Chapter 11 - Kahn
The problem with Caitlynn Williams was that she had exactly two modes, and neither of them gave him anything useful to work with.
The first was open warfare, which Kahn understood.
He’d been raised in open warfare. It had rules, identifiable objectives, a clear opponent you could face and engage.
For the first weeks of their cohabitation, she’d given him that, and he’d taken it because at least it was honest—at least when she told him his opinion was unrequested, she was present, she was there, some part of her was directed at him even if the direction was hostile.
The second mode was this.
Civil. Polite. Precisely, surgically polite, in the way that people were polite to strangers in waiting rooms. She said good morning.
She passed the bread. She answered direct questions with direct answers and excused herself from rooms at the natural end of conversations, never a moment before or after, so there was no behavior he could point to and call out.
It was, Kahn thought, the most effective thing she’d ever done to him.
His wolf had been miserable for two weeks.
It pushed at him constantly, wanting proximity she wouldn’t give it, wanting the connection the bond had established, but she kept sealed at her end, the way you could feel someone holding the other end of a rope without pulling on it.
He ran longer in the mornings. He picked fights with Viktor in the sparring yard, which Viktor tolerated patiently.
He sat in his study at night and read border reports until the words blurred and his wolf quieted enough to let him sleep.
He was, by any reasonable measure, not handling this well.
“You threw a punch at me with your eyes closed,” Viktor observed, from where he’d stepped back to let the swing pass. “That’s new.”
“I slipped.”
“You’ve been fighting for twenty years.”
“I slipped, Viktor.”
Viktor looked at him for a moment with the specific expression that meant he had several things to say and had decided, on balance, not to say them.
Then he raised his hands, and they went again.
Kahn put his focus into it, the clean and simple problem of a body moving against another body, where the rules were clear, and everything else was somewhere else.
It helped. For about forty minutes.
Then he went inside and heard her laughing in the kitchen—real laughter, the startled kind, nothing like the dry sound she produced when she was being sharp with him—and his wolf went sideways immediately.
He stood in the hallway, listened, and went nowhere.
He had no idea how he would make it through the week like this. What about the rest of his life?
Olivia found him in the archives on a Thursday, which was not where he usually was on a Thursday, but the usual places had stopped working.
“You could just talk to her,” Olivia said without prompting. He did not look at her.
“I’m looking for something.”
“About her.” Olivia settled onto the table beside the stack he’d built and crossed her arms. She had their father’s eyes and their mother’s complete absence of diplomacy, which was usually useful and currently was not. “Kahn. You could simply ask her what’s happening.”
“She’ll shut me down.”
“You don’t—”
“She will.” He turned a page. “She shuts down anything that moves toward a conversation she hasn’t decided to have. You know this.”
Olivia was quiet for a moment. “I know. I just thought.” She picked up the cover of the nearest volume, read the title, set it back. “What are you actually looking for?”
“There is something…” He sighed.
“The lights dim when she’s upset. They steady when she breathes.
I thought it was the wiring.” He turned a page he wasn’t reading.
“Last Tuesday, I was in the kitchen telling her about the communal dinner, and a cup slid two inches across the counter. Neither of us touched it. She didn’t even notice.
” Another page. “The door to the upstairs hallway swings closed on its own when she’s in the armchair. No draft. No wind. Just—closed.”
Olivia’s arms uncrossed. Her hands went to the edge of the table.
“Elena says every candle in the hallway went to the ceiling last week. Scorched the tapestry on the left.” He closed the book. “And the child’s knee in the courtyard—you heard about that. The glow. The wound closing under her fingers.”
Olivia’s grip on the table edge had gone white. The only part of her that gave away the speed at which the rest of her was working. She slid off the table and went to a different shelf entirely.
She came back with three volumes he hadn’t reached yet, set them in front of him, and said nothing.
He found it halfway through the second one.
The Aldric Pacts. Four hundred years old, written in the cramped hand of a pack historian who’d apparently believed brevity was a vice.
