Chapter 140: MOLLIE’S DEMANDS

The cold hit me the moment the pack house door swung shut behind us. I pulled my coat tighter and stood on the top step, the gate lamp throwing a thin yellow column across the wet gravel below; inside that chamber, Darcy Valentine was probably already smoothing his jacket and making pleasant conversation. Miguel had given him that procedural threshold through direct instruction, and the phrases repeated in my mind until something inside me set like stone.

I slid my hand into the wool lining, finding the hard plastic of the drive still intact where I had tucked it earlier.

"Regional observers cross the boundary at daybreak," I said, pitching the words into the freezing dark between us. "Miguel told us that himself."

Puck stepped down beside me, heat radiating off his frame into the raw air while he fought to keep his posture relaxed.

"Georgia."

"I’m driving to the boundary gate." If I left right then, I could intercept them before pack jurisdiction framed the entire narrative. The silence that followed carried actual weight.

"I’m coming with you."

I turned to look at him where he stood rigid on the step below me; the fury in his face wanted an outlet, but none of it was meant for me.

"No," I said.

He warned me that Darcy Valentine remained loose inside, but I recognized the danger Darcy posed; that was the exact reason I needed to take the road immediately.

"You’re not doing it alone."

"I am." I came down two steps until I stood close enough to tilt my head back, meeting his stare directly. "This is my evidence. I recorded it, I cornered Bianca, and I sat in that room watching Miguel hand him an exit; the moment you step into that car, this turns into an internal territorial grievance instead of an outside complaint." I watched the realization register across his shoulders. Observers would view any wolf affiliated with Hale as an interested party challenging protocol, and they would discard the chain of custody before I finished speaking.

He clamped his jaw tight, his posture stiffening against the wind.

If I went by myself, the Council’s regional representatives would receive a recorded confession from a neutral human witness; he knew the difference as well as I did.

"I don’t care about the legal architecture right now."

"I do." I took the last step down, moving past him toward my car while the wet gravel crunched beneath my boots. Looking back risked losing my focus entirely, and the drive felt heavy in my pocket, marking a deadline that left no room for hesitation.

I pulled the driver’s side door open and climbed inside. The starter caught on the second turn, cold exhaust curling into the dark as the headlights swept across the wet stone and cut into the black pine trunks bordering the fence line. In the rearview mirror, Puck remained on the bottom step, watching the taillights pull away into the mist. Beside me, the passenger seat sat empty and freezing, devoid of the familiar furnace of heat that usually filled the cab, and the heavy silence between us pressed in against the glass. I kept my hands steady on the wheel, shifted into gear, and drove toward the gate.My apartment was cold. I had left the place dark, and the shadows crowded every corner the moment I unlocked the front entrance; the familiar shapes of furniture sat reduced to outlines I navigated entirely by memory. I bypassed the overhead light switch. Moving straight into the bedroom, I dragged the duffel from under the frame and began working through the mental checklist I had mapped hours ago: the power cable, water, and the folded printout of boundary access codes Miguel had filed with the regional office before the whole structure fell apart.

My phone screen flared against the dark wood of the dresser.

Mollie.

I paused over the open bag, staring down at the illuminated letters. No panic surfaced; no immediate dread settled in either. Instead, a dull, clinical calculation took over, measuring whatever demand she might make against the few minutes I had left.

I answered.

"Georgia." Her voice broke across the speaker, clipped and brisk, without greeting. She told me she had spent three days trying to get through, adding that Dr. Voss had flagged my unconfirmed appointment.

I dropped the fleece into the bag and kept packing while she spoke.

"I’ve been busy."

"Busy." She seized on the word, snapping it back with the practiced irritation she reserved for anything outside her schedule. The regional qualifier window was closing in six weeks, and she rattled off the warnings: missing therapy benchmarks by month’s end meant forfeiting the entire spring circuit, assuming the repaired joint even held up under torque.

The plastic edge of the flash drive pressed against my ribs through the inner coat lining, sharp and unyielding.

