Boundarylands.
"Don't look at me," Knox said when Gray and his mate turned to him. "Cutting a few chains from three feet away is one thing, but there's no way in hell I can manage touchless surgery."
"I'll do it," Olivia offered. "But not by firelight. It's going to have to wait until daylight…after I've gotten a few more hours of sleep."
Josie nodded vigorously, willing to seize any strand of hope, even if it meant getting cut into without anesthesia. "Thank you. Seriously."
"Don't thank us yet." Gray shook his head. "It's too dangerous to let you inside my house."
Josie nodded. He was right, of course. "I understand."
"She can't stay out here," Knox complained. "She'll freeze."
"Not with you around to look after her," Gray growled at Knox.
"Me?"
"Yeah, you. ‘Cause I'm going back to bed with my mate. Which means you're the only one around to keep watch against all those scary wolves and bears you're so worried about."
Chapter Five
In the life Knox had made for himself since coming to the Boundarylands nearly a decade ago, every day was pretty much the same—do a little work, do a little puttering, fix his meals, do the dishes, take a bath in his very own mineral spa carved into the granite of the steep mountain face that formed the northern edge of his property.
But there were two kinds of nights: staying in and getting the hell out.
To the casual observer, the latter would seem like the more dangerous choice since it often ended up with Knox getting into a fight or losing his money in a card game, or drinking too much and sleeping it off in the roadhouse's backroom. By contrast, nights in involved sitting in front of the fire or on the porch in good weather, doing nothing at all until it was late enough to go to bed.
But Knox knew that the real danger was being stuck with his own company for too long and becoming an easy target for the dark fog that he'd never been able to outrun. That fog was the only thing that could surround and suffocate him, speaking in the voice of all the people he'd disappointed, reminding him of all the ways he didn't measure up until he felt as bleak as a January sleet storm.
Getting out was the only thing that kept the fog at bay. Drinking, brawling, and fucking until dawn allowed Knox to empty his mind. To drive away those memories of disappointment.
The only trouble was that it was a losing proposition. The moment he stopped furiously bailing out the leaking boat of his life, it started to fill with water again. But a good wild night? Well, that could give him the energy to keep going.
Tonight, though, Knox wasn't sure what kind of night he was having. There was no fighting or carousing, but he was sitting in the bed of his own truck with his back against hard steel, parked in front of a brother's cabin, talking to a woman through the sliding window separating the cab from the back of the truck.
The window wasn't open far, just a couple of inches so that cold couldn't leech into the cab where Josie was cozied up on the old bench seat under a mound of blankets. But Knox's deep alpha voice carried, and he could hear her just fine.
A week ago, he would have laughed if someone told him he'd give up a night in a warm bed to protect a beta he'd just met. In fact, one of Knox's hard-and-fast rules was to never let anyone get close enough to become his problem.
But Josie had gotten under his skin. He'd never met anyone like her, so full of contradictions, and it stirred up his curiosity. Throw in a few good intentions—always a bad idea, in Knox's experience—and it had all come back to bite him in the ass.
There was a perfectly good couch not ten yards away. While Gray was adamant that Josie couldn't sleep inside, nothing was keeping Knox from stretching out on it.
But to do that, Knox would have had to leave Josie alone in his truck, and that wasn't going to happen. So instead, Josie was locked up safe and protected from the elements inside the cab of his truck…and Knox was the one propped up in the back.
The thing that baffled him the most was that, though he was on Gray's land, Gray had no power over Knox or any other alpha brother—even if he seemed to think