Chapter 4
Nikolai
I feed her eggs and bread and coffee, and I watch her eat like a soldier, and my wolf is so loud in my chest that I am genuinely surprised she cannot hear it.
My cabin is the plainest structure at Bone Hollow.
The brothers tease me about it — they have woodstoves and televisions and women's touches in the ones who have women, and I have a bed, a table, two chairs, a stove, a wall of books in three languages, and a bench where I clean weapons that is more cared-for than any other surface I own.
My father raised me to need nothing, and need is a hard habit to acquire late.
So there is not much in this cabin. But there are eggs, and there is good bread from the woman in town who bakes it, and there is coffee I make strong the way my father made it, and I put all three in front of her, and she eats the way a person eats who has been living on dense bars and rationed water for five days on a ridge.
She eats fast and clean and without comment, and only when the plate is empty does she sit back, and I see her notice that she relaxed, and I see her decide it was a tactical error, and I see her file it.
I am beginning to learn her tells the way I learn a new weapon — by handling it until my hands know it.
She files everything. She has a ledger behind her eyes where she keeps the cost of every move, hers and everyone else's, and she has been keeping it so long she does not know she is doing it.
I recognize it because I have one too. My father gave me mine the same year he gave me the knife.
"You said you'd tell me what I actually want," she says. "You don't get to be the one who knows. Tell me what you'll give me, or I go back up the mountain and you handle the snakes yourself."
The accent comes through more when she is tired.
The vowels lengthen. I find that I am cataloguing this, that I want to know all the ways her voice changes and what changes them, and the wanting is so foreign and so total that I have to set it aside in order to function, the way you set aside pain on the mat.
"I'll tell you the truth," I say. "Some of it. And you'll know which parts I'm leaving out, because you're good enough to feel the shape of a hole. I won't insult you by pretending the holes aren't there."
"That's the most honest thing anyone's said to me since I got off the plane."
"The pipeline exists." I say it plainly, because there is no point pretending otherwise to a woman who has photographed my armory from four angles.
"The Sinners broker weapons through networks that run up out of the Gulf ports and into the corridor.
That much you already have, or you wouldn't be here.
What I won't give you is volume, suppliers, or where it goes after it leaves the mountain.
Not because I'm protecting a secret. Because those are the parts that get people killed, including you, and including some who've never done anything but be born into the wrong valley.
" I let that sit. "So. That's the shape of it, and the shape of what I'm keeping.
Now you tell me what you actually came for.
Not the case. The thing under the case."
She is quiet for a long time. The light moves across the table.
Outside, the compound is waking — an engine, a voice, the ordinary sounds of the place I have spent my life defending.
She turns her coffee cup a quarter turn, and a quarter turn back, and I wait, because I have learned that the careful sister does not get pushed across a threshold; she crosses it herself or not at all.
Then she tells me about Ingrid.
She tells it flat. That is the thing that does the damage — not tears, not breaking, but the absolute flatness of a person who has told the story so many times to investigators and bureaucrats and her own self in the dark that she has sanded all the feeling off the surface of the words, and the feeling has gone somewhere underneath where it can't be reached and can't be healed.
A café on a street called Drottninggatan.
A morning. Her sister thirty-four years old, drinking coffee, talking about a trip to Lisbon.
A man with a rifle. The rifle a modified AKM variant, the serial number partially filed but not enough, traced by a younger and more naive Astrid through a customs broker in Savannah to a mountain intermediary, and there the official trail went cold and the official investigation closed it as untraceable, and the unofficial investigation — the four years, the red string, the ridge — began.
"I don't want your network," she says, and now she looks at me, and the flatness cracks just slightly, just at the edges, and underneath it is something I recognize, because I have it too, the thing that moves into the place where a person used to be.
"I want the weapon that killed my sister.
The specific one. And I want the specific man who put it in the hands of the man who walked into that café.
I want to stand in front of him. After that—" She stops.
"I don't know what's after that. I've never let myself get to after that. "
I know what is after that. I have been after that.
I was nineteen and there were men in the snow on the eastern ridge, and I found out exactly what I was willing to do, and the knowing did not give me back my father, and I would do it again without a half-second's hesitation.
I do not tell her this. It is not the time, and some of it is not mine to tell.
I get up. "Wait here," I say.
I go to the armory.
I should not be doing what I am about to do.
I am pulling records on a closed deal to chase a thread for a woman who is a threat to the club, and there is no version of this that Conrad would sanction if I described it plainly.
But I have been turning the thing she said over in my hands the whole time she said it — modified AKM variant, partially filed serial, Savannah broker, mountain intermediary, roughly two years ago by the timeline of the Stockholm shooting — and a piece of it has been catching, the way a bolt catches when the part is wrong, and I need to know if I am right.
The armory keeps records. Not on any system that touches a network — paper, in a safe, in my hand and my father's hand before me, the brokered deals logged because a weapons operation that does not know what it has moved is a weapons operation that is one bad day from extinction.
I find the ledger for two years back. I find the AKM line.
And the bolt seats home with a click I feel in my teeth.
