Thank fuck. Because I’m in no space to answer questions right now.
Her scent is on my shirt. My collar, where her hands straightened it. The fabric over my shoulder, where she bitthrough the cotton to keep from crying out. Every time the truck hits a bump, I feel the echo of her in a muscle, a bruise, the places she gripped hard enough to mark.
The pull in my chest hasn’t let up since I watched her drive away from the council building with Brenna and Willow. She’s driving somewhere, too. I can feel the motion of it, the rhythm of a vehicle under her. Heading back to the Ozarks. The Brenna delegation breaking up, wolves scattering to their territories, the council machinery grinding forward while we both drive away from the place we just chose each other in a storage closet.
She chose me.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to, sixty miles of highway at a time.
Not her wolf. Not the heat. Her. The woman who carried a rabbit six hundred miles to make me pay for what I built. She put her back against a door, pulled me down, opened her mouth under mine, and let me be inside her while she was in full possession of her judgment. And afterward, when I could have said something stupid, she straightened my collar. A gesture so small it shouldn’t carry the weight it carries, and it carries every ounce.
I can’t shake the feeling that something’s different about her. A warmth that wasn’t there before. A density to her scent I couldn’t place.
She pushed my hand away when I started to ask.
I don’t press the thought. She’s not ready to tell me, and I’m in no position to demand answers from a woman I just had against a storage room door twenty feet from the council chamber where I confirmed every crime I ever committed.
Dawes is still sleeping, so I take the long way back. Past the junction. The pullout is empty. The road is quiet. The trucks have stopped running, the contact phone has been disconnectedfor weeks. Anyone watching the junction now sees nothing but a truck slowing briefly and driving on.
They’re still watching. I know they’re watching. The surveillance vehicle Ellis spotted Tuesday night, the shell company plates, the patient machinery of an organization that doesn’t let a supply line disappear without a fight.
Or maybe they will.
We pull up to the gate at dusk.
Ellis is at the fence. That alone tells me something. Ellis doesn’t wait at the gate. If he’s standing at the fence when I pull up, something is wrong.
I kill the engine and get out. He comes around the hood to meet us.
“What?”
“A vehicle came to the compound an hour ago. Dark SUV. Syndicate — same cut of people as before. They didn’t try to come inside. They offloaded something at the gate and drove.”
“Offloaded what?”
“You need to see it.”
He walks. Dawes and I follow.
Past the main gate, into the pasture that fronts the compound, the fence line running north along the road. Fifty yards in, there’s a shape I don’t recognize at first in the failing light. A structure. Wrong-looking.
A cage.
Shit.
Iron bars, welded frame, the kind of construction you’d use to transport large animals. Set on the grass beside the road, where anyone passing would see it.
It’s not empty.
Inside are four people.
A man, maybe thirty-five. A woman beside him. Two children, a boy and a girl. The family is huddled together in the centerof the cage, and when they hear Dawes and me approach, the adults move to shield the children. The instinctive response of parents who’ve already lived through something terrible and are braced for the next blow.
I stop ten feet from the cage.
The father watches me. His face is bruised, one eye swollen shut, his lip split. He’s a wolf. I can tell from his scent, from the way his body moves, even through the restraint of being locked in. The woman is also a wolf. Both children. A whole family. And under the wolf scent, the sharper, electric undertone my father trained me to identify when I was ten.
Magic-blood. All four of them.