Page 79 of Shifters Reckoning

“He can keep the settling bed,” I told the raven. “You get the towel rack. Done. Next.”

There was always a next.

Near suppertime, I was at the front of a line of nexts that stretched out the door and around the mess hall, acting as the headmaster of the worst boarding school in Louisiana. Bunk disputes. Ration math. A squirrel who’d climbed into the rafters of the new mess hall and declined, philosophically, to come down. Phil grilling on a schedule that never stopped. Eating kept the fear sated so it didn’t turn into panic. Panic would have destroyed what we had, and I was not going to let this camp fall apart days from a war.

“I’ve got to go do something useful. My office is closed,” I barked. Then I stood, knocked my folding chair to the ground behind me, and marched away from the long line of disgruntled shifters with problems. Emma?

Nothing. Fucking nothing came back. Dread didn’t cover the half of it.

So, I did what I did with fear. I painted squares for two more rows of tiny homes I didn’t have time to place. I trenched drainage against a winter that was coming whether or not the monster did, and I stood in the cold with a can of marking paint to let the work quiet the wolf panic over what had happened to my fated mate.

The bond had a damn gap in it. That was the only way I’d found to say it.

Emma had come back from the Red Tail changed. Not hurt. I’d have felt hurt. She’d come back quiet. She’d come back with a closed door between us, a warm room gone suddenly dark, and every time I reached for her the way I’d reached ten thousand times, I found nothing.

She was still there. I could feel the essence of her on the other side of the gap, but a wall blocked our link. Fuuuuuck. My mate had never once willfully closed a door on me.

At one time, she’d made me promise to never close her out, and now she was standing on the other side of a door she’d built, and she wouldn’t tell me why, and I was losing my mind one polite, unbearable inch at a time.

The sun set red, and I spotted my beta moving across the crowded complex. “Olivia!” I bellowed.

A few minutes later, she appeared with a clipboard. “Yes?”

“Walk with me.”

“To where?”

“The fence line.”

“Are you going to be this much joy the whole way?”

“Probably.”

“You’re practically grinding your teeth,” Olivia said.

“Wouldn’t you?”

She waved her arm wide. “With all of this to manage? Of course.” Her gaze narrowed. “Oh, wait. I have been managing it.”

I wanted to rip her a new one. Instead, I didn’t answer.

“Should we walk the fence line now or after you punch someone?” she asked.

“Now,” I snapped.

We made our way to the fence line, counting heads that wouldn’t stay counted, and making plans to absorb more refugees. Olivia asked questions and took notes.

“Dammit, Logan. You’ll crack a molar, and then I’ll have to explain to your mate why the alpha of Six-Mile is eating soup until New Year’s. You know, I bet they don’t let you eat pussy after you crack a molar.”

I blinked. “What?” Then what she’d actually said registered in my preoccupied brain, and I chuckled. “Not being able to eat Emma’s pussy would be a problem.”

“Yeah, well, you’re grinding your teeth again. Every answer you’ve got is practically a grunt.”

I rolled my shoulders and took a deep breath. “She’s hiding something.”

Olivia’s pen stopped. “From you?”

“From me.” The admission tasted like rust. “Since she came back from Red Tail. There’s a…” I didn’t want to explain it. “There’s a wall. In the bond. She put it there on purpose, and she won’t tell me what it’s for, and every time I ask, she looks at me like…”