Chapter Six #4
The night air was cold against my bare legs. I had not bothered putting on anything over the sleep shorts, and the shirt did very little once the wind reached beneath it.
Wolf looked at me over his shoulder, took another drag from the cigarette and turned back toward the trees.
I stopped beside the railing with enough distance between us that neither of us could touch the other without choosing to move.
For a while, the only sound was the faint hum of the compound below us and the soft crackle at the end of his cigarette.
Wolf broke the silence first.
“Shoulder?”
“Bear says strain.”
“How bad?”
“Not bad enough to make him send me anywhere. Bad enough that he threatened me if I lift anything over my head.”
Wolf nodded.
He noticed my wrists.
“Those?”
“Still attached.”
“Not what I asked.”
“Then ask better questions.”
The corner of his mouth might have moved beneath the raised mask, but he’d angled himself just far enough out of the light that I couldn’t be sure. I suspected that was deliberate.
He returned the cigarette to his lips and I watched the ember brighten.
“Jackal hates you right now,” I said.
“I noticed.”
“He doesn’t seem like somebody who challenges you often.”
“He doesn’t.”
“And you’re not going to tell me why that made him challenge you.”
Wolf exhaled slowly. “No.”
I expected the refusal, but it still troubled me.
“Is there anything about any of you that I’m allowed to know?”
“Whatever they decide to tell you.”
I looked toward the dark windows below, realizing the answer fit the unit better than I wanted it to.
We had talked about siblings without any of them offering names, and neither Raven nor Bear had explained what sat underneath Jackal’s reaction earlier.
Even after the confrontation, nobody had tried to turn it into office gossip.
Whatever each of them carried, the others left alone.
“I guess that’s fair,” I said.
Wolf briefly turned toward me, almost surprised.
“Don’t get used to it.”
“Wasn’t planning to,” he replied.
Silence settled again.
I wrapped my left hand around the cold railing.
“I still think staying for Südweg was the right call.”
Wolf’s voice went flat.
“Of course you do.”
“Because it was useful.”
“Useful doesn’t make it right.”
“You keep saying that like the risk produced nothing.”
“I never said it produced nothing.”
“You treated me like I nearly got the team killed.”
Wolf grounded the cigarette once against the concrete edge, then stopped before putting it out completely. He pulled his mask back down and turned toward me.
“You want to know what happened from where I was standing?”
“I’ve been trying to get you to explain things instead of blindly ordering me around for days.”
His eyes narrowed, but he continued.
“Hawk lost you first, which I expected once you dropped below the hedge, but Raven still had partial view and enough audio to tell me where you were, so I let it run. His signal started breaking after that, and you stayed when he told you to move.”
“Because Kade was speaking.”
“I know why.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. I know exactly why you stayed.”
Wolf looked toward the trees again.
“Then Raven lost you too.” He sighed. “He had no usable audio and Hawk had already lost visual. Viper couldn’t see the path from his angle, while Jackal was east with Bear still outside the gate, so from where I stood there was nothing left to work with.”
I watched him.
“For forty-eight seconds,” I said, but there was less fight in it now.
Wolf’s head turned.
“You were gone.”
“I was behind a cabana.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“You knew where I had been two seconds before.”
“And then I didn’t.”
His voice stayed controlled, but I heard the same thing I had heard in the vehicle.
Something under it.
“I lost you.”
I forgot whatever words were about to come out of my mouth. I realized he had stopped talking about a feed or a camera angle and said he lost me. Actually me.
I studied him more carefully.
Wolf realized what he had said at almost the same moment I did. He looked away and the familiar wall went back up so quickly that I almost wondered if I had imagined the difference.
“You didn’t lose me,” I said.
“I couldn’t reach you.”
“That isn’t the same thing.”
“It is when reaching you is my job.”
I wanted to argue but I turned toward the perimeter lights instead.
“You still can’t control everything.”
“I know,” he said without hesitation.
“You don’t act like it.”
“Doesn’t mean I don’t know.”
For a second, the man beside me looked tired in a way I had never seen before. Whatever was weighing on him went deeper than exhaustion. He watched the smoke curl away from the crushed cigarette with a strange kind of resentment, like he hated that even this was something he couldn’t make stay.
My eyes dropped to his forearm.
The black-and-gray scales of the snake wound around him, disappearing around the inside of his arm and surfacing again near his wrist.
“Why the snake?”
Wolf followed my gaze.
“Don’t want to talk about it.”
“I only asked about the tattoo.”
“I heard you.”
“You have an entire snake wrapped around your arm and expect nobody to ask?”
His eyes lifted to mine.
“Yes.”
“That’s unreasonable.”
“You’ll survive.”
I leaned one hip against the railing, careful not to put weight through my right shoulder.
“Does it have something to do with why you acted like somebody died when Raven lost my signal?”
Wolf went completely still and I knew instantly that I had crossed into something dangerous.
He lowered his head. “Don’t ask me that again.”
“Okay,” I whispered.
Wolf looked back toward the trees and the silence lasted long enough that I assumed the conversation was over.
Then, quietly, he said, “You shouldn’t have had to tell me to get off you.”
He still did not look at me. The words were not an apology wrapped in poetry. They were barely more than a fact, delivered by a man who seemed to hate every fact he could not change.
“No,” I said. “I shouldn’t have.”
Wolf nodded once.
“It won’t happen again.”
I looked at the marks on my wrists.
“Good.” I repeated his favorite word back to him.
He dropped the dead end of the cigarette into the small metal cup sitting near the wall.
“You still want me to go fuck myself?”
The question caught me off guard enough that I laughed before I could stop it.
“Oh, I absolutely do.”
Wolf’s eyes narrowed, something almost amused creeping into them. It took me another second to hear my own wording the way he clearly had, but before I could decide whether I wanted to correct myself, he spoke.
“And I still think you were wrong at the party,” he said.
“Of course you do.”
“You were.”
“We got Südweg.”
“And next time you’ll get it without disappearing.”
“You are so fucking irritating.”
“Go to bed, Mercer.”
I pushed away from the railing and headed toward the balcony door, looking back once.
Wolf lifted his mask again and lit another cigarette. The snake seemed to shift around his forearm when he raised it to his mouth, the coils changing shape with the movement of muscle beneath them.
I went inside with my shoulder aching and my wrists still tender. The webbing had hurt, while his hand in my hair had done something else entirely, and both truths were going to have to live in the same body until I figured out what the hell to do with them.
Behind me, the balcony door closed.