2. Chapter 2
Grace
The dining hall is loud enough that no one has to try not to be noticed. That’s what I like about it. People fill the noise themselves—talking over each other, scraping chairs, reaching across the table without asking—and all I have to do is sit at the near end and let the room move around me.
Kaylin drops her tray across from mine. “There’s a new batch of the lentil soup.” She grimaces. “Don’t even go there.”
“How bad?”
“It’s gray.”
I look at my bowl. Mine is also gray. It’s not lentil soup. Kaylin watches me work that out and offers no comfort.
She tears off a piece of bread and slides half across to me without being asked. We came out of different facilities, on different nights, from the same nightmare, and this is what it looks like between us: half a piece of bread, no explanation needed. Days without food will do that to you.
Down the table, two ops-wing techs argue about a supply route. I catch Eastern Relay and Thursday window, and file them away.
“You’re doing the thing,” Kaylin says.
“I’m eating.”
“You’re eating and doing the thing.”
She has the mild look she gets when she’s right and doesn’t need to press it.
“Just distracted, I guess. And tired.”
Her face softens. “Oh, honey. Nightmares again?”
“Yeah.” Which isn’t really a lie. The nightmares never stopped.
“Wanna talk about it?”
“No.” I soften it with a smile. “I’m fine. I just need time.”
“Well, lucky for you, you’ve got all the time you need now.” She reaches over and squeezes my hand.
“Thanks,” I murmur, and feel like a fraud.
She nods and goes back to her bread. I make myself eat, and the table carries on without me.
A shadow falls across us. We both look up, and Kaylin lights up.
“Jericho!” She’s on her feet, arms barely reaching around his ribs as she hugs him.
“Hey, Short Stuff.” He ruffles her hair like she’s a kid—which isn’t strange, since even at twenty-two she still looks fifteen. He eyes her tray. “Trying the slop of the day?”
Kaylin wrinkles her nose. “What can I say? Gotta get my nutrients.”
“I hear ya.” His own plate is loaded like he grabbed it without looking.
He glances down at me. “Keeping out of trouble?”
“Always, Commander.” I hope my smile doesn’t look as tight as it feels.
“Good.” He moves on, patting my shoulder as he passes. He does this…not stopping to talk, exactly. Just checking on us. The warmth is real. So is the thing underneath it. Ex Syndicate.
Kaylin’s still smiling as she sits back down. “I love that guy.”
“Of course you do. He carried you out of a hellhole.”
“Yeah. He’s a good man.” She picks at her bread. “I just wish he’d start to believe it.”
“He spent most of his life as a Syndicate man.” I shrug. “He’s always going to feel responsible for what they did to us.”
“That’s not on him. It’s the sick fucks in the white coats. And the people at the top.”
“Sure,” I say, because this is a conversation I don’t want to be in—and not for any reason she’d guess. I look back down at my bowl of gloop.
At the far end of the table, the talk shifts, and I hear Rafael and Creed and go carefully still. Domenic, who runs comms, has a habit of thinking out loud that someone should have broken him of by now. He’s leaning toward the woman beside him.
“—they got out clean, can you believe it? Then ran straight into an intercept. Creed knew they were coming.”
“Coincidence?” the woman says.
“Yeah. Sure. Not.” He snorts. “That’s how they’ll spin it. Not all of us are dumb enough to keep swallowing it.”
“You still think there’s someone on the inside?” She sets her cup down.
My ears prick, but Domenic’s gone quiet. He leans closer to her, and the words blur into the noise.
I take another piece of bread and chew, but my mouth is dry. Kaylin’s chattering, not bothered that I’m barely answering. I like that about her. It lets me take in the room without anyone watching me do it.
“Anyway.” She pushes her bowl away and stands. “I’d better go. Got some new paint I want to try in my bathroom.”
“Viktor’s letting you paint your bathroom?” I raise an eyebrow. After Kaylin got the all-clear from the medical team, she spent a month in communal lodgings with the rest of us. Then Jericho pulled some strings for private quarters, and it’s all she can talk about.
“What Viktor doesn’t know about my bathroom won’t hurt him.” She grins.
“I’ll walk out with you.” I stack my leftovers on my tray and follow her to the return counter. “I’m on the stationery run the rest of the day.”
“Lucky you.” She laughs.
I shrug. “It gives me something to do. I need some way to make myself useful until they decide what to do with us.”
We set down our trays, hug, and part ways.
The ops wing is quieter mid-afternoon, which is when I do the restocking run.
It’s the kind of task that turns a person into part of the furniture.
And furniture hears everything. Today it’s printer paper for the briefing room, a replacement ink cartridge, two reams of security clearance forms that nobody touches but someone keeps ordering.
I know these shelves better than the people who use them. I know which doors don’t latch all the way, and which corridor has the right hum for a conversation someone thinks is private.
I’m passing the secondary ops room when I hear Viktor’s name, something in the tone of it. I ease my pace, hands steady on the cart, and pull my magic in close until I’m little more than a smear at the edge of the eye.
The door isn’t fully shut. Two voices. One of them is Nadia—Jericho’s mate.
“—brought him in to dig around for the mole. Kept it off the org chart.”
A beat.
“How far off?”
“Far enough that nobody knew. He’s been in and out for months.”
Then Nadia’s voice drops below what I can catch, and I’m already three steps past, the cart wheels quiet on the concrete.