"Dr. Voss can reschedule," I told her.

"That’s not the point." She paused, her cadence shifting as she recalibrated her approach, using patience like a blunt instrument. She demanded a concrete timeline, insisting her coaching contacts needed to see me back on the ice before the committee stopped paying attention, but then the rehearsed speech cut off abruptly. "What are you doing? You sound distracted."

"I’m packing."

"For what?"

I pulled the zipper across the teeth of the duffel. Outside, the sky remained black, yet the countdown tightened against everything around me; the boundary gate, the watchers, the hard drive, and the raw audio file of a woman confessing to a crime pack law had deliberately chosen to bury.

"Georgia," she said, the tone hardening. "You need to focus on what actually matters here."

I grabbed the straps.

She was right about focus, but she was aiming at the wrong target; the gap between her reality and mine was too wide to bridge across a cellular connection, so I stopped trying.

"I’ll call Dr. Voss," I said. "Drive safe, Mom."

I cut the call, shoved the glass screen into my coat beside the drive, and stepped back out into the dark.I stood in the dark hallway for a moment, the screen fading to black against my palm. I had offered no goodbye, skipping the small verbal concession Mollie had trained me to produce over twenty years of competition prep and controlled disappointment. The silence where that habit used to live felt clean rather than empty.

I slid the phone into my inner jacket pocket next to the flash drive.

The duffel sat on the mattress behind me, zipped and ready. I grabbed the straps, swung it over one shoulder, and moved through the apartment without turning on a single light. The shapes were familiar enough. I knew every corner, every piece of furniture I had arranged myself, and every window that rattled when the wind came from the north, so I left the darkness intact.

Outside, the cold hit my face immediately. The sky above the tree line remained solid pitch-black, without any gray lifting along the ridge to signal morning. My car was parked at the curb below.

The engine turned over on the first try this time.

I backed out into the empty street, headlights cutting across wet pavement, and pointed the car toward the eastern road. The boundary gate was forty minutes out if I kept the speed up and avoided stops along the way. Regional observers would cross at first light because Council protocol required it, the same protocol Miguel had cited inside that chamber while Darcy Valentine smoothed his jacket and waited for the elders to let him walk.

I pressed the accelerator down.

The drive sat solid against my ribs through the wool lining, a hard plastic edge marking every breath I drew. Bianca’s voice was on that recording, preserved as a complete, unedited confession. What pack law refused to penalize, outside jurisdiction might finally settle.

Three miles up the mountain, a glare flared white in my rearview mirror.

Twin high-mounted beams exploded over the crest behind me, closing the distance on the narrow switchback too fast for ordinary traffic. No horn, no warning flash; just heavy steel riding my bumper through the bends, throwing the frame of my rear headrests against the windshield.

My knuckles locked against the wheel.

If it was Valentine’s people or pack scouts working the perimeter line, pulling over meant losing the drive before I ever reached regional territory. I flicked the stalk, killing my brights to cut the blinding backscatter off the mirrors, and dropped into second gear.

The car hit the access road curve too fast. The tires lost grip across a slick sheen of black ice, the back end fishtailing violently toward the frozen drop-off. I held off the brake, fighting the skid and turning into the slide until the front rubber caught gravel with a sickening jolt that rattled my teeth.

Behind me, the high beams surged, blinding and immense, before swerving hard left with a roar of diesel exhaust and disappearing down an unmarked logging spur into the pines.

The road ahead went dead black again.

I sucked air into my lungs, my chest aching where the flash drive had slammed against my ribs. I switched the low beams back on and checked the dash. The engine hummed, steady and cold.

Mollie’s clipped tone surfaced in my memory, carrying that practiced patience she used whenever she decided to wear down resistance: "Georgia, stay focused on the real priority here..."

I was focused.

I tracked the asphalt unwinding before my lights, the dark pine trunks blurring past the glass, and the boundary gate rising out of the mist ahead. Somewhere beyond it, the observers would appear at dawn.

I drove toward them.