I will not start now.
One point five miles.
The grey wolf is in that bakery. Tucked under the arm of a four-year-old girl who handed it to me on the first night in the cabin. She walked up to me. No fear. No hesitation. Dark eyes, serious, the same expression she wears when she is deciding whether to trust something with her whole weight. She looked at me and held out the wolf and said, “You can hold him. He is brave like you.”
I took the wolf. Held it in one hand. It weighed nothing. It meant everything.
That was the night the distance ended. Whatever wall I built between myself and the world, whatever perimeter I maintained between the Beast and the things the Beast protects, a four-year-old girl walked through it with a stuffed animal and did not look back.
One mile.
Calix Ferraro is driving toward that bakery.
The Leonardi boss. The man who stood in Lucia’s compound three months ago at the gala and looked at her across the ballroom with the eyes of a buyer inspecting merchandise. He was there when Dominic announced the arrangement. The marriage Dominic was brokering to consolidate the Costa alliance with the Ferraro family. Lucia on the ballroom floor. Silent. Her hands clasped in front of her. Her face empty. Not calm. Survival. The blankness of a woman who has learned that showing emotion in the presence of predators is an invitation.
I was at that gala. Undercover. Standing against the wall in a Costa security uniform, my golden eyes fixed on the middle distance, my hands at my sides, my cover identity requiring me to be invisible. I stood three feet from Calix Ferraro and did nothing while he looked at Lucia like she was property he had already purchased.
The operation required silence. The mission required my cover to hold. I said nothing.
The operation is over.
Half a mile.
Pine Valley appears below us. The bakery is a warm square of light against the dark valley floor. Still on. Still glowing. The ovens running. Tiffany’s truck in the side lot.
No other vehicles.
Ferraro has not arrived. But the valley road runs straight from the south and two sets of headlights are moving fast on the flat approach. Formation driving. No civilian drives in formation at eleven at night.
Minutes.
Jude skids the SUV into the parking lot. Kills the engine. We are out before the tires stop turning. I take the rear entrance. Weapon up. Body filling the doorframe. The mountain air is cold and smells like pine and flour from the ovens and underneath both there is the faint chemical trace of gun oil from my own hands.
The Broken Halos are already here.
Two bikes in the side alley. Blake’s truck at the curb. The exterior has been reinforced. Steel-framed doors. Impact-resistant glass. Blake did this work two years ago after a security incident. One line from Logan at the time: make the bakery a hard target. Blake made it a fortress disguised as a pastry shop. The walls are reinforced. The back storage room has no windows and a steel door.
Inside that room: Tyra. Tiffany. The grey wolf.
I do not go inside yet. I stand outside the locked door. One beat. Listening.
Through the steel: a small voice. Sleepy. Barely audible. She is murmuring to Tiffany that the frosting needs to be blue because the grey wolf’s favorite color is blue and this has been established and is not open to debate.
My chest does something. Not a loosening. A focusing. The tension that has been coiling since Nick saidTyrain the vehicle does not release. It narrows. Becomes a point. Becomes a blade.
Tyra is safe.
Which means my full attention is now available for Calix Ferraro.
I move to the front of the bakery. Nick is at the corner of the building. His dark eyes are on the valley road. The two sets of headlights are closer now. A quarter mile.
“How many?” I ask.
“Ferraro plus four. Maybe five.”
I look at Nick. He looks at me. The exchange is three seconds. No words needed. He knows whose kill this is. I know he knows.
Nick nods. One sharp chin dip. The Commander releasing the Beast.