Morning in Absaroka came in clean and cold, the kind that made the town look honest even when it wasn’t. Cady stood at the kitchen counter of a house she practically lived in, coffee gone bitter from neglect, law files spread like she could pin Wyoming down with paper. She was in town on lawyer business, which was the neat version. The truer version was that she was here to keep an eye on her father, to make sure grief hadn’t settled into him like a second spine, rigid and unyielding. She told herself the work was the reason she stayed, but the house was warm in a way she didn’t question.

Cady had always been an alpha who learned early how to keep the edges sanded down. College, the years Walt still remembered clearly, had been a story she let him keep unchallenged. Good grades. Good choices. No trouble. He liked that version of his daughter. He didn’t know about the fights, the nights spent proving she could outthink men twice her age, or how easily control slid into something sharper when she let it. There were parts of her life that never made it back to Durant, parts that stayed locked behind her teeth.

The deputy was one of those parts. Walt’s deputy. The one who had been seeing Cady for years now, long enough that toothbrushes blurred and mornings stopped being awkward. A beta, steady and observant, who knew when to ask questions and when not to. Walt saw loyalty and competence in them, nothing more. Cady had never corrected that impression. She told herself it was timing, that her father needed space to heal before learning his alpha daughter shared a home with someone he signed paychecks for.

They moved through mornings together without ceremony. Coffee refilled. Files sorted. Cady’s phone buzzed with messages from clients who thought the law bent faster than it did. The deputy was simply there, an anchor she didn’t comment on, a presence that made the house feel less borrowed. It was domestic in a way she never said out loud, especially not in a town that remembered her as a girl and insisted on keeping her that way.