The documentation of seven alliances between shifter packs and witch bloodlines—not the hedgewitch variety, not the coven practitioners, but something older.
Something that predated the separation of the magical communities and ran through certain bloodlines the way a river ran through limestone: not on the surface, underground, carving its shape out of the rock over centuries.
The bonds documented in the Aldric Pacts had produced the most powerful pack territories in recorded history. The wards they’d built still stood in two territories. The bloodlines were recorded as extinct, the last documented member dying in the early twentieth century.
He read that page twice.
Magic didn’t disappear. He knew that the way he knew his own name—not from the archives, but from the ground up, from twenty years of living in a world where power moved in currents and pooled in places and went quiet for generations without going away.
Magic went dormant. Magic slept in bloodlines and waited and surfaced without warning when the conditions were right.
He thought about a fire. A woman with auburn hair. A seven-year-old child who should not have survived it.
He closed the book.
He found Caitlynn in the sitting room off the hallway, which she’d quietly colonized over the past week, the armchair by the window now holding the specific indentation of someone who spent considerable time in it. She was reading. Olivia’s, by the spine.
He sat down across from her.
She looked up. The polite, patient, strangers-in-a-waiting-room expression.
“I need to talk to you about your mother,” he said.
She looked back at her book. “No, thank you.”
“Caitlynn—”
“I heard you the first time.” Her voice was perfectly level. Not cold exactly—more the temperature of something that had been warm and had the warmth deliberately removed. “The answer is still no.”
“The fire—”
“Kahn.” She looked up again, and this time the levelness had something beneath it pressing against the surface.
“I have had one photograph of her for seventeen years. I don’t know who she was, or what she was, or why she died, and I survived.
I have not known that for seventeen years, and I have gotten very good at it, and I am not doing this with you right now. ”
He looked at her across the low table between the chairs—the line of her jaw, the careful steadiness of her hands on the book—and he understood that the wall she’d just put up was not the same as the ones she’d built against him in the first weeks.
Those had been angry. This was something she was protecting.
He let it go.
“Fine,” he said.
She turned a page she hadn’t read. He stayed where he was, because leaving immediately would be retreat, and he’d learned by now that retreating from Caitlynn was a sure way to lose ground he wouldn’t get back.
“The sitting room has better light in the morning,” she said, after a moment, not looking up.
“I know. I used to use it.”
“You could use it now. I don’t have a schedule.”
“I wasn’t aware I needed an invitation in my own house.”
“I’m not inviting you, I’m informing you that your previous claim has not been legally vacated by my presence.”
“How generous.”
“I thought so.”
He looked at her profile—the freckles, the half-page she was pretending to read—and his wolf pressed forward quietly, the persistent and pointless press of it, the same message it had been sending for weeks that he kept refusing to act on.
Trouble, he thought. Serious trouble.
He moved to his study, ignoring it.
Viktor came in after midnight, which meant it was bad before he said a word.
“A third attack,” he said at last. Kahn closed his eyes.
“Again?”
Viktor shrugged, frowning.
“They’re not trying to break through,” he said. “They’re counting. Response times. How we distribute. Where the gaps are.”
Kahn stood at the window of his study and looked at the dark.
Whoever was coordinating this knew his pack. Knew the patrol routes, the ward anchor points, the rotation schedule. That was not guesswork from the outside. That was information.
He thought about what an enemy would want if the goal wasn’t the border.
He thought about the most effective way to stop an Alpha. Not kill him—killing an Alpha who was expecting an attack was difficult, dangerous, costly. But paralyze him. Anchor him. Trap him somewhere he couldn’t function from.
There was only one thing that accomplished that.
“Double the guards on the Alpha house,” he said.
Viktor didn’t ask why. He nodded and went.
Kahn stayed at the window for a long time after, watching the compound below, the lights in the buildings going out one by one until the dark was almost complete.
The light in the sitting room went out last.