Chapter 13
Let the Wolf Come Home
JOEY SAW the car waiting for him when he got off the train—and neatly avoided it.
He wasn’t going to accept his father’s help, for one thing, and he didn’t want to be trapped in his father’s house, for another.
The storage facility he’d told Gideon about on his first day in the city was less than a mile from the train station, and it didn’t only house a steadily depreciating investment in pricey menswear.
Joey’s winter boots were prime, well-oiled leather, a rubber sole that made running easier and gave him traction through the snow on the side of the road.
He stayed behind the tree line, on the shadowed side of the interstate, knowing his dark clothes and OD green duffel would be harder to spot.
When he got to the facility, he didn’t go through the front; he vaulted over the wall in the hole in the cameras.
And when he drove his fully charged electric motorcycle out, he was so stealthy the security guard didn’t even see him.
He really loved this thing. It was like riding a dragonfly. Quick, quiet, went for hundreds of miles on one charge, and wearing dark leathers and a slate-gray helmet, he could be absolutely invisible.
It also went off-road.
Joey knew the backroads of this area of wilderness—much of them were on the reservation, where he and his grandfather had tramped and camped for weeks at a time.
He knew the naked area that abutted his father’s property, and the tiny line shack that still stood close to the hole in his father’s security.
Or what would be the hole in his father’s security, thanks to the class the whole unit had just attended on how to jam security cameras and break into compounds without being seen.
After stowing the bike behind the shack and covering it up with the camo tarp that had been in his storage facility, he also tucked away a change of winter clothes, a lined denim jacket, and a bedding roll strapped to the back.
There was cash in there too, hidden in a pocket in the bedroll.
He didn’t plan to get trapped in his father’s place, but he had a five-mile hike in and out.
He could do it in his underwear if he had to, but he wanted warm clothes at the end.
The hike through the woods up to the long driveway of the house as the sun sank beneath the tree line was almost cathartic.
Part of it was the rather childish exercise of picking up small rocks and taking out the security cameras that he saw every hundred yards or so, once when the camera was especially high, by using his new scarf as a sling.
But mostly it was the physical exertion.
His body was fit for it, but it had been a long time since he’d exercised in raw wilderness, and everything from the wind in the trees to the sound of game—wild turkeys, peafowl, wild rabbits, deer, and the occasional forbidden wolf smuggled in by his father’s gamekeeper to balance the ecosystem—made him remember his original den.
And there, pungent and powerful, the smell of the ultimate predator on the property, the one even the wolves feared.
Joey had no idea if his father knew it was there, but he rather suspected he didn’t.
The gamekeeper, a silent old Mohawk man whom Joey surmised was being threatened with blackmail to tend to his father’s acreage in such a way as to keep it wild and stocked full of game for his father’s hunting friends, had enough bitter lines around his mouth and eyes that Joey wondered sometimes if he hoped the mountain lion would take Joey’s father out one day.
Joey liked that plan. It had a certain poetry to it, but he didn’t count on it happening.
Still, he was glad the creature—the family of creatures—survived in the back quarter, in a rocky den that most humans didn’t approach.
As Joey passed the lair, scanning his surroundings carefully to make sure he didn’t cross any boundaries or miss any scat, didn’t disturb the creature any more than necessary, the pewter gray sky opened up, and snow began to fall.
Joey pulled a stocking cap from the pocket of his leather jacket, as well as some warm, stretchy gloves he’d worn under his leather motorcycle gloves and pocketed for later.
Around his neck he had a black-and-gray cashmere scarf that Gideon had given him, something handwoven and tailored that he’d practically thrown at Joey the night before, presented in a box with a stretchy, festive silver ribbon.
“It’s my Christmas gift,” he’d said stonily when Joey had been surprised. “Just because we’re not spending the day together doesn’t mean I didn’t get you a present.”
Joey had clutched the thing to his chest, absurdly touched.
“I was expecting Legos,” he said, feeling lost as a child.
He hadn’t gotten Gideon a gift yet. Every fiber of his being had been taken up with countermeasures for facing his father without putting Gideon—or hell, anybody in his unit—in the old man’s crosshairs.
