I haven’t let myself think about that since he said he was going. Conner is gone. My brother is gone. He spoke to me on the phone, and his voice wasn’t my brother’s voice. It was the voice of a man who was leaving. A man who’d decided we’d done things he couldn’t be part of anymore.
And now, I can’t blame him.
The Syndicate envelope is in the jacket I draped over the chair in my office. A threat I need to contend with.
There’s a woman out there with my bite on her neck.
I can’t think about all of them. Not in one night. Not in one skull.
I choose the woman. Not because she’s the most important thing. Because she’s the one I can feel.
She moves. Another mile. Two. The wire thins and hums.
I lie back and stare up at the ceiling, watching the shadows of the trees outside the window moving across it. Just as they always do.
Nothing in this room is different. Except me. Because of her. My would-be killer.
My tongue finds her blood on my teeth again.
She touched us gently.Before the blade. Her hand was gentle.
I remember it. I remember it precisely. Her fingertip at the pulse point in my wrist. The pause. The way she pulled her hand back a little too fast, like she’d surprised herself.
I remember it because he remembers it. Becauseweremember it.
“Go to sleep,” I tell him.
She’s ours.
“Shut up.”
He goes quiet. I turn my face toward the window.
She’s mine.
She doesn’t want to be.
I have no right to want her to be, either. Not after what’s happened. But under the shame — and the shame is there, the shame isreal— under the shame, there is a quieter thing. A thing that is glad. A thing that isgladshe is tied to me.
I will deal with that thing later. In the morning, I’m going to go down those stairs, pour a cup of coffee, and tell Dawes I was running a lead on the south boundary. I’m going to deal with the Syndicate envelope. I’m going to sit at the head of the table at the ten o’clock meeting, and my face is going to do what my face has done for years, and no one at that table is going to see anything different.
Tonight, I lie here and feel a woman I don’t know ride farther away from me, mile after mile. And I want to go after her.
Chapter 9
Briar
Ten hours is a long time to argue with yourself when the other side isn’t talking.
My wolf won’t engage. She’s sitting with the settled calm of an animal who’s made her choice and has nothing left to discuss, and every mile I put between us and that clearing is a mile she endures without protest. Fighting, I could work with. This patient refusal is something I don’t know how to navigate.
The bite throbs in time with the road.
Somewhere past Texarkana, the shirt starts to feel wet against my collarbone. I pull off at a gas station with a Shell sign half-lit against the dawn. One truck at the pumps. A Chevy sedan by the air hose. The automatic doors wheeze when I push through, and the light inside is the kind of fluorescent that makes everyone look jaundiced.
The woman at the counter is maybe fifty, bottle-red hair pulled back, reading glasses pushed up on her forehead.
“Morning, hon. Pump?”