Chapter 22
Grace
I go through the numbers for the fourth time, and they end in the same place.
If Decker isn’t back by tomorrow night, I take the south route after dark. Find a signal point. Reach Kaylin’s emergency line and hand her the truth—all of it, the drops, my sister, what I’ve done. That’s the plan. It doesn’t improve with looking at it.
The long light crosses the stone floor, and I track it. His pack sits in the corner where he left it. The energy bars stand on the shelf in a line he made before he went—evenly spaced, labels out—and I’ve picked them up once to count them and put them back exactly the way they were.
My wolf paces.
Not threat-pacing. The other kind. Slow circuits, wall-to-wall, nowhere to put it. Her restlessness won’t let up. Every time I sit down, it gets louder. Every time I stand, I’m five steps to the shelf and five steps back. Neither of us is getting anywhere.
I know what she wants. I’m not going to say it.
He’s been gone since morning. I worked it out while the boulder was still settling: forty minutes down, the drive to Aurora, however long Viktor keeps him, the drive back, and forty minutes up. Every hour past twilight, I get more anxious.
Because I know where he went. He told me to my face, lacing his boots like it was nothing. To Viktor. The man who thinks I sold out his people. And I stood there wanting so badly to ask him not to go, but I couldn’t. Because I knew he had no option.
So now I run the scenarios instead. It’s what I do when there’s nothing left to close.
If Viktor holds him, I’ve got about three days of provisions. Then the gap beside the boulder that I made before. The south route is cold, no cover on the open stretch, but I can make it if I go at night.
If Viktor believes him, he comes back.
If Viktor believed nothing and put people on his track, then I’m sitting in a cave waiting for a boulder that opens on an extraction team.
I stop walking and put my back to the stone near the entrance.
He fought a dragon for me. Fire across his back, flesh laid open down his ribs, and he got up off that grass and crossed to where I was like it was the only thing on his mind.
Then he carried me up a mountain and worked on my wounds all night while his own stayed open.
And when I tried to say something about it, he told me I needed the sleep more, and he stayed with me.
I know that man. Months of learning to read people well enough to stay alive, and I know that man. I know I trust him.
I also know I gave him everything. Serenity’s name. The drops. Everything I did. It’s out of my hands now, and it has been since this morning, and there’s nothing to do with that except stand here and feel it.
My wolf stops mid-circuit.
She turns and faces the entrance.
I feel it a half-second behind her—the low scrape of stone on stone, smooth and even. The sound it makes when someone knows exactly where to press.
I’m moving before the gap finishes opening.
Decker comes through sideways, the way his shoulders make him. Jacket rumpled. Dust on his jaw. No blood. He scans the cave the way he always does—wall, shelf, pool passage—and lands on me.
“You’ve been pacing,” he says.
“You’re not locked up.”
He looks at me for a beat, then smiles. “No.”
The relief hits my knees. I get a palm flat against the wall to stay upright.
He seals the boulder and crosses to the shelf, setting his phone and keys down. His scent moves through the den with him, and my wolf goes quiet all at once, the pacing finished like it never happened.
“Tell me,” I say.
He turns and reads my face first. Then he gives it to me straight, the way he gives everything.
“Viktor heard me out. All of it—the calls, your sister, why you did it.” A pause. “He believes you were used.”
My breath leaves me in a gust. I make myself stay against the wall.
“There’s more, and some of it’s ugly. You need all of it.
” He goes to the cot and sits, forearms on his knees, so he’s not standing over me.
“Someone called in a tip. Anonymous. Told Aurora to search your cubicle. They found a phone planted under your floor—loaded with texts you never sent. Routes. Rotations.” He holds my eyes.
“One of the threads covers the night one of Viktor’s people was killed. ”
The room spins. “They think I—?”
“They did. Until this morning.” He doesn’t let me spiral.
“I gave Viktor your real phone. Set them side by side and made him look. Asked why you’d keep the harmless one on you, and leave the damning one where it could be found.
He saw it. He knows the second phone’s a plant.
Which means he knows someone inside Aurora tried to frame you. Someone who’s still there.”
I slide down the wall until I’m sitting. A dead man. They didn’t just make me a mole. They made me a murderer.
“Who died?” My voice comes out small.
“Samien Khalef. Tabitha’s mate.”
“God.” I drop my face into my hands. “I remember. They said it was Jericho. But they cleared him.” My voice is muffled by my palms.
“And now they pinned it on you. Or tried to.” Something crosses his face and settles. “The frame was built to make sure nobody ever looked past you. That’s how much whoever did this needed a door closed.”
I drop my hands, wrap my arms around my knees, and breathe until the shaking evens out. He stands as if to come to me, but then doesn’t. He waits. He doesn’t fill the quiet, and he doesn’t touch me, and both of those are him giving me room to process.
“Serenity,” I say, when I can.
“Aurora’s searching. Quietly. Viktor’s put his best person on it—one person, closed loop, no council, no paperwork. Your phone goes to her. The number that called you, the towers it used, the drop site. Those are real threads she can follow.”
“How long?”
“Days if she hasn’t been moved. Weeks if she has.” He doesn’t soften it. “He wouldn’t try to make it sound better, so I won’t either.”
Weeks. I don’t like it. But it’s a start, something concrete.
“And me?”
“That’s the part you’ll like least.” He inhales.
“Viktor can’t clear you. If he does, the person responsible will know they’re still under threat, and they’ll disappear before anyone gets close.
So on paper, you’re still the mole. Still a fugitive.
You stay buried up here until the search is successful or the real mole slips.
He’ll check in every second day with updates. ” He pauses. “No telling how long.”
I wait for the rest. There’s a rhythm to how he reports, and something in it just changed—a half-second where he chose his next words instead of just saying them.
“That’s everything?”
“That’s what we can use tonight.” He holds my eyes while he says it, steady as ever, and I can’t find anything there to tell me there’s more. Maybe there isn’t. Maybe I’ve just spent so long hiding things that I see suspicion everywhere.
I let it go. Because things are better than they were.
Viktor knows. And I’m still free. Someone with real reach is hunting for my sister tonight; not a frightened woman whispering into a burner at midnight, but people who know how to do this.
And the man who did that, who walked into a building where they think I killed someone and argued them around, is sitting three feet away.
“Thank you.” I cross the den before I’ve decided to.
Both hands in the front of his jacket, my mouth on his—and everything I’ve been holding comes loose at once.
The waiting. The fear. The months of keeping every part of myself locked down and calling it survival.
I kiss him hard, and he meets me with the same heat, one hand coming up to the back of my neck.
He tastes like road dust and coffee and him.
I suck in a breath, and he goes still for one second. The old care, checking.
I pull him closer. I’m done being checked on. “No more waiting,” I tell him.
“Okay.” Then his arms close around me, and this time he doesn’t stop.