Gideon had sighed and pulled him close—that thing they both claimed they didn’t know how to do, be close, touch easily, seeming to come more and more often as Christmas loomed—and feathered a kiss along his temple.
“Only request is that I get to see you wear it,” he murmured. “Which means you have to come home.”
Joey had nodded and had threatened to strip down to nothing, wearing only the scarf, and Gideon had pretended to be horrified, claiming that was a terrible thing to do to cashmere.
What had followed had been naked and intense, because they didn’t do sex any other way, Joey was starting to learn. After so many years of simply brushing up against bodies in the night, he’d expected sex to pall after a few months with this one person.
Apparently that’s not what mating was. Mating was never boring, and it was never repetitive.
Yes, sex itself was basically the same motion, repeated until orgasm, but mating…
. Mating was the smell of Gideon’s skin suffusing his senses.
It was the warmth of his bony fingers stroking Joey’s flesh.
Mating was the swell of emotion as urgency built between them, and the explosion of pleasure, of safety, when climax tumbled over them both.
Sex was rudimentary.
What happened when Gideon Chadwick touched him was something else entirely.
Joey found he was clutching the scarf tightly around his neck as he hiked, not because he was cold but because it was as though he was holding fast to that memory of the two of them together the night before.
The memory lingered, and he could still hear Gideon’s harsh breath, his cry of completion as he poured his orgasm, once again, into Joey’s body.
Joey had stopped protesting to himself that he “didn’t bottom.
” With Gideon, he did. With Gideon, he needed Gideon’s flesh inside his.
He begged for it. It grounded him, pulled him into the world of Gideon’s arms, made the two of them whole.
And it was that wholeness that he wore like his leather jacket as he rounded the last bend of the long driveway to his father’s mansion. It was that wholeness, supple as calfskin, warm as cashmere, as impervious as steel, that he used to defend himself against his father’s acid tongue.
Joey didn’t knock on the great oak door—he punched the code and entered.
He’d expected his father’s bodyguard on the other side, but found his father there instead.
When Joey had been small, learning how to navigate a world in which the predator was his guardian, he’d kept expecting his father’s face to change.
Stephen Carlyle was a handsome man, with a high forehead, a bold nose, and a square jaw.
His gray/blond hair was receding, but even that was occurring handsomely, in a fashionable widow’s peak.
Joey always expected the bones under the skin to morph, the flesh to sag, to melt, the entire visage to contort into grotesquerie to show the world his father for the monster he was.
But now, after eighteen months with the SCTF, after encountering monsters like Chester Schumer and Halsey Garber, he’d come to appreciate that his father’s face was the face of evil—people just didn’t always recognize evil when they saw it.
“You could have let us know you had a way home,” Stephen said almost before the door was open.
“I told you when I’d be here,” Joey said. He’d added an hour and a half to the train’s arrival time. “You were trying to ambush me. Are you going to move, or would you like me to turn around and leave?”
Silent intimidation was one of Stevie’s favorite gambits. Grudgingly he stepped back half a step, and Joey didn’t move. He kept up eye contact until Stephen took another half-step. And then another.
He tried to draw a line in the sand, to refuse to go any farther, but Joey shook his head.
“Far enough back that I can’t smell your fetid breath, Stevie. This is going to be a short visit.”
With a growl, he took a full step backward and gestured grandly to the interior of the entryway.
“Come to the study,” his father said. “Leave your things in the hallway. Someone will move them to your room.”
Joey kept his duffel on his shoulder. “Nobody touches my shit but me,” he said. “And I’m going to the kitchen for something to eat. Whatever you want to say to me, you can say to me there.”
He removed his hat and gloves and tucked them in his coat pocket as he went.
So far he’d gotten the physical intimidation and the subtle threat to steal his stuff to leave him stranded—a thing his father had tried before.
If the past told him anything it was that his father was going to demand he return to the family business, threaten all his friends, threaten his family’s property on the reservation, and threaten his life if he refused.