6. Chapter 6
The work room at eight in the morning had the tired-bright look of a room where nobody had really gone to bed.
Maren came in behind Jace and stopped one step inside the door because she'd done this once before and the door felt like the same door but the room felt different.
Two laptops on the long table. Three phones face-down at the head of it. The whiteboard behind Freya wasn't blank anymore. A photograph clipped to the top corner. A list of names down one side in a script Maren didn't recognize. Lines drawn between things in red and blue and black.
Coffee on the side counter in a carafe that looked like it had been refilled twice already.
Theo was at the table. Rhys was at the table. Declan was at the table with his phone face-up at his elbow this morning instead of his ear. Freya was on her feet at the whiteboard, the marker still in her hand.
Maren noticed the mug at Freya's end of the table. Near empty, which meant Freya had been at the whiteboard before anybody else had come in. The side door opened and Brennan came through with a fresh cup in his hand. He set it down next to Freya's laptop, pressed a quick kiss into her hair.
“Don't work too hard,” he said.
“Stay safe,” Freya said back, eyes still on the board.
He was gone again by the time Freya's marker touched the board.
As Jace and Maren came in, nobody made room because everyone had already left her a chair.
She sat where they had left it for her, which was at Jace's right hand at the head of the table, the side closest to the door, with her tire iron on the floor by her boot because she still brought it to rooms with five wolves in them.
Jace didn't sit. He stood at the head of the table with his coffee. Looked at Freya.
“Show her.”
Freya tapped a key on the laptop nearest her. Pushed a stapled printout across the table at Theo without looking up. Theo picked it up, scanned the top line, exhaled through his nose.
The whiteboard behind her was paper. The screen on the wall above it lit up.
“Elias Palmer,” Freya said. “Accountant. State of Idaho. Killed three years ago, March, in the back parking lot of his own office. Throat cut. Cold case. Quietly stalled. One daughter, Maren Palmer, age twenty at the time of death, on the IRS missing-persons list but not actually being looked for.”
Maren's hand went to the edge of the table.
She kept her face still.
She was on a screen up there with her own name. Hadn't seen her own name written down by another person in three years.
“Palmer's last client of record was Bastian Holdings, LLC. Delaware-registered shell with a Boise mailing address. Bastian Holdings fronts a trucking operation, a timber concession on federal land, and a transport company that runs across four states. Owner of record: Brock Bastian.” Tap.
The screen changed. “This is him at a Children's Hospital benefit in Coeur d'Alene last spring.”
The face came up.
Maren hadn't seen the face in three years. She had carried it under her ribs and behind her eyes and into every parking lot she'd ever crossed for three years. The face was older than she remembered. Better-fed. The same.
She tracked her own pulse instead. Counted it slow.
Made herself do it the way she'd taught herself to do it on the night she'd come home and found a cop at her father's office door three years ago and had needed to be the kind of daughter who could speak in full sentences to a stranger about the body of the man who had raised her.
The face on the screen was the face the cop hadn't named because the cop hadn't known to. It was the reason she had spent three years pretending to be other women in cash apartments in five different states.
It was the reason the bulb over her landing had been out the night she'd come home from her tenth shift in seven days.
She made her hand let go of the table edge. Set it palm-down on her thigh under the table where nobody could see it.
Jace hadn't turned his head, but she felt his attention adjust by a fraction of an inch.
“This is him at a tax-evasion deposition four months ago,” Freya said.
Tap. “Composed. An agent named Morales has been circling Bastian Holdings for years.
Financial crimes. She's good, and she wants him.
What she has never had is admissible proof.
Every time she gets close, it turns to smoke.
She's the federal name I keep landing on for this.”
She set the marker down. “Which is the catch.
We can't put Maren in front of Morales yet.
Not until we know what Elias actually hid.
Hand a federal agent a witness with nothing to back her up, and all we've done is paint a target Bastian's lawyers can see from Boise.
We need what's in that storage unit first.”
A knock at the work-room door. Brennan put his head in.
“Two hikers on the south fence at the trail-head. Looked at the sign. Walked away. Photo if you want it.”
Theo, without looking up. “After.”
Brennan dipped his chin and went.
Theo, beside Jace, said, “He's careful.”
“He's been careful for a long time,” Freya said. Tap. Another image. “A retainer with Thornwood pack started the month Maren's father was killed. Security-consulting cover, on paper. Real job: watch for one human across Northwest territories. Quiet retainer. Renewed annually.”
Maren's voice came out more even than she'd thought it would.
“Three years,” she said.
“Three years,” Freya said.
Declan was watching the screen with a face that wasn't his usual face.
Brock at the deposition. Linen suit. Hand on his lawyer's elbow. Composed.
Declan said, dry, the way Declan said things, “He's got a really punchable face.”
