Mine To Beg For

Not Like Him

POV: Caelen

The border report sat on my desk unread for the third day running, and I only knew that because Dax pointed it out, dropping a fresh copy on top of the old ones.

"East line," he said. "Halloway's men found a scent trail crossing near the old fire road, it didn't seem to belong to any pack, gone by the time they tracked it to the ridge. It could be rogues or scouting from Fenris again, testing how far our patrols actually run before somebody notices."

"Fenris wouldn't be that stupid."

"Fenris has been that stupid twice this year."

I pulled the report toward me and read the first line. 'Track width consistent with adult male, estimated 180-200 lbs, gait irregular; possibly injured or evading.' My eyes kept sliding off the page toward the window, toward the specific memory of Odell's mouth against my ear telling me to move like she meant it four nights ago, which had no business showing up in the middle of a threat assessment.

"You hearing any of this?" Dax said. Interrupting my thought.

"Gait irregular. Possibly injured?"

"That's the first line. I've said six sentences since then."

"I heard the first line clearly."

He gave me that look. I was already getting tired of, mostly because I kept earning it.

"Injured how," I said, forcing the rest of my attention onto the page. "Injured from a fight, or injured from a trap. Those are different problems."

"Halloway thinks trap. There's a piece of wire caught in the woods about forty feet off the trail, old and rusted, not ours. Somebody's running snares out there that don't belong to anybody in Blackholt."

"Human hunters?"

"Wrong terrain for it. Too far off the access road for anybody without a reason to be back there."

"So we've got an unclaimed trail, an injured wolf that isn't ours, and a snare line that isn't ours either, all inside a two-mile stretch of our own territory." I set the report down. "That's not a coincidence Fenris would bother staging. That's somebody actually living out there."

"That's what I think too. Which means we've got a squatter problem before we've got a border problem, and I'd rather solve the first one quiet before it turns into the second one loud."

"Send two men, not Halloway's whole patrol. If there's somebody hurt and scared living rough on our land, I don't want eight wolves descending on him like a raid. Send Ronan, he's steady, and pair him with somebody who can track without pushing."

"Marisol."

"Marisol. Tell them find him, don't corner him, and get word back before anybody makes a decision about what happens next."

Dax wrote it down, and somewhere in the four seconds it took him to write two names on a notepad my mind had already wandered off again.

"You want me to keep going, or you want to have this conversation with yourself instead," Dax said.

"Keep going."

"Bracket's still sitting on the Halloway acreage claim. He hasn't backed off it, he's just gone quiet, which is worse. My money's on him waiting for Thursday to see if your father shows any interest in the dispute before he commits to a position."

"My father won't show interest. He never does until it's already a problem he can blame someone else for."

My father did not tolerate complaint, and he especially did not tolerate it dressed up as observation, which was the only way I'd ever learned to get anything true about him past my own teeth.

He'd raised me on a single, repeating lesson, delivered so many times: 'a wolf who loses himself has already lost everything else.'

I was fourteen when I understood that the lesson wasn't really about wolves in general. It was about me specifically, and it came with a corollary he never said out loud but didn't need to: 'I am watching you for the moment you prove me right.'

I'd spent every year since making sure that moment didn't come. Composure wasn't a personality trait in my family. It was more like armor you didn't take off even in your own house, because you never knew which room he might walk into.

I'd seen what happened to wolves who lost the thread of themselves under his watch. He simply withdrew, incrementally and publicly, until the wolf in question understood exactly how much smaller his life had gotten and exactly whose doing that was. I'd watched it happen to an uncle once, a man who'd grieved too visibly after losing his mate, who'd let the pack see him break instead of managing it somewhere private, and within two years he was reduced to someone that didn't matter inside Blackholt.

I didn't know if my father would do that to me. I'd never given him the material to find out.

Until, apparently, now!

"You're doing it again," Dax said.

"Doing what."

"Going somewhere. You've got that face."

"I don't have a face."

"You've got a very specific face, and I've known you long enough to clock it from across a room, and you've had it on and off for two weeks now, and every time it shows up it's got her name written all over it, even though you've never once said her name to me."

"I'm not asking you to tell me anything," he continued, setting the notepad down. "I've got two working eyes and a nose that still functions. Whatever this is, it's not the arrangement you started with. I don't need the details to see that much."

"It's under control."

"Sure it is. That's why you've read the same line of a border report four times in the last ten minutes."

I looked back down at the page. He wasn't wrong.

"Send Ronan and Marisol out at first light," I said, closing the folder. "I want a report back by tomorrow evening, before anything reaches Bracket's ears and turns into a territorial argument nobody needs. If it's a squatter, I want him found and dealt with quietly. If it's something else, I want to know before my father does."

"Copy." Dax stood, tucked the notepad under his arm. "You should eat something. You look like hell."

"I'm fine."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true."

He gave me a last look and left.

It was Thursday. Not Tuesday. I had no reason to see her before Tuesday, no logistics that required it, nothing that needed confirming or rescheduling. The rules, her rules, the ones I'd agreed to, didn't include 'drops by two days early because he couldn't concentrate'

I picked up the phone anyway.

I typed 'Tuesday still good?' and deleted it.

I typed instead: 'I know it's not Tuesday...'

I paused for a second, 'I know it's not Tuesday. I'd like to see you tonight anyway, if that works.'

It was too plain and didn't sound like anything either of us usually said to each other. It sounded too direct, no joke buried in it to soften the request, no logistics language to hide behind. It sounded like a man asking for something he wanted, plainly, which wasn't a category of message I'd sent her before.

I could still delete it and wait for Tuesday like a man with some discipline left in him.

But... I hit send!