ThorneVale

Chapter thirteen

The pack house's back room felt smaller than usual with all four of them crowded around the table the next morning, Marcus, Del, and Toby, the young wolf who'd caught the scout the night before, all watching Callum with varying degrees of expectation.

"I want a rotation on the ridge house," Callum said, tracing the northern boundary on the map with two fingers. "Two on watch at all times, staggered shifts so no pattern's obvious from outside. If the Circle already has the property marked, I want eyes on it before they make another move."

"You want to tell her that," Del said, arms crossed, "or should I get used to being the messenger for every decision you make about her life?"

The comment landed exactly as pointed as she meant it to, and Callum felt the weight of the promise he'd made the night before, the one about not deciding things for Wren without telling her first, settle uncomfortably against the practical urgency of the moment.

"I'll tell her," he said. "Today. But the rotation starts now, whether or not she's had the chance to weigh in on the details. Some decisions can't wait for a conversation, Del. This is one of them."

Del's expression didn't fully soften, but she nodded, because even she understood the difference between deciding someone's fate for them and moving fast enough to keep them alive while you explained yourself as quickly as you could manage.

Marcus was already sketching rotation slots on a spare sheet of paper, methodical in the way he always was once a decision had actually been made. "Toby and Reese for the first shift. I'll take second with Del. You should stay clear of the actual watch rotation, Cal, you're too obviously connected to her now if anyone's tracking pack movement in and out of that property."

"I'm not going to just sit here while people watch her house for me."

"You're going to do exactly that, because you being seen there constantly is the fastest way to confirm to the Circle exactly what they're already suspecting." Marcus didn't look up from his sketching, his tone brooking no argument. "You can visit. You should visit, given what proximity does for her condition. But the actual security work needs bodies that don't advertise the connection every time they walk up that driveway."

Callum wanted to argue and found he didn't have a good counter, the tactical logic too sound to dismiss just because it chafed against every protective instinct currently running hot in his chest. He nodded, once, and Marcus finished the rotation without further comment.

The conversation moved to logistics after that, sightlines around the property, the best positions for watching the road without being visible from the house itself, contingencies if the scout from the night before had already reported back before he was caught. Callum let the practical rhythm of it settle him, the particular calm that came from having something concrete to plan around instead of the tangled, unresolved feelings that had kept him up long past midnight the night before.

It was easier to protect her from a distance, in the abstract, structural sense of assigning shifts and checking sightlines, than it was to sit across from her in that firelit room and admit, out loud, exactly how much he'd started to want things he'd sworn off years ago.

He didn't say that part out loud, not to Marcus, not to Del, though he suspected both of them saw it plainly enough anyway.

When the meeting broke up he drove straight to the ridge house, earlier in the day than his usual visits, and found Wren in the garden, of all places, sleeves pushed up, pulling weeds from a bed that had clearly been neglected since her aunt's illness began.

She looked up when his truck pulled in, and something in her expression, cautious but no longer entirely guarded, told him the conversation from the night before had held overnight, hadn't dissolved back into the careful distance of the days before it.

"You're here early," she said, sitting back on her heels.

"I need to tell you something before you hear it from someone else." He crouched at the edge of the garden bed, close enough to talk without shouting across the yard, and told her about the rotation, the watch shifts, the reasoning behind keeping his own visits separate from the security detail, laying it out plainly the way he'd promised he would.

She listened without interrupting, and when he finished she was quiet for a moment, turning the information over.

"You're putting people around my house without asking me first," she said finally, though there was less heat in it than he expected. "But you're telling me about it before I found out some other way. That's new."

"It's what I promised."

"It is." She pulled off her gardening gloves, studying him with an expression he was starting to recognize, the particular assessment of someone deciding, in real time, how much trust a given moment had earned. "Okay. I don't love the idea of strangers watching my house, even strangers on my side. But I understand why, and I appreciate that you told me instead of just letting me find a car parked on the road and wonder if I was losing my mind."

"That's progress, I think. For both of us."

"It's a start," she agreed, and something in the way she said it, wry rather than guarded, felt like the first real crack of warmth since the rite, small and careful but undeniably there.

They sat together at the edge of the garden a while longer, talking about nothing important, and Callum let himself notice, without immediately shutting the thought down the way he usually did, how easy it was becoming to simply exist in her company. How much less it felt like danger and how much more it felt, despite everything, like something worth protecting properly instead of from a careful, cowardly distance.