10. Chapter 10
They left at first light.
Kira drove.
Maren hadn't spoken to her until that morning.
A quiet woman, mid-twenties, in the way people were spare when they'd learned to take up the smallest amount of space in a room.
Jace introduced her at the lodge door as the combat trainer he'd brought in three weeks before.
“Kira.” Maren had put out her hand. Kira had taken it once, clean, like a woman whose hands had done a lot of jobs that weren't handshakes, and let go.
Her sleeves were long. Scar edge visible at one wrist. Maren hadn't looked a second time.
Kira drove. Jace in the shotgun. In the back: Maren in the middle, Declan at one window, Rhys at the other. Declan and Rhys had said good morning and nothing else. Kira had pulled out of the gate and turned west.
Out of Cedar Junction county the road ran two-lane between fences and pines and the long flat of winter pasture. Pale gray sky undecided. The truck bed thrummed under four wolves. She'd set the tire iron there without thinking. Ten miles out, she'd noticed she'd brought it.
Nobody in the truck remarked on it.
Jace passed back a thermos halfway through the drive. She took it. Coffee. Black. Still warm.
“Thank you.”
He didn't turn his head. Watched the shoulder.
“Kira.”
“Alpha.”
“Park at the county road. Declan walks in first.”
“Yes.”
The cabin sat a quarter-mile off the county road, back along a track that hadn't been graded in three years. Trees close on both sides. The track ended in a clearing smaller than she remembered, and also exactly the size she remembered.
Declan went out on foot first.
He was gone twenty minutes. Long enough that Maren's fingers went cold around the thermos she was holding in her lap. Kira turned the engine off and the cabin windows of the SUV went slowly gray with their breath.
Declan came back through the trees at a steady walking pace that told her the property was clean before he opened his mouth to say it.
“Nobody's been on it,” he said at Jace's window. “Porch has a season of leaves. No fresh tracks. Tree line's quiet. Maternal-side deed, no visible link. He hid it well.”
“Thank you.”
Declan's eyes moved to Maren for the half-beat it took a pack wolf to see and register, and moved off. He stepped back from the truck. Jace got out first, walked around to her side, opened her door.
She got down on the packed snow of her father's driveway on a Wednesday morning in January, three years and seven months after she had last stood on it.
The cabin was smaller than a cabin ought to be.
That was the first thing. Every three-year-old memory had it bigger.
The porch steps were three, not four. The door was a door, with a deadbolt her father had installed the summer before he died because she was going into her junior year of college and he wanted to know she could lock up if she came up alone.
The brass latch above the deadbolt was loose on one screw the way it had always been loose.
The key was under the third porch plank from the railing on the left, in a tin he'd nailed to the underside of the plank when she was six. She got it out without having to look.
Jace watched her do it. Didn't comment.
She unlocked the door.
The smell that came out was the smell of a closed-up log cabin in winter after three years. Cedar. Dust. The faint sour of a kitchen rag somebody had forgotten to wring. It wasn't unkind. It was the smell of a place that had been left.
She stepped inside slowly, her head the last part of her body to follow.
Living room, three steps in. Woodstove on the left.
Her father's reading chair still facing the window.
Gray throw she'd crocheted in ninth grade still folded over the arm, dust on top of it.
Kitchen through the archway. Coffee pot upside-down in the dish rack where she'd left it the last afternoon she'd ever seen him.
Hallway to the back with two doors. Her room. His room.
She stood in the middle of the living room with her coat still on and didn't cry.
She walked through.
Kitchen. Her palm on the counter for the width of it. Three years of dust on the countertop. The coffee can still on the shelf beside the stove. The mug she had given him for Father’s Day when she was 12 upside down on the drain tray.
Back hallway. Her room. Bed made the last way she had made it, messily. A stuffed fox on the pillow that had been hers when she was seven. She didn't go in.
His room. Cracked door. Bed made much neater than hers had been. A pair of his boots at the foot of it, laces untied.
Maren didn't go in there either.
She came back through the living room and stood in the middle of it and settled her hand on the back of his reading chair. Her palm made a shape in the dust.
Jace was at the door. One shoulder against the jamb. Arms folded. Watching her.
She nodded once.
“Outside,” she said.
