What the Wolf Wants

James's POV

He hadn't meant to end up at the lake.

He'd been walking the eastern boundary, something he did whenever the mood struck him, a habit inherited from his father. Not out of sentiment. It just worked. Walking your own borders taught you things no report or Marcus briefing ever could. Whether the scent markers held. Where the undergrowth grew too thick to see through. Whether someone had shifted a boundary stone.

He'd been half focused on a stretch of fence line on the north side where the posts were rotting, already planning to send a crew out that week, when the scent slammed into him.

He'd never catalogued this one before. Or maybe he had, buried under other things, the way one note in a chord disappears until you hear it stripped bare and realize it had been there all along. Something warm and clean, riding just under the smell of lake water. Something moving through the trees on the afternoon breeze with a slow, unhurried quality that stopped him cold.

He stood still on the path. His wolf, quiet and bored through most of the walk, snapped forward with an interest that pissed James off for reasons he couldn't name fast enough to shut down.

He followed the scent to the edge of the lake. Stopped at the tree line.

Later, in the private accounting he'd give himself, he'd say he stopped to identify the source before deciding whether there was a security issue. Whether someone unauthorized was on his land. Whether there was some reasonable explanation for a scent this unfamiliar in its bare, uncovered state.

He would not admit, even to himself, that he stayed there longer than any security check required.

She was in the water to her shoulders, brown hair dark and slick against her neck, head tipped back to catch the light. He'd seen her every day for years. He'd looked at her with deliberate, practiced absence, the same way you look away from something bright enough to burn a mark into your vision. Trash. That was what the pack called her, what he'd let himself call her since they were kids, because her actual name in his mouth felt like a weight he'd never wanted to carry.

He had never, until this exact second, seen her the way his wolf was demanding he see her now.

The water shifted around her as she turned, light catching the surface. In the half second before she heard him and crossed her arm over her chest, something cold and inconvenient clicked into place in his head. He understood, all at once, exactly what the warriors who'd come to him last week with vague, half embarrassed reports had actually been describing.

He stepped back behind the tree line before she could look his way.

He stood in the trees and listened to her leave. The water settling. The soft crunch of her steps on the path. And he felt the specific, ugly fury of a man who has just been ambushed by his own instincts.

He walked back to the pack house the long way. Went to his office. Sat behind his desk and stared at the wall and made himself think about the fence line that needed fixing, and the Summit meeting Marcus kept pushing him to confirm, and the quarterly resource report sitting two weeks overdue on his desk.

His wolf refused every bit of it.

When she came through the pass-through at dinner with the first serving dishes, he was already seated at the head of the table. He looked up. He watched her move through the room, quiet, exact, entirely folded into herself. His wolf's hackles rose up his spine like a hand dragged the wrong way against fur.

He picked up his fork. Looked at his plate. Decided, with the same cold, focused certainty he used on every decision that needed a variable removed, that he'd deal with this quickly, cleanly, and that it would not become anything more than exactly what it was.

A distraction. A temporary, manageable distraction.

He ate his dinner. The French toast that morning had been, like it always was, exactly right.

He did not let himself sit with that thought for one second longer than it took to have it.

But his wolf did. His wolf sat with it all night.