That's uncharted ground, and I don't have a map for navigating it.
Another minute passes, maybe two, just breathing her in and marveling at how someone who's been through so much can still trust so completely.
Then, with movements careful enough to disarm a bomb, I retrieve my phone again.
This time, though, I'm not looking for messages.
I tap through screens with practiced efficiency, past encrypted folders and hidden apps, until I find what I'm looking for. Blake Harrison's photo fills the screen—a professional headshot from Iron Ridge's website, all artificial smile and calculating eyes. He's wearing one of those ridiculous Alpha power suits, navy blue with a blood-red tie, styled like he thinks he's running for office instead of managing a pack of abusive assholes.
I study the image with the same clinical detachment I once used to analyze targets. High forehead—arrogant, likes to think he's the smartest person in the room. Weak chin hidden by careful grooming—compensating, always needs to prove his dominance. Eyes set too close together, showing a narrow worldview, inability to see beyond his own needs. The smile doesn't reach those eyes, never has in any photo I've found. Sociopathic tendencies, potentially narcissistic personality disorder.
My thumb swipes across the screen, pulling up more photos. Blake at pack gatherings, Blake at business meetings, Blake with his arm around Willa in what should be a loving photo but instead looks like possession. In every image, she's smaller, dimmed, trying to take up less space while he spreads out like he owns the world.
The cold thing that lives in my chest—the part that made me good at my job, that let me hunt predators through legal loopholes and back alleys—unfurls like smoke.
I know men like Blake Harrison.
Have put dozens of them in the ground or behind bars, depending on what the law allowed. They're all the same underneath the expensive suits and practiced smiles:hollow creatures who feed on others' pain, who break beautiful things because they can't stand not being the brightest light in the room.
But Blake made a critical error.
He didn't just hurt someone—he hurt her.
He touched what's ours, left marks on her soul that might never fully fade, and now he's stupid enough to show up in our territory acting like he still has rights to her air.
My free hand flexes against my thigh, muscle memory from years of specialized training.
I know seventeen ways to kill a man without leaving forensic evidence. Know how to make someone disappear so thoroughly their own mother wouldn't find them. Know which pressure points cause maximum pain with minimal visible damage, how to break someone down psychologically until they're begging for physical pain instead.
All skills I've carefully leashed since leaving that life behind. But for Blake? For the man who locked Willa in a burning building and then had the audacity to blame her for it?
The leash feels awfully thin.
Willa stirs against me, making a soft sound that pulls me back from the edge of that particular darkness. Right. She needs tenderness now, not the predator I keep caged.
That'll come later, when she's safe at home in the nest Cole's building, when I can slip away and do what needs doing without her ever knowing the specifics.
Because that's the thing about being both protector and weapon—you have to know when to be which.
Right now, she needs the man who'll hold her while she sleeps, who'll whisper promises in the dark and mean them.But Blake?Blake's going to meet the other version, the one who earned a reputation in certain circles for being very, very good at making problems disappear.
I pull up a different app, one that looks like a standard weather program but opens into something far more useful.
Contact lists. Safe houses. People who owe me favors.
Resources accumulated over years of operating in the gray spaces between legal and necessary.
Blake Harrison thinks he can waltz into our town, threaten our Omega, and walk away unscathed.
He thinks that expensive suit and Iron Ridge's money make him untouchable. Assumes Willa has no one to protect her, no one who'd go to war for her safety.
He's about to learn exactly how wrong he is.
"Let the haunt begin," I murmur, the words a promise to the universe and a warning to anyone stupid enough to threaten what's mine.
The thing about ghosts is they don't always stay buried.
Rarely… they come back, seeking justice or vengeance or just to make sure old debts get paid.