The birdhouse was on the west side of the cabin. Nailed to the broad trunk of a ponderosa pine at shoulder height for an eight-year-old, which put it at waist height for her now.
It hadn't crossed her mind in years, but she hadn't forgotten.
She had tucked the memory into a low drawer with most of the good ones and hadn't opened the drawer in three years.
Now the drawer was open and the day came back clean.
August. She was eight. They'd cut the pine boards on the porch because he'd said if they brought sawdust into the kitchen Aunt Marie would have their heads.
She'd hammered her thumb once and cried.
He'd put his hand over her thumb and blown on it for two minutes until she'd laughed.
The birdhouse was still there.
Rougher than she'd remembered. Nailed a little crooked. The roof peak was two pieces of cedar shingle that he'd cut into a bevel and she'd painted with a brush that was too big. The paint was all but gone now. One dark patch under the eave where weather hadn't got to it.
She stood in front of it with her breath going white.
Jace was three paces behind her. Waiting.
She reached up.
Tipped the birdhouse forward on its nail.
The cavity inside had been hollowed out wider than bird-nesting required. She hadn't known that when they'd built it. Which meant her father had come back and done it later, after she'd stopped thinking about the birdhouse, after she'd gone on to being a teenager with other things to care about.
Inside the cavity there was a tin.
Small. Round. Coffee-can brand. One of the old ones he used to keep nails in.
She took it out.
She held it in both palms a second.
She didn't open it there.
She turned and walked toward the trees at the back of the property with the tin against her chest. Jace fell in three paces behind her and then farther back than that.
She heard the other wolves fall back too.
She didn't turn to look.
The trees opened into the small meadow she had gone to when she was little and he was reading on the porch and she wanted to be alone without telling anybody she was alone. Snow on the ground. Bare aspen on one side. A log fallen across the near edge that she sat on.
She opened the tin.
Folded paper inside. One envelope with her name on the front in his handwriting. She took out the envelope. She opened it.
The name of a storage facility in Cedar Junction at the top.
A unit number underneath. 217.
She turned the envelope over.
Four words on the back, in his handwriting.
I love you, birdie.
The small up-slant he'd had when he was tired.
The nickname he'd called her since she was four years old and had named the wren that nested in the porch eave.
The nickname he hadn't used in any letter, any voicemail, any of the careful sterile things he'd put down on paper in the year before he died.
She sat on the log in the snow with the envelope open on her knees, and her eyes moved over his handwriting, and the thing she had kept down for three years came up.
It came up slowly. It came up the way a wave came up that had been gathering somewhere out of sight. It came up her ribs and her throat. It came out of her mouth first as a sound she hadn't made since she was twenty-one.
Then it came out as crying.
She put her face into her hands over the envelope and cried.
Her shoulders went.
She could hear somebody moving farther back into the trees on the far side of the meadow. Not away. Out of earshot. The sound of three bodies stepping back through the snow, deliberate, saying without words, we're here, we're not listening.
Jace sat down on the log beside her.
Didn't touch her yet.
Then did.
One arm around her shoulders. His body turned toward hers at the hip. The other hand open on her knee, palm up, as if she could put something in it if she needed to.
She cried against his coat.
He held her.
Jace didn't fix it. He didn't tell her it would be all right.
He didn't shush her. He didn't ask her what the note said.
He held her at her own pace. Let her cry until she stopped being able to.
Then held her through the part after that.
The part where her breathing was uneven, her face hot and wet in the cold, and she couldn't lift her head yet.
His chest under her cheek was warm.
She could feel his heart slower than hers.
He was breathing in a count she recognized. The one he'd breathed in front of Tyler at three in the morning. The one that went in four, hold four, out four.
She matched him.
She matched him without thinking about it.
She matched him steady.
When she could speak she didn't say anything about the note.
She said, “We built that birdhouse the summer I was eight.”
“Yeah.”
“I hammered my thumb.”
“Yeah.”
“He held it for me. Blew on it. Kept blowing on it. I laughed eventually.”
“Yeah.”
She wiped her eyes with the back of her glove. The wool came away dark.
“He was a nice man,” she said. “He wasn't a big man. He wasn't a loud man. He was a nice man. He made me laugh. I had forgotten. In three years of running I had forgotten that he made me laugh.”
