
“Congratulations,” Dominic said. His voice was even. Then he walked back to the weather board.
Shane rubbed his shoulder and looked at me. I raised an eyebrow.
“That’s going to bruise,” he said.
“You’ll live.”
? ? ?
A weather system stalled over the valley and closed the upper lifts, which meant the three of us ended up at the same table in the base lodge’s small dining area, watching the radar loop on Zeller’s laptop and eating bowls of chili that someone from the kitchen had brought up.
Wind-driven snow ticked against the windows.
The resort runs below us were empty, and the parking lot held maybe a dozen cars.
“It’ll push through by noon,” Shane said, pointing at the trailing edge of the system on the screen. “The front’s moving fast. You can see the gap behind it.”
“You’re looking at a ridge,” Dominic said. “That stalls everything for another two hours. Look at the pressure gradient.”
“We’ll be skiing by lunch.”
“Take a meteorology class.”
I ate my chili and watched them argue. They did this.
They’d been doing it for years, long before I crossed the river, and the rhythm of it was comfortable and practiced and underneath it was real trust. Shane pushed.
Dominic held the line. Neither of them gave ground without making the other earn it, and neither of them took it personally.
“You’re both wrong,” I said.
They looked at me.
“It clears by one, not noon. And the wind shifts northwest after it passes, which means the upper mountain opens but the east glades stay closed because of the drift pattern.” I pointed at the satellite image on the right side of Zeller’s screen.
“You can see the moisture band curving inland. That keeps the east face socked in for another three hours after the main system passes.”
Shane stared at the screen. Dominic leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, and the corner of his mouth twitched.
“She’s right,” Dominic said.
“I know she’s right. I was getting there.”
“You were getting to lunch.”
“Lunch is a perfectly valid meteorological prediction.”
I laughed. Laughing with these two came easily; the feeling beneath it was what surprised me.
I was sitting between my fated mate and my chosen mate in a resort dining room, eating bad chili and arguing about weather, and none of it felt complicated.
Dominic’s presence grounded me, steady and close.
Shane’s happiness ran through the fresh bond like a warm current.
Dominic hadn’t said a word to me about Shane’s mark, and I could feel it waiting. Right now, with the snow on the windows and the radar turning and the chili getting cold, I let myself have the hour.
The weather broke at ten past one. I didn’t mention it.
? ? ?
Dominic caught me outside after lunch. Shane had taken his truck back to the garage to get a tour ready, and the lot had nobody in it but the two of us and the wind.
“I hit him too hard,” Dominic said.
“I noticed.”
He stood with his hands in his coat pockets and looked at the mark. “I’ve known since the night of the tie rod. I told myself he’d wait forever and you’d never look.”
“You were half right. He would have waited.”
“Yeah.” His jaw worked. “He’s all over you, and I want to put him through the garage wall, and he’s the best man I have.”
“Then don’t put him through the wall.”
“No.” It came out flat. Then he breathed, and some of it went out of him. “It’s on your neck, Liza. It stays.”
“So do I. I sleep at your cabin. That’s not changing because Shane finally said it out loud.”
He looked at me then. His hand came up and settled on my shoulder, on the side without the mark, and stayed there.
He walked me up the steps and held the patrol base door for me.
? ? ?
The rumble started low.
I was at the patrol base near the end of my shift, cleaning a splinting kit and listening to Kristen coordinate the last sweepers off the upper mountain.
The day had gone clean, no injuries, no lost tourists, no incidents worth logging.
Shane had taken his last snowmobile tour group down already, and Dominic had left for the lodge an hour ago to check the north fencing before dark.
The rumble came up through the floor, too sustained for thunder and too deep for wind, a vibration that made the walls hum and the first-aid supplies rattle on their shelf.
I knew what it was before I could think it, because I’d heard it once before on the East side when a cornice collapsed above the drainage and took half an acre of loaded slope with it.
Avalanche.
I was on my feet and at the radio before the vibration stopped.
“All stations, patrol base. Did anyone copy that?” I keyed the channel and listened. Kristen’s voice came back from the upper mountain, strained and fast.
“Patrol base, I felt it up here. East face. It came from below us.”
Below us meant the river road.
I switched to the resort-wide frequency and heard what I was afraid of.
The channel that monitored the river road, the highway between both sides of the valley, had gone dead silent.
No check-ins, no traffic reports, nothing.
The kind of silence that meant the repeater antenna was down or the road itself was gone.
Then the call came through.
A resort maintenance worker’s voice, shaking and half-buried in static, cutting in and out on a handheld that was too far from the nearest tower. I caught fragments. —slide hit the road— and then —cars, I saw cars— and then the worst part: —buried, they’re buried under it—