A laugh came up out of Maren that she hadn't made a plan for.
Not loud. But real. The first one in three years that hadn't been a small thing she'd cut off because it would have given her away.
Freya's mouth pulled at the corner. Theo didn't look up but his shoulders moved once.
Jace didn't laugh.
Jace stood at the head of the table with his coffee in his hand and watched her laugh.
He didn't comment. Didn't smile. Just watched.
She felt him watching.
The conversation moved on without her for a few minutes the way a good meeting moves on so the person who has just had her father's killer put up on a screen in front of her can have a second.
Theo and Freya talked about what Bastian could be told and what he could be made to know. Rhys put a question about the timing of the parley. Declan opened a folder of court records and scrolled.
Maren sat with her hands pressed against her thighs under the table and breathed.
When the meeting got to the parley itself she came back into it.
“I'm coming,” she said.
Jace, who had finally taken a chair at her left, set his mug down.
“You're not.”
“I'm the one he wants. I should be there.”
“Treaty's wolf-only,” Jace said. “That's not me being polite. That's neutral-ground rules. Humans on the meet ground are a treaty violation, and it gives Garrett legal cover to do whatever he wants with you on the spot.”
“Then it's dangerous for you too.”
“It is.”
She looked at him. He looked back.
Around the table the others had gone quiet because they had all been at this table when Jace and his mate disagreed before, except they hadn't, and they were all about to see what he did when she dug her heels in on a thing that was about her own life.
Jace didn't shift his voice. Did not lean forward. Did not put any of the alpha weight into it that Maren had been told the alpha could put into it.
He just said it.
“If I get killed at that meet, you still survive. Theo brings the pack home, the pack votes itself a new alpha, and you stay alive. If you get killed at that meet, no one will ever know why your father was murdered, and the bastards who did it won't pay.”
The room didn’t move.
Maren opened her mouth.
She closed it again.
This argument hadn't happened in her life before because there hadn't been anyone in her life who was offering to walk into a room with the people who had killed her father in her place.
She wanted to say: what about you.
What also wanted to come out: I've done my own surviving for three years and I am not used to anyone doing it for me.
And: don't.
What came out was, “Okay.”
It came out small.
He didn't gloat about it. Didn't soften it. Didn't reach across the table.
He just nodded once.
“Theo, Rhys, Declan with me. Freya holds the work room. Three at the marker, two at fallback. Standard formation.”
“Already on it,” Theo said.
The meeting wrapped without her saying anything else.
She came out onto the lodge porch into the cold.
The sun was up over the trees. Pack moved between cabins the way pack moved on any other morning. Children somewhere. A wolf trotting along the fence line.
Maren put her hands on the porch railing and held it.
The door opened behind her.
Jace came out. Stopped a pace off. Looked where she was looking.
He gave her the minute. Let her have it.
“I can smell your fear,” he said. Quiet. “You don't have to apologize for it.”
“I wasn't going to.”
A breath of a laugh from him. Small.
“Why are you willing to do this?” she said. “Walk into a room with people who would put me in a trunk if the math went their way. You barely know me.”
“You keep running the numbers like one of the columns has me staying home.” He said it without heat. “No such column. The rest of the why is the thing I keep almost telling you. When I'm back, if you want it, you'll get all of it.”
“Come back from that meet.”
He met her eyes.
“I will.”
She held his eyes. She nodded.
They stood a pace apart in the cold morning with the entire conversation about the rest of their lives sitting between them. Neither of them crossed the gap. It wasn't distance. It was something they were holding upright, together.
He went back inside.
She stayed on the porch until her hands hurt from the railing.
That night in her cabin she didn't sleep.
She lay on top of the blanket in her clothes the way she had every night since she'd come, but the thing in her chest that had hummed quiet on her porch the night she'd matched her breathing to the wolf wasn't humming quiet now.
Tomorrow he was going to walk into a meeting on neutral ground with the pack that had killed for the man who had killed her father.
Tomorrow he was going to come back or he wasn't.
She turned onto her side and looked at the wall. Counted her breaths the way she'd counted things on a parking-lot floor three years ago. The way she'd counted things at twenty when she'd just learned that her father wasn't going to walk back through the door of his office.
She made herself picture the face on the screen instead of his face. The Brock face. Composed at the deposition. The face that was the reason any of this was happening.
It didn't help.
The face she kept landing on was the one that had said I will this morning on the porch with his hands in his pockets and didn't reach for her.
The dog wasn't on her porch tonight. She didn't know where Jace was sleeping. Probably the lodge. Probably with his core group, planning the meet by the fire, doing the alpha things he'd be doing all night.
Sometime after midnight she got up and put the tire iron on the bed where she could touch it. Lay back down.
Listened to the cabin breathe, and for boots on the porch that didn't come.
Sleep didn’t come.