Jace's arm around her shoulders stayed where it was.
“You haven't forgotten anymore.”
“No.”
“Good.”
She nodded against his coat.
She didn't tell him the facility name. Didn't tell him unit 217. Those sat in the envelope beneath her palm and would have their own conversation on their own time. The woods were for the birdhouse and the thumb.
She sat up eventually.
Folded the envelope. Put it back in the tin. Closed the lid. Stood. Walked back through the trees with the tin against her chest.
Jace walked behind her.
The other wolves came back into view as she reached the clearing.
Declan from the tree line to the south. Kira from the west side of the cabin.
Rhys at the SUV with his palm on the hood the way a wolf stood when he was watching a stretch of road he was responsible for.
None of them looked at her. All of them stepped aside to give her the path to the cabin and the path back to the truck.
Maren's arms held the tin. Her boots crunched on the packed snow.
Her breath was still uneven. She did the walk anyway.
She'd done harder walks than this. She had done the walk from her landing to a SUV in the dark seven nights ago with a dead body on the pavement behind her, and she had done the walk through a diner door ten times a day for a week while men she'd never seen watched her across the counter.
This walk, with four wolves of her alpha's pack moving quietly out of her path, and a tin against her chest that held three words in her father's handwriting, was a walk she could manage.
Talk could wait. The walk couldn't.
She climbed into the back of the SUV with the tin in her lap. Jace got in beside her. Kira started the engine without being told.
The drive back was quiet.
She watched the same fields they passed that morning go the other way.
Different light. The pale gray sky had filled in toward the north where snow was coming.
The air dropped a few degrees. The truck heater was working harder.
She held the tin in her lap with both palms the way somebody held a bird they'd picked up off the ground and were still deciding whether to try to save.
Jace was beside her.
He didn't put his hand on hers.
He didn't try to.
At one point his thigh touched hers because the SUV took a curve, and neither of them moved to separate.
Halfway home she said, “His handwriting.”
“Yeah.”
“I hadn't seen it in three years.”
“I know.”
“It was the same.”
“Yeah.”
She closed her eyes for a mile and didn't cry.
Somewhere in the last few miles the grief loosened its grip enough to let something else up underneath it.
She felt the bond first, the warm low pull of it that had been there all day and that she was only now, in the quiet, letting herself notice.
Then she felt him. Not his comfort. Him.
The heat of his shoulder a careful inch from hers, the size of his hands loose on his knees.
The want came up through her in the same wave as the grief, tangled into it, and she didn't have the strength left to be ashamed of it.
She turned her head.
He was already looking at her. He'd been looking at her, she understood, for some part of the dark drive she hadn't been awake to.
The air in the back of the SUV went tight and close.
His hand lifted off his knee, a half-inch, less, the start of the thing he did, thumb toward her cheekbone, the gesture that always asked before it took.
From the front seat, without turning her head, Kira said, “Gate in five.”
Whatever had been about to happen folded itself back down into the inch of cold air between them, unspent. He put his hand back on his knee. Neither of them said anything about it.
Not yet. But not never. She felt it land in both of them through the warm line between her ribs and his.
They pulled back through the compound gate at dusk.
The light was blue across the snow. Porch lights on. Smoke from the lodge chimney. Elena's silhouette in a window moving from the stove to the sink and back. The smell of woodsmoke and food carried across the clearing before the engine was fully off.
Maren didn't get out right away.
She sat in the back of the SUV with the tin against her chest and listened to the engine tick as it cooled.
Jace waited.
“Tomorrow,” she said.
He took it in like she'd named the weather and not a war. “Tomorrow.”
“I want to go to the storage unit.”
He was quiet.
When he spoke, his voice was steady.
“We'll plan it.”
She nodded. “Plan it with me in the room.”
She set her palm on the door handle. Didn't push it yet.
“In the room. Front and center.”
“Thank you for not asking.”
He gave it a breath before going on.
“He was yours. The woods were for him. We'll work on the rest tomorrow.”
She pushed the door open and got out into the blue cold of the compound at dusk and walked across the clearing toward her cabin with the tin against her chest and the wolves of her alpha's pack moving quietly out of her path as she went.