I love when she’s so confident and capable. She’s wrong, of course, but I love it, and it makes me want to kiss her.
“What?”
“Nothing,” I say. We round a bend. The waterway opens up into a large lake walled in by trees and massive rock formations.
“Omigod,” she whispers.
“What?”
“What? Um, hello! The whole thing! It’s beautiful.”
My heart swells with pride.
“Look how the lake is a perfect mirror for the trees. All the yellows and oranges. The mist rising up at the end. It’s like a magical glen or something.”
She spots an eagle. A moose up on the ridge.
“How long?” she asks an hour later, when we’re going up one of the smaller rivers.
“We won’t get there today,” I say simply. “We’ll stop for the night.”
She goes still, eyes the color of moss in the waning light. The unfocused look tells me she’s thinking complicated thoughts.
She bites the side of her lower lip. She knows why she wants to come along with me—to get my story. Is she’s finally wondering why I want her along?
“You see the black rocks around the water’s edge? Those are slippery as ice.”
She brightens. “Is that personal experience talking?”
“Yes. I learned very much the hard way.” I tell her about slipping into the icy water as a kid. How long it took me to put even the simplest things together. The details of my story seem to calm her.
The details for the article she imagines she’ll be able to write about me. The dirty savage.
“Weren’t you hungry?”
“The loneliness was worse than the hunger.”
“It must have been so hard.”
She has no idea. How the loneliness wore at me.
I’ve only ever wanted companionship. Affection. The affection of the wolves meant everything—even the slightest scrap of it.
Ann’s affection in the institute was even more powerful to me than the affection of the wolves. The realization shakes me. Her affection meant more.
And now I’m bringing her home.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Aleksio
We set upat the Sky Slope Hotel, just outside of Duluth. My luxury suite becomes a command center, and my guys and I are generals, plotting our incursion into the giant wilderness area northwest of here. We’re assembling guides, getting ears on local law enforcement, developing teams, hiring copters.
My brother Viktor’s working on getting ears inside Bloody Lazarus’s organization. Lazarus has some kind of intel that’s keeping him a step ahead of us.
My girlfriend Mira comes in. She has her lawyer outfit on—the suit, the skirt. She looks so fuckable, I want to die.
“Baby,” I say.