LOGINNoahTwelve days of surveillance sits on the council table in front of me, typed, dated, signed, and it might be the most dangerous thing I've ever done."Read us the summary. We’ll go through it in detail later."Dad's using his public voice, the proud one, and I make myself not react to it."Twelve days. Three watchers in two trucks, working rotating shifts, we compiled a full log of the north gate and the east fence."The room is quiet the way it only goes for evidence."Movement in and out is consistent with a residential community. Deliveries. Commuters. School runs. Gym bags. Joggers. Grocery shopping.”The next part is because Dax warned them to stay inside.“No movement after dark out of the Reserve. Zero approach to town limits at night. My read is that they have a curfew and strict rules not to leave after sunset. There’s also been no contact with any site connected to this year's disappearances.""Nothing," Corben says from the wall, arms crossed, "Except the howling.""You
NoahHe's waiting.Braced above me on his forearms, all that heat and muscle holding perfectly still because I asked him to.Wolf-amber eyes on mine, and the hardest part turns out to be that he's making it easy.I should've planned this. Should've written it down in the truck like one of my reports.I’m not a spur of the moment kind of guy generally."You asked me something once."My voice comes out lower than I meant."While we were fucking. You probably think I ignored it on purpose."His whole body changes.He knows exactly which something."Noah, you don't have to-""Shut up. Please. If I stop I'll have to start over and this isn’t the kind of bravery I’m good at."He shuts up."You asked me to land here. When I came off the fence."Long breath out."So. The thing is. I'm not coming off the fence."A flicker of something that looks a whole lot like hurt crosses his face, and I grab his jaw before it can become anything."Because I'm already off it. It already happened. I don't ev
DaxNoah walks into my kitchen smelling like another man and I'm across the room before the door finishes closing."Whoa. Hello to you too.""You smell wrong."My nose is already in his neck, and under the cedar there's six hours of truck cab, thermos coffee, and hunter.A strange one."Whose scent is on you?""Pruitt. My shift partner. He’s been sitting eight inches from me since dawn, because that's how trucks work."'Strip it off him,' the wolf says, hackles all the way up. 'Every layer that stranger breathed on. Now.'"Already on it," I tell him."Jacket," I say. "Off.""Dax.""The jacket is coming off you one way or another, and one of those ways involves buying you a new jacket."He laughs at me, tired and real, and shrugs out of it, and I throw it in the general direction of the laundry room, hard.Four days of this.Four days of watching a hunter truck sit outside my fence through the trees, knowing he's in it, not being able to walk over and kiss him.Four days of the fence l
Noah"Say the last part again."Dax's voice fills the truck cab, and underneath it there's a low rolling sound that isn't coming from the engine."You heard me the first time.""Say it again anyway. I want to be sure before I lose my mind properly."Driving through the dark with my phone on speaker, I give him the whole conversation we had over dinner, nearly word for word.The growl stops being underneath his voice and just becomes his voice."Your own father put a scope in your hand and pointed it at me.""Yes.""Is he punishing you? Does he know something?""No. Jesus, Dax. If he knew he wouldn’t be circumspect about it."The headlights find the turnoff and I take it."He thinks he's giving me a gift. Career-wise, he is."Silence on the line.Somewhere behind it I can hear him crossing a room, turning, crossing it back."Where are you driving? That's not the sound of your street.""Lillianna's.""It's past midnight.""She'll be up.""Noah."His voice drops, and even furious, even t
NoahDax makes it from my bathroom to my kitchen in about four steps, dripping, a towel around his hips that's losing the fight, and snatches the phone off the counter mid-ring."Mato."Watching a naked wet Alpha take a call in my kitchen should not be doing anything for me after the morning we just had.It's doing something for me.Then his face changes, and that's the end of that.Whatever makes a man who texts in single words pick up a phone and use his voice is nothing good.We both knew it before he answered.Dax listens.Says nothing for a long stretch, which with Mato on the other end means the conversation is practically a debate."Since when?"Another silence."Don't be seen. Don't touch them. Call me if they move."He puts the phone down and stares at it like it bit him."Talk," I say."There's a grey pickup parked on the Reserve road. Been there since first light. Two men inside, scanning the fence line with binoculars. One of them got out to stretch his legs and Mato caugh
NoahGetting a werewolf out of his jeans while walking backward is a two-man job and both of us are laughing too hard to be much good at it."Foot. Other foot. Dax, lift your...""Your hallway is trying to kill me.""My hallway is fine, you're just enormous.""Thank you.""Wasn't a compliment.""Very much sounded like one."He kicks the jeans somewhere into next week and stands there in my bathroom stark naked, smug, half hard and rising, like a man who has never once lost an argument in his life.Insufferable.Gorgeous.Mine, apparently, and as of this morning there's nothing standing in the room with us.No doors.No careful sentences.Just him.My chest does something dangerous about that, so I hand him the cling film.He looks at the box. Looks at me."Kinky.""It's for the splint, you animal.""Sure it is."He wraps my forearm with great care, though.Takes the box out of my hand and does it neat and snug, cranking the film around the splint with the focus he usually saves for pa
DaxThe thing's in pieces at our feet and my body's still waiting for round two.I never come down off a kill clean. My blood's still up, ears still straining, every muscle still voting to hit something else.I don’t think it’s a werewolf thing. It’s an adrenaline thing.So when the wolf decides to
NoahThe wolf hits it like a truck, and the thing barely rocks.Wrong.Two hundred pounds of Alpha at a dead run should fold anything with a spine.This rotten thing takes the hit, slides back a boot-length in the dirt, and swings an arm the size of my leg.The wolf has to wrench sideways midair to
DaxFor the last hour I've been telling myself I'm only out here to keep the idiot from getting himself killed.It's a good lie.Responsible.Very Alpha.The kind of thing my father would've said with a straight face right before going off and doing exactly what he wanted.Truth is, I caught his tr
NoahThree miles from where you should be standing.The asshole could have at least given me a direction.Fortunately, I’ve learned to trust my instincts.Hunters don’t have any inherent magic, but our senses are more developed than those of ordinary humans.So here I am.Three miles out from the N







