Chapter 12

Rex's POV

I have walked into crowds my whole life and felt nothing. This morning I came around the corner of the pack house and the wind shifted, and her scent hit me before I even saw her face.

Cheap soap. Lake water. Something underneath it all that I had no name for — clean and old and deep, like cold water rising out of rock.

Griffin went very, very still.

Then he ignited.

The whole courtyard went sharp. And I looked at her standing there, and I knew. I knew the way a wolf always knows, the way the old packs sing about it in songs I had always thought were exaggerated.

Mate! Griffin shouted.

I had never believed it was real until that exact moment.

Then she opened her mouth and told twenty wolves she was Cole Carter's mate.

I checked her throat. No mark, nothing that held under any law I had ever enforced. What stood behind her words was a forged scroll and three years of poison.

Something in me went loose with relief, and I did not like how loose it went.

---

"You knew," Griffin said from somewhere low in my chest. "The moment the wind changed. You knew, and you said nothing."

"She told the whole pack she belongs to another wolf. She also didn't say she was my mate. Mates are two-way," I said. "There has to be something wrong with that."

"Oh." His voice went flat and cold. "So that's how it is. Despite being an Alpha King, despite how fearless you are in battle, you're a coward when it comes to love. You know damn well she's your mate, but because she didn't give you a response, you're just going to give up? If I told you something right now — " He stopped. "No. Forget it. You don't deserve to know."

"Say what you were going to say."

"You don't deserve it."

I let that go. "Her situation is complicated," I said. "A forged rite. A Beta's daughter coming back in three days. A complaint I have to judge with clean hands. If I walk out there and say that word, everything bends around it. Nothing stays straight."

"Or," Griffin said, "you just think she's too fat. Or not pretty enough. Say the honest thing for once."

I pressed my fingers to my forehead. "I genuinely did not think that."

I didn't tell him the rest of it.

I didn't say that I stood in that courtyard and thought every wolf in it had gone blind. They looked at her and saw the weight on her, the heavy arms, the body three years of poison had built. That was all they saw.

I saw the line of her brows, straight and clean as a brushstroke. I saw eyes that didn't move off a threat no matter how many wolves pushed back. I saw the way she held her chin when twenty people stared her down, and something in me that I have kept locked up since I was eighteen reached out and put a hand on the bars and did not let go.

She was striking. Genuinely, surprisingly striking. The kind of face that lands like a fist because you weren't ready for it.

I kept all of that to myself.

Griffin turned his back on me and went quiet. He has done that exactly twice in five years. I earned it both times, and I had earned it now too.

I sat down and pulled the Carter file across the blotter, but the words stopped making sense after the third page.

I put my head down on my arms for one minute, which is what a man tells himself before he falls asleep at his own desk.

I was in the forest again.

Dark trees, no wind, the kind of quiet that only exists in dreams.

She was there. Kneeling beside me in the pine needles the way she had that night, her hands pressing against my side at first. Then those hands began to move. They were small, sure, and warm in a way that went deeper than skin. She stroked slowly down my chest, over my stomach, gentle but certain, until her fingers wrapped around my cock.

She started to stroke me, up and down, steady and smooth. The dream made every touch feel real. My breath grew rough. The pleasure built fast and sharp. I tried to see her face, but it stayed blurred at the edges.

Then, right at the peak, when my body tightened and I came hard in her hand, the blur finally cleared.

Wren!

I woke up with a sharp gasp, my hand clenched around the edge of the desk. My breath came fast and ragged. The office was dark. My heart hammered against my ribs, and the front of my pants was wet and sticky. Outside, the valley had gone full night while I was under, and the fog had come back up off the river and pressed itself against the window glass.

I sat there and tried to steady my breathing.

Her face. For one second I had seen it, clean and clear. It was not a stranger's face. It was the face from the courtyard this morning. The straight brows. The black eyes. The mouth that hadn't shaken in front of twenty wolves.

Wren Ashwood.

I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth and stayed very still.

It meant nothing. A man's sleeping mind takes what he has been carrying all day and builds a story out of it, and I had been carrying her face since this morning. Of course my dream put her in the forest. Of course it put her hands on me. That is what a tired brain does with the thing it cannot stop turning over.

I picked up the desk phone and dialed before I had finished deciding to.

Two rings. Then a voice, half-asleep and annoyed about it. "Yeah."

"It's Horne," I said. "I need two things checked. First, pull everything we have on Wren Ashwood. Where she came from, who she was in Blackwood, anyone who knew her before the Carter household. Second." I paused. "The woman from the ridge. I want the search extended. New description. Small hands. Strong. Medical knowledge, or something close to it."

A pause on the other end. "Tonight?"

"First thing," I said. "Before the morning briefing."

I hung up and sat in the dark for a moment.

It was too neat. The kind of coincidence that doesn't happen in real life, only in the stories men tell themselves when they want something to be true.

I was not going to put weight on it.