After My Husband Abandoned Me to the Wolves

Morning came cold and white. I sat outside my tent with both hands wrapped around my coffee cup, letting the heat do its work.

Rowan was already up. He moved through his camp across the clearing with the quiet efficiency of someone who had never needed to announce himself. I watched him from under my lashes. He was talking to one of his team — a broad-shouldered man in a gray fleece who nodded once and moved off toward the tree line.

Rowan walked over to the shared fire pit. He crouched to add wood. That's when he saw my hand.

I'd rewrapped it that morning with fresh gauze, but the bandage was visible above my jacket cuff. I held the cup carefully, the way you hold something when one grip is unreliable. I thought I'd been subtle about it.

I hadn't been subtle enough.

He didn't say anything. He just went still for a moment — the way a person goes still when they are choosing, very deliberately, not to react. Then he fed another piece of wood into the fire and stood up.

His jaw was tight. That small tension below his ear, the one I remembered from London when he was controlling something he'd decided not to say out loud.

He looked at me once. Just once. Then he walked back to his camp.

Fifteen minutes later, I noticed his team had moved. Two tents, a supply station, a satellite antenna — all repositioned to the near edge of the shared perimeter. Close enough that a raised voice would carry. The broad-shouldered man in the gray fleece was standing at the tree line with his hands in his pockets, facing outward.

Rowan never mentioned it. He didn't need to.

---

Dexter found me at the water supply around midday.

I was filling my bottle from the filter pump, my back to the camp. I heard his footsteps — he always walked heavy on his heels, a habit I'd spent years listening for in apartment hallways.

He stopped close. Too close.

"What do you two talk about?" His voice was low. Careful. The voice he used when he was pretending to be calm. "You and Armstrong."

I kept pumping. "Nothing."

"Don't do that." He stepped around to face me. "Don't give me the nothing. I see how he looks at you."

I looked up at him. His face was doing the thing it did when he felt overlooked — a tightness around the eyes, a slight flare at the nostrils. Dexter had always been most dangerous when he felt like he was losing an audience.

"He looks at me like a person," I said. "It's a new experience."

His expression shifted. "That's not fair."

"Okay."

"Calliope." He grabbed my wrist.

Not hard. Not hard enough to bruise. But enough. I went completely still. I looked down at his hand on my wrist, then up at his face. I didn't speak. I didn't pull away. I just looked at him with the same expression I used when I was reading a scan — neutral, thorough, already forming a conclusion.

He held on for three seconds. Four. Then his fingers loosened and dropped.

He looked away first.

"I just want to talk," he said.

"I know," I said. "That's what you always call it."

I capped my water bottle and walked back to camp.

---

The night settled fast and hard. By nine o'clock the fire was low and the temperature had dropped into the twenties. I zipped my tent, layered my sleeping bag over Rowan's jacket, and lay still in the dark.

I didn't sleep. I hadn't slept properly since Seattle. My body had learned, somewhere in the last year, to stay half-lit even in stillness — an ER habit that had bled into everything else.

Outside, the camp went quiet.

I heard Dexter's tent zip. Heard Emberlynn's low laugh from the direction of the SUV, then silence. The wind moved through the pines in long, slow waves.

I stared at the tent ceiling and thought about the recording on my phone. Two minutes and forty-three seconds. I thought about the financial records in the waterproof pouch. I thought about Marcus Webb's voice on the phone: *Documented? Timestamped? Admissible?*

Yes. Yes. Yes.

I was almost done.

I closed my eyes.

I didn't hear her. That was the thing I would think about later — how completely silent she was. No footsteps. No sound of a container opening. Nothing.

Just the cold, and the dark, and the wind.

And somewhere outside my tent, in a slow and patient circle, the ground was being prepared.

She worked methodically. I know that now. She'd sourced the blood two days before we left the last outpost — planned it the way she planned everything, with the particular care of someone who has never once been caught and cannot imagine being caught now.

She completed the circle. She retreated to the SUV.

She waited.

I lay in the dark inside my tent, my bandaged hand resting on my chest, and I thought: *Almost done.*

I had no idea what was already soaking into the ground around me.

None of us did.