I frown. “How old?”
“Seventeen.”
“Christ.”
“Yeah.” She picks up her own piece of rock. Turns it the same way I’m turning mine. “He’s healing now. He’s with people who love him. But you don’t get that time back. You don’t undo what was done.”
The grief in her voice is specific, intimate. Not secondhand. She held this kid together, whoever he is, and the cost of that is written in the lines around her eyes.
“The people who took him,” I say. “They pay for it?”
“Some of them. Not enough.”
“They will.”
She looks at me. An unsettling stare, direct and assessing. “You sound sure about that.”
“Because I know what it looks like when a wolf decides someone’s going to pay. And you’ve got that look right now.”
Something crosses her face; not surprise, but the jolt of being seen clearly. Her wolf pushes forward in her eyes for just a second. I see it: a flash of something wild behind the human expression. My own wolf responds with a rumble deep in my chest, an instinctive acknowledgment that makes the air between us feel charged.
She blinks. The wildness recedes. “You see a lot,” she says quietly.
“Yeah. Curse of the job.”
“Does it ever make you tired? Seeing everything?”
“All the damn time.” I toss the rock fragment into the pool. It drops through the clear water, hits bottom, and sends up a small cloud of silt. “But the alternative is missing something that matters. And I’d rather be tired than blind.”
She nods slowly. Then she says, “This is just like the place I told you about when we spoke before. A pool at the base of a waterfall, tucked into a hollow between two ridges.”
“Tell me about it.”
She turns toward me. Tucks one leg under her. The posture is open, unguarded.
“The hollow was narrow. Maybe fifty feet across at the widest. The waterfall wasn’t big—maybe fifteen feet—but in spring, when the snow melt came down, the sound of it filled the whole hollow. You could feel it in your chest.”
“Cold water?”
“Freezing. You’d lose feeling in your feet after ten minutes. But the pool was deep. Deep enough to dive from the ledge, which was stupid, and we did it anyway.”
“We?”
“Me and my—” She pauses. Resets. “The kids I grew up with. We used to dare each other. Highest point on the rock face wasabout twenty feet up. One of the boys did a backflip off it once and almost broke his neck.”
“Sounds like a good way to grow up.”
“It was.” The warmth in her voice is real, and then it dims. “Until it wasn’t.”
“What happened?”
“Raids.” The word comes out stripped of everything except fact. “We held on as long as we could. Eventually, the settlement wasn’t safe anymore. We lost the hollow. Lost everything around it.”
“Wolves?”
“Wolves who thought we didn’t belong.”
Something coils inside me. The hackles I can’t physically raise in human form are up. The statement—wolves who thought we didn’t belong—feels personal and old and furious, and the anger in her voice is controlled so tightly that I can feel the pressure of it myself.