CHAPTER 4: The Case File

She finished the soup.

Roman stood in the hallway outside the guest room and listened to the quiet sounds of her moving around inside, the clink of the spoon, the soft exhale when she shifted position and her ribs reminded her they were cracked, the deliberate steadiness of her breathing that told him she was managing pain and refusing to show it.

His wolf was pressed against the inside of his chest like something trying to get out.

Mate, it kept insisting, with the single-minded certainty of an instinct that had been dormant for three years and was now making up for lost time. Mate. Ours. Safe. Keep her safe.

"I know," Roman muttered under his breath.

Dmitri appeared at the end of the hallway. His second-in-command looked at Roman's eyes, still threaded with gold at the edges, still refusing to go fully dark, and winced.

"Still?" Dmitri said.

"Still."

"Roman…"

"Not now."

"The pack is asking questions. You carried a human woman through the compound at midnight with your eyes blazing like a bonfire. They're going to keep asking questions."

"Tell them to mind their business."

"You're the Alpha. Your business is their business." Dmitri lowered his voice. "Is it real? The bond?"

Roman said nothing.

That was answer enough.

Dmitri leaned against the wall and blew out a long breath. "Elena's only been gone three years."

"I know how long Elena's been gone."

"The pack won't understand."

"The pack doesn't need to understand tonight." Roman pushed off the wall.

"Tonight they need to stay away from the eastern perimeter and let me handle the Wendigo situation."

"And the woman?"

"I'm handling that too."

He knocked twice and pushed the door

open.

She was sitting at the small desk in the corner with the empty tray pushed aside, and she had found a pen somewhere, his pen, from the bedside drawer, and was writing on the back of a receipt from her blazer pocket. Notes. She was taking notes.

On him, he realized. On the room. On everything she'd seen since she woke up.

The pen stopped moving when he entered. She looked up. Those green eyes ran over him once, quick and comprehensive, the way a camera shutter opens and closes.

"Sit down," she said.

Roman raised an eyebrow.

"Please," she added, in a tone that made it clear the please was a courtesy rather than a genuine request.

He sat. Across from her, far enough to give her space, close enough that she couldn't get to the door without going through him. She clocked the positioning immediately, he saw her clock it, and filed it away without reacting.

"You're investigating the murders," he said.

She stilled. Just slightly. "What murders."

"Three counties. Six weeks. Bodies with signatures that don't match any known predator." He watched her face. "You drove out here alone tonight following a lead your supervisor told you not to follow. You were on Blackwood Road when the Wendigo found you."

The pen was very still in her hand. "How do you know what road I was on?"

"I found your car."

"How do you know about my supervisor?"

"I don't. I'm inferring. Agents don't drive out to isolated locations at midnight alone unless they're either reckless or operating outside their sanctioned parameters." He paused. "You don't strike me as reckless."

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she set the pen down. A decision being made, he thought. A calculated display of openness to prompt reciprocal openness.

She was good.

"Special Agent Sara Mitchell," she said.

"Behavioral Analysis Unit. I've been assigned to a series of homicides across Cascade, Flathead, and Glacier counties. Twenty-three victims in six weeks. The signature is unlike anything in our database, bodies completely drained of fluid, skeletal fractures that originate from inside the bone, bite marks that don't match any catalogued predator." She held his gaze. "Until tonight I had a biological profile and no viable suspect. Now I have a viable suspect and a lot of questions."

"Ask them."

"What was that thing?"

"Wendigo."

She didn't blink. "Wendigos are folklore."

A beat of silence.

"You're telling me that what attacked me tonight was a Wendigo," she said carefully.

"Yes."

She picked up the pen again. Wrote something. Roman leaned slightly and caught two words: completely calm. She was noting that he showed no deception markers when he said it.

"The Wendigo," Sara said. "It knew my name."

"Yes."

"It used a voice I recognized."

Roman was quiet.

"It sounded like someone I knew.

Someone who died two years ago." Her voice was professionally flat and costing her something to keep that way. "Is that possible? Can a Wendigo retain memories from before the transformation?"

"Some of them. The stronger ones."

She wrote something else. Her hand was perfectly steady. "Who was it?"

"I was hoping you could tell me that."

She looked up. Read his face. Understood he was being honest. Something moved through her expression, there and gone, swiftly managed, and she looked back down at her notes.

"I need to call my supervisor," she said.

"Not yet."

She reached into her blazer pocket. Found it empty. Her eyes came up slowly. "Where is my phone."

Roman placed it on the desk between them. Her hand moved toward it. His covered it first.

She looked at his hand on her phone. Then at his face. Her expression was very controlled and very dangerous.

"Mr. Volkov," she said quietly.

"If you call your supervisor right now, he sends a team. The team comes in blind. The Wendigo is still on the perimeter and it's been feeding recently, which makes it stronger and less predictable." He held her gaze. "People will die. Your people."

"And if I don't call?"

"Then you spend tonight here, safe, and tomorrow I show you everything you need to understand what you're actually dealing with." He slid the phone back across the desk toward her. "I'm not keeping you prisoner. I'm asking you to wait twelve hours."

She looked at the phone. Looked at him.

He watched her build the risk assessment in real time. Threat analysis, probability calculations, exit strategy evaluation, all of it running behind those steady green eyes.

She picked up the phone.

Roman said nothing. Didn't move. Gave her the choice completely.

She turned it over in her hand once.

Then she put it in her pocket.

"Twelve hours," she said. "Then I make my call, I get my gun back, and you answer every question I have. Every single one."

"Agreed."

"And Mr. Volkov?" She held his gaze with a directness that most people, most wolves, couldn't manage. "If I find out you're lying to me about any of it, twelve hours becomes a federal investigation."

Roman nodded.

She pulled her notes toward her and kept writing.

He sat across from her and watched her document his existence with the focused precision of someone who had already decided he was a case to be solved, and felt his wolf go absolutely, completely, helplessly still.

Not calm.

Captivated.

He had faced down rival Alphas, rogue vampires, and Council Elders who wanted his territory. He had buried his mate and rebuilt himself from the wreckage and kept a pack together through grief that would have broken lesser men.

He had never once been unnerved by someone with a pen and a receipt.

Sara Mitchell, he was beginning to understand, was going to be the most dangerous thing that had ever walked into Thornridge.

And she hadn't even gotten her gun back yet.