I file it: an outside contractor, unlogged, digging. Viktor doesn’t trust his own read of things lately, which means the failure is sitting heavier than the briefings let on. Which means whatever I’ve been feeding out has landed somewhere.
My pulse jumps frantically.
They’re onto you.
I pull in a breath and keep my steps even.
Calm down. There’s no proof of anything.
But my nerves won’t settle. The dread is always there anyway, low and steady, a knot in my stomach that never quite loosens.
I return the cart and sign the form. The rest of the afternoon closes over me the way it always does—quiet, unremarkable, nothing to pay attention to.
It doesn’t settle me. I skip dinner and tell Kaylin I’m turning in early with a book I downloaded.
The truth is I’m still wound too tight. She doesn’t push.
It’s past midnight when the buzzing under my mattress drags me out of sleep. The burner glows in the dark of my cubicle. I grab it fast and glance around out of habit, though no one’s listening at this hour. Our quarters are communal, but each of us has an enclosed cubicle for privacy.
The voice is the same as always—flat, businesslike, no personality in it at all.
“We need an update.”
I swallow. “There’s an update on the wolf who escaped. He ran into one of your teams. Got away.”
“We don’t need you to tell us that. We already know.” Curt. Impatient. “We need intel on movements.”
“Um.” I clear my throat. “There’s talk about something with the eastern relay on Thursday.”
“What are they doing? Extraction? Team allocations?”
I shake my head in the dark. “I don’t know. I hear things. But strategic planning and personnel take longer. People don’t talk about that around someone carrying a box of printer paper.”
“Then listen harder. This has no value.”
“I’m trying. I swear.” My voice comes out a hoarse whisper.
A pause.
“Your sister sends her regards.”
My heart clenches. I’ve rehearsed how I answer this. Practiced exactly how to sound, so it won’t come out too desperate.
It comes out desperate anyway. “How is she?”
“Comfortable.” A beat. “She’ll stay that way. But if we don’t get better intel…”
The call ends. The danger to Serenity doesn’t.
I’m shaking.
In the last photo they sent, Serenity was standing in the sun. But there was something in her eyes—cold. Not from the weather. The kind of cold you feel when your spirit is dying.
I know that cold. I lived it. She still does.
I shove the phone back under the mattress and pull the covers over me.
She’s going to be okay. I’ll do whatever it takes to get her out.
I hold on to that, staring at the ceiling, willing sleep to come. It doesn’t. Probably for the best. The nightmares are always worst when the Syndicate is too loud in my head.
I close my eyes and lie there for hours, waiting for the light. When it comes, I’m already dressed and heading down for coffee. My stomach won’t take much more than that.
The yard is cold, the mountain still holding the dark past dawn. I’ve got a stack of supply requisitions to drop at the ops desk and the whole day mapped out in my head. It helps when I stay busy.
I’m halfway across the open stretch toward the main building when the bottom drops out of the morning.
I see him.
Not someone I know, or ever did—but for some reason, it doesn’t feel that way.
He’s near the far wall, facing the yard, and for one full second my body forgets how to walk.
Not because of his size; this place is full of big, dangerous things, and I’ve learned to move past all of them without breaking stride, even the ones who stand head and shoulders above the rest. It’s something else that stops me mid-step, my weight caught between one foot and the next.
He’s tall enough to make the wall behind him look small.
Dark hair, dark eyes, broad in a way that isn’t bulk so much as build—the way a thing is put together when it’s meant to last. His jaw is doing something severe to the rest of his face, and my mind goes blank and stupid before I can finish whatever thought I was having about it.
Something turns over under my ribs, hard and unfamiliar. Everything in me leans toward him at once. I’m shaking.
What is happening to me?
He looks up.
His eyes find mine across thirty feet of cold yard, like he heard something only he could hear, and the second they land, the air leaves my lungs in one clean pull.
A small choked sound escapes me.
He goes still, nostrils flaring. Like an animal that just scented something it didn’t expect to find here.
I gather the threads of magic that should smudge me into the background—there without being seen.
It doesn’t work. His eyes stay on me.
How?
I don’t look away. My whole body has rearranged itself around the fact of him looking at me, and something that’s been silent for years sits up so fast it knocks the breath out of me a second time.
Yes.
The thought isn’t mine. It comes up out of the part of me I’ve kept leashed my whole life—all teeth and fur and instinct—and it’s screaming one word loud enough to make me sway.
Yes, yes, yes.
I shake my head to clear it.
Get out, Grace. Just get the hell out of here.
I’ve spent months hidden in plain sight. That’s my gift. Being able to blend into nothing. And he’s looking right through it.
I turn for the door before my legs do something humiliating and walk—too fast, too stiff, every nerve in my back lit up with the certainty that he’s still watching—until I’m inside, the door swinging shut behind me, and I can finally breathe.
I press my spine to the wall just inside the entrance and stand there shaking.
I know self-preservation. I’m fluent in it. I know what it sounds like when it flags something as a threat.
This wasn’t that.
My wolf has been quiet for years. A low, flat presence, barely there—easy to forget I was ever sharing this body with anything at all.
She isn’t flat now. She’s throwing herself against the inside of my chest like she wants out, like she’s been asleep behind a door that just blew open, and the only thing she knows how to say is the one thing I refuse to believe.
It’s him.