Chapter 7 What I Should Have Said
Grady
I drive back to the compound with both hands on the wheel and the windows down.
Cold air. That's the theory. I clear my head before doing something that can't be undone.
It is not working.
She found the 1899 letter.
In two hours at a table, she finds the one piece of evidence that changes the entire arbitration. She pulls it out of a folder, reads it twice. She slides it across the table like it was routine.
It was not routine.
These papers are my family's records. I never once think to cross-reference against the Veron line. She lines up the two sets of documents and plows through them.
It was the kind of find that takes a professional researcher weeks. She did it in the afternoon. She follows my moves. I follow hers.
Which I did. I am not going to pretend otherwise, not even to myself.
Her sharp focus and intense concentration are trance like. A paper moves, and a folder opens, her pen taps, and the rest of the room ceases to exist for her completely.
I watch all of it.
? ? ?
The wolf mate bond is not subtle about what it wants.
I park at the compound and sit in the truck for a moment. The lodge lights are on. I can hear the low sound of the kitchen still running, someone moving around in there. Normal compound sounds. The world continues to function according to its regular rules.
My phone buzzes.
Denholm.
I let it go to voicemail for the first time in four years of working together.
I get out of the truck.
? ? ?
Hamish is in the workshop. He has the courtesy not to look surprised when I come through the door, drop into the chair by the workbench. Sawdust puffs up into a grainy cloud. I stare at the wall for a full thirty seconds without speaking.
"That bad?" he says finally.
"That good."
He sets down the clamp he's holding. Turns to face me. "Talk."
"She found the corroborating reference. The 1899 letter. It puts our eastern boundary line forty feet east of Veron's claim."
"Okay." Hamish waits. He knows that's not what I came in here to say.
I put my elbows on my knees. I rub my face up and down. Then I run my fingers through my hair.
"I sat across a table from her for two hours, Hamish."
"Right."
"Two hours. In a closed room. With that dogged pull from the wolf yanking away at me." I stop. Start again. "You know what it does. You've seen it happen with other clan members."
"I've seen it," he says carefully.
"It was like trying to hold still in a current." I look at my hands. "I manage it. I keep it professional. I ask the right questions about the documents. I do not say anything I shouldn't."
"But."
"But I booked a full day with her next Thursday before I had finished the thought."
Hamish's mouth moves. He is trying not to smile. I note this without appreciation.
"It's not funny."
"No," he agrees, in the tone of a man who finds it somewhat funny.
I stand up. I need to do something with my hands. I pick up a piece of sandpaper from the bench and put it down again. "She's going to ask about Marris."
The workshop goes quiet.
"She hasn't yet," I say. "She's too professional to bring it up during a research appointment and too smart to ask before she has more information.
But she pulled the donor intake form. I know she did.
She's been managing that collection for eight months and she is not a person who leaves a partial record alone. "
"No," Hamish says. "She doesn't sound like it."
"So, she knows Marris facilitated the original donation.
The Clan wanted the documents in a neutral place and protected.
She knows I've been the collection contact since my parents handed it to me a little over a decade ago.
She knows I came in asking for her sister by name.
" I look at the ceiling. "She's building a picture.
She's going to have it complete before Thursday. "
Hamish is quiet for a moment. "What are you going to tell her?"
That is the question.
I have been a rule follower my entire life.
Clan rules. Land law. The protocols around human interaction that Denholm wrote into our charter eighteen years ago and that I helped him enforce.
I followed them when they cost me something real.
I told myself the clan came first. I told myself the rules existed for good reasons.
I told myself that story until this morning, when Lilly Walker slid an 1899 letter across an archive table and looked at me like she was waiting to see if I was going to say the true thing or the careful thing.
I told her the careful thing.
She knew.
"I'm going to tell her the truth," I say.
Hamish goes still. Not surprised exactly. More like a man watching something he expected and didn't know how to prepare for anyway. "Denholm."