The batch she described — the modified variant, the filed serials, the timing, the route through Savannah — matches a batch the Sinners brokered.
But not on my watch, and not through any deal Conrad sanctioned.
It was handled by the man who held this armory before me for the eight months between my father's death and my taking it over fully — a man named Harlan, who was older, who resented a nineteen-year-old inheriting the racks, who ran the operation sloppy and greedy and was eventually expelled from the club for exactly that, for unsanctioned deals run off the club's networks for his own pocket, for the kind of carelessness that puts filed-down rifles into channels no one is watching and no one can pull back.
The weapon that killed her sister did not come from the Sinners' sanctioned pipeline.
It came from a rogue broker using the Sinners' name and the Sinners' channels, after he had already been cut loose, or in the months before he was, when he was already rotten.
Harlan. The same Harlan whose unsanctioned deals are a stain on the club that has never fully been scrubbed out, because Harlan vanished into the mountains when he was expelled and has been a rumor and a problem ever since.
I carry the ledger back to the cabin.
She reads it the way I clean a weapon. She does not snatch at it.
She lays it flat and goes through it line by line with two fingers, and I watch her do in ninety seconds what it took the official Swedish investigation four months to fail at — match the batch number to the manifest in her own memory, cross the route, confirm the timing, isolate the line.
She has read thousands of these. It shows in the economy of her attention, the way mine shows when I strip a rifle I've never seen and my hands already know where the parts will be.
"This is him," she says. Quiet. "The batch is the batch. This is the man who brokered the weapon that killed Ingrid." She looks up. "Harlan."
"He was expelled from the club for it. For deals like this one.
He's been running unsanctioned out of the mountains since.
" I keep my voice level. "The weapon didn't come from us.
It came from a man who stole our channels for his own pocket.
That distinction matters to me. I don't expect it to matter to you. "
"It doesn't," she says, and there is no cruelty in it, just truth. "My sister is just as dead either way." A pause. "Where is he now?"
"That's a club matter."
"It's my sister's matter."
We look at each other across the plain table in the plainest cabin at Bone Hollow, and I feel the two things in me pull in their two directions — the oath that says Harlan is a club problem to be handled by the club, in club ways, on club terms; and the bond that has been a roar in my chest since a motel doorway and is now a low certain pressure pointed entirely at the woman reading my ledger with two careful fingers.
The oath and the bond. They are not, for once, pulling apart.
For once they want the same thing, which is to find Harlan, and I do not yet trust the alignment, because alignment between those two has been the thing I was told my whole life I would never have.
And underneath both of them, the wolf makes a decision before my mind has caught up, the way it has been doing since I first scented her, and what comes out of me is not the oath's answer and not a calculation. It is just true.
"I'll find him," I say. "But you have to trust me."
She almost laughs. It is not a happy sound.
"I don't trust anyone," she says. "I haven't trusted anyone in four years.
The last person I trusted was a sister who's a photograph in my wallet.
Trust is how you end up in a shipping container in Moldova, or a ditch in these mountains, which I'm told is a real possibility for me. "
"It was," I say. "It's not anymore."
"Why not?"
I do not have an answer I can give her. The answer is because you are mine and I would salt this whole valley before I let it put you in a ditch, and she does not know what we are, and there is no version of that sentence I can say to a woman who thinks she has walked into a problem made of guns and money and not into the oldest and strangest thing my kind has.
So I give her the only piece of it that fits in human words.
"Because I've decided you're not a problem I'm solving," I say.
"You're a person I'm helping. I don't change my mind once it's made up.
Ask anyone on this mountain." I hold her eyes.
"Start with me. Not with everyone. With one man.
Me. See how far it goes. If I break it, you'll know, because you feel the shape of a hole, and you'll go back up the mountain and finish what you came to do, and I won't stop you.
" This is a lie — I would stop her, I would do almost anything to stop her ending in a ditch — but it is the lie that lets her cross the threshold, and I have learned that the careful sister crosses thresholds herself or not at all.
She turns the empty coffee cup a quarter turn. A quarter turn back.
"One man," she says. "We find Harlan. And the second I feel the hole, I'm gone."
"Understood."
She puts out her hand, across the table, the way you close a deal and not the way you touch a person.
I take it. Her hand is cold — she runs cold, I am learning, her hands always a few degrees under the rest of her — and mine runs hot, the way my kind runs hot, and the contrast goes up my arm like current, and for one half-second her composure flickers, just at the eyes, because she has felt it too, the heat of me against the cold of her, and neither of us says a single word about it.
I am in so much trouble. I have never been in trouble in my life.
I have been controlled and certain and mechanical and obedient to the animal inside me since I was four years old at a bench with a stripped pistol, and now there is a woman with a cold hand and a dead sister sitting in my cabin, and the wolf has chosen her, and I am holding her hand across my own table and lying to her so she'll let me keep her alive, and I would not undo a second of it.
The oath or the bond, I told myself in the armory.
The wolf says, again, in the wordless way it has spoken only since her: there is a third thing.
I am beginning, very slightly, to believe it.