Chapter 15 The Worst Lie
Alpha LEO
"He's right," I say. "I'm his father."
She doesn't. Her arms close around the boy and her weight goes back onto her heel, half a step, the retreat a person makes without deciding to.
I reach out and take him.
"You're covered in snow." She's looking at my collar. "He'll get cold."
There is a version of this where I put my hand behind her neck and finish what my mouth wants to do.
She has drawn a line down the middle of me and she keeps standing on the far side of it, and she will not step over it while she's holding a reason not to.
I turn and walk out with my son.
The corridor is bright, all glass and morning. Luca bounces against my ribs, gumming my collar, delighted with himself. At the corner where the hall turns and no one can see us, I stop and look down.
His eyes are laughing up at me. Then, for less than a breath, the black of them thins out and goes green from the inside, a flat animal shine that has no business in a face that round.
I spread my hand over his eyes.
"Your eyes were wrong just now," I tell him, and I keep my voice under the sound of the radiator. "Hide it. Your mother doesn't like it."
He gurgles into my palm. "Papa."
The tactical room takes up the whole top floor. Nobody comes up here unless I send for them.
Eight of us walked out of that facility. Not eight wolves.
Eight of the first, the ones the aerosol took whole instead of in pieces, and for four months we bled each other over ground that was already ruined.
Five are in it now. The last two came in yesterday with their throats bare and their seconds behind them, and put their foreheads on my floor, and the wolf world stopped eating itself at eleven minutes past four in the afternoon.
I have a continent. I have thousands of them. I have time, and nothing to spend it on.
Below me, two floors down and forty feet east, she's in the study.
The pen in my hand goes flat, then splits, ink running down between my fingers.
I told her he only comes back at night. I said it to make her stay, and now I stand in daylight and wait for the sun to go down so I'm allowed to be spoken to like a husband. It is the worst lie ever constructed by anything with a brain.
So tell her.
I turn that over for a long time, watching the tree line. She won't take it. Not now, not from this face. She can't even come close to finding out.
And if she finds out anyway.
The sun moves a hand's width across the floor before I take out the phone.
"Find me someone who can build a closed network," I say when the Beta picks up. "Local. Nothing that touches the outside. Wolf or human, I don't care which. Bring them to me alive."
***
The moon comes up full and my skin doesn't fit.
It's been doing this since dusk, a pressure under the ribs that wants out through my teeth. I come to her at the usual hour with the usual voice, and she folds into me the way she always does, warm and without a single question, her hand already sliding up the back of my neck.
She's healed. It's been long enough. I take her clothes off one piece at a time and she lets me, and every sound she makes goes straight down into the part of me that has been counting the hours since the night.
At the last moment I stop.
Everything in me is pulled tight. Sweat runs off my jaw and lands on her collarbone, and she blinks up at me in the dark.
"There's something in my body with me," I say. My voice comes out wrecked. "Do you care?"
She doesn't take even a second.
Both arms come up around my neck and she pulls me down, and her eyes are wet.
"I don't care. You're alive." Her fingers close in my hair. "That's all I want. That you're alive."
Something in my chest takes the hit and stops working properly, and after that I stop being careful.
I don't leave the estate after that.
There's nothing left out there that needs me, so I haunt my own house.
Meetings on the ground floor because the study is where she works. Standing in doorways. Watching her carry a crate she shouldn't be carrying, then having the Beta reassign the man who let her.
At night she cooks.
She stands at that range with her sleeves pushed up and brings out plates of it, meat with the blood boiled out of it, potatoes, some green thing with butter. Everything on the plate is dead twice over.
My stomach wants it raw, and the back of my throat aches with how much it wants that.
She sets the plate down and stands there with a towel in her hands, waiting.
I pick up the knife and fork and eat all of it.
I start counting toward sundown the way the pack counts toward the moon.
Three weeks in, I finish a border report and go up to look at them before she puts him down.
I push the bedroom door open.
Luca is sitting on the carpet in the middle of the room, crying. Not the loud kind. His mouth is open and wet and his face is red and the sound coming out is thin and confused.
On top of his head, pushed up through the black hair, are two gray ears. Bristled, hard-furred, wet-tipped at the point, and they turn toward the door before he does.
He puts one arm out toward the corner of the room.
"Mama."
I follow his hand.
She's pressed into the dead angle by the wardrobe, as far from the door and the child as the walls will let her get. Her face has no blood in it. Both fists are knotted into the front of her own shirt, and she's shaking hard enough that the wardrobe door ticks against its frame behind her.
She doesn't see me. Her eyes are fixed on our son.
I built her a house out of one sentence and I have been living inside it, and I'm standing in the doorway watching the roof come off.
Luca's arm is still up in the air. Nobody takes it.