Chapter 3

Caden's POV

I left before she woke up.

I told myself it was the right thing to do. I told myself she was a stranger and it was one night and leaving quietly was the clean version of this. I told myself a lot of things while I was getting dressed in the dark and watching her sleep and feeling something in my chest that I had no right to feel about a woman I had known for six hours.

She was lying on her side with her hand open on the pillow where I had been. Her breathing was slow and even and she looked like someone who had finally found a few hours of peace after a very long time without it. I had noticed, the night before, how carefully she held herself when she was awake. How she sat with her back to the walls and her eyes on the doors. How even when she laughed she looked like someone waiting for something to cancel it out. But asleep she looked like just herself, no armor, no watching, just a woman resting.

I stood there longer than I should have.

Then I went to the kitchen and made her coffee because she took it a specific way and I had picked that up without meaning to the way I picked up everything about her without meaning to, and I left without making a sound, and I walked out of that building and into the cold morning air and I told myself I was fine.

I was two miles down the road when Alpha Marcus called.

He said the full mission file was ready and I should check my secure messages and then he hung up the way he always did, no extra words, and I pulled over on the side of the road and sat there with my phone in my hand and thought: I already know I am not going to like this.

I opened the file.

I went through it the way I went through every file. The threat assessment. The syndicate contacts. The timeline of what had happened to her over the past eighteen months. I read it all and my jaw got tighter with every page because this woman had done everything right. She had testified. She had cooperated. She had been brave in every way a person could be brave and every door had been slammed in her face anyway, and now she was in a small town trying to build something out of nothing while the people who destroyed her life the first time were already parked on her street.

Then I got to the photograph.

I stopped breathing.

It was her.

The woman I had just left sleeping in that room. The woman whose coffee I had made in her kitchen ten minutes ago. The woman who had said I have not done this in a long time before she kissed me and I had felt the whole careful distance I kept between myself and everything just folded up and disappeared.

Nora Hale. My mission. The woman Alpha Marcus had sent me here to protect before I even knew her face.

I sat on the side of that road and I could not move.

My wolf did not move gradually. It hit me all at once, every part of it, like a door I had been leaning against my whole life suddenly opened and I fell through. Full recognition. Complete and final and so certain it did not leave room for argument. The word came up from somewhere deep in the part of me that was more wolf than man and it was not complicated, it was not a question, it was just the truth landing with everything it weighed.

Fated mate.

I put my head back against the seat and closed my eyes.

I had felt it the night before and I had filed it under something else. I had felt it the moment she walked into that café with that look on her face, tired and sharp and trying so hard not to show how much she was hurting, and something in me had just gone quiet and certain and I had told myself it was because she was interesting. I had told myself it was because it had been a long time since I had a real conversation with anyone outside the pack. I had told myself every reasonable thing I could think of and none of it had been the truth and somewhere underneath all of it my wolf had already known exactly what she was to me.

She was mine.

And I had to walk into her apartment tomorrow as her service dog and lie to her every single day.

I called Marcus because I did not know what else to do with what I was carrying.

He picked up on the second ring and before I could say a word he said: your wolf reacted to the photograph in my office yesterday. I saw it and I let it go because I needed you for this job. Tell me it happened again just now.

I said it happened again.

He was quiet for a moment and I could hear him thinking.

Then he said: I know what this is, Caden. I know what it costs. And I am going to ask you to do something that goes against everything your wolf is telling you right now. I am going to ask you to walk through her door anyway and keep your head and keep her alive. Because if you do not, she dies. And you will spend the rest of your life knowing you could have stopped it.

I said: and when she finds out. Because she will find out.

He said: then you make sure she is alive to be angry about it.

I sat with that for a while.

I drove back to Millbrook slowly, which was not something I usually did, I usually moved fast, but I needed the time. I needed to sit with the weight of what I was about to do. I was going to walk into her life and she was going to trust me the way people trusted something they thought could not hurt them, the way she had already talked to me the night before, open and honest, giving me things she did not give to people, and I was going to hold every single thing she gave me and she was never going to know that I knew.

I thought about what Alpha Marcus had said in the briefing. She is a person who has been having a very bad eighteen months.

I thought about her asleep with her hand open on the pillow.

I thought about what it must have been like to be her. To do everything right and watch it fall apart anyway. To move to a new town and check the locks and try to believe that being somewhere new would be enough. To finally have one night where everything went quiet and then wake up alone to a coffee made right and not know what to make of any of it.

She deserved someone in her corner who was honest.

I was not going to be able to be that person. Not yet. Maybe not for a long time.

I parked at the back of the motel and I sat there and breathed through what my wolf was doing, which was loud and certain and not interested in the mission parameters at all. I told her: not yet. I told her: she needs to be safe first. Everything else comes after safety.

My wolf did not like it.

I shifted anyway.

The wolf settled around me like it always did, heavy and certain, and I walked through the service entrance and the handler clipped the leash and we went up in the elevator and she knocked on the door and I heard Nora move inside and my wolf went so still it felt like holding my breath.

The door opened.

She looked at me and I looked at her and I saw the exact moment something in her let go a little, the way it had the night before when she walked into the café and sat down across from me. Her body relaxed by just a fraction. Like even in wolf form something in her recognized that this was safe.

I wanted to tell her she was right about that.

I wanted to tell her a hundred things.

I walked through her door and she said come in and bent down to let me sniff her hand and her hair fell forward over her shoulder and she smelled exactly the way I remembered from last night and my wolf said her name inside me like a word it had been saving.

She called me Ghost.

I hated it.

I sat down in the middle of her living room and looked at her and thought: I am going to keep you alive. I am going to stand between you and everything coming. And one day, when it is over, I am going to tell you every single truth I owe you.

She closed the door and locked both bolts.

I watched her do it and thought: twelve bolts would not be enough for what is coming. But I will be.

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