"Denholm is not my alpha." The words come out flat and certain. "He is not the clan's legal counsel. He advises. He does not decide. He is not an Alpha mentor either." "Then why does everyone still act like he runs half this clan?" Hamish asks.
"Because he used to have real power, and he's spent the years since figuring out how to fake having it.
" I look at the grain of the workbench. "He held the alpha seat's second position for about a decade.
Lost his footing when my father passed the seat down the wrong branch.
He never got it back. So now he doesn't lead anyone.
He works angles instead. Finds the pressure point in a person and leans on it until they move the way he needs them to. "
"Me. Marris. You."
"All three of us." I meet his eyes. "He can't command anymore, so he manipulates. It's the only tool he's got left, and he's had eighteen years to get good at it."
The wolf pushes its way to the surface. I feel coarse hair on my hands and hear the guttural roll in my voice. My eyes must be blazing like the sun just by the look on Hamish's face.
"Whoa." Hamish puts his hands out in front of himself. "I hear you loud and clear."
"I know that you do but there are people in this clan and others that think he has more power and influence. At one time he may have but not today."
"He'll push back."
"That's his one strength. In fact, he pushed back eighteen years ago and I let him." I set my hands on the workbench and look at the grain of the wood. "I am not twenty-four years old. I am not going to sit across from my council and let someone else's voice be louder than what I know to be true."
Hamish is quiet for a long time.
"You're going to claim her," he says. Not a question.
"I don't know yet." That is honest. "Fate pairing doesn't give her a choice in this. It's fate. She doesn't know what she's walking into. That matters to me."
"It should."
"She's twenty-four."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it keeps being true." I push back from the bench.
"She has built a whole professional life.
She has colleagues and a career and a research appointment on Thursday that she booked because it's her job, not because she's chosen anything.
I am not going to walk in there and put the weight of a fated bond on a woman who hasn't agreed to carry it. "
Hamish looks at me for a long moment. Something shifts in his expression. Something that looks like respect.
"Then what's the plan?"
"Thursday," I say. "I tell her about Marris. I tell her the truth about what I am and what I felt when I walked through her door. And then I let her decide what to do with it."
The workshop is quiet. Outside, the compound settles into the sounds of late evening.
"She's going to have questions," Hamish says.
"She is going to have a great many questions," I agree. "She is going to want documentation."
He laughs. One short sound. Real.
I almost smile.
Then my phone buzzes again.
Denholm.
I look at the screen. Set it face-down on the workbench.
"One problem at a time," Hamish says quietly.
"Right."
But I pick the phone back up. Because I have been a rule follower long enough to know that ignoring Denholm does not make Denholm go away. It makes Denholm show up at the compound, and I need him nowhere near this archive or the woman working in it until I have had Thursday.
I answer it.
"Grady." His voice is even. "I heard the research appointment went well."
"It did. The 1899 letter establishes the eastern boundary. I'll have documentation ready for arbitration by the end of next week."
"Good." A pause. The kind Denholm uses when he has a second agenda and is deciding which door to use. "I understand you've rebooked the archivist for a full day next week."
I keep my voice level. "The collection has more to offer. It's in the clan's interest to document it thoroughly before arbitration."
"Of course." Another pause. "The archivist. Is she discreet?"
Something tightens along my jaw. "She is a consummate professional."
"That's not what I asked."
"That's what I'm telling you." I let that sit for exactly one second. "Good night, Denholm."
I hang up.
Hamish is watching me from across the workshop with his arms crossed and the unfocused expression he wears when he is doing careful math in his head.
"He knows something," Hamish says.
"He suspects something." I put the phone in my pocket. "He doesn't know what yet."
"How long before he finds out?"
I think about Lilly Walker in the reading room at seven o'clock, the automated lights going to half-power around us, looking at me like she already had every piece of the puzzle and was just waiting to see how I arranged them.
"Not long," I say.
I need Thursday to go right.
Everything after that depends on it.