11. Chapter 11
The tin was on her nightstand when she woke.
She'd brought it in the night before. Set it on the wood by the lamp.
Hadn't opened it again. She'd slept the kind of sleep you slept when your body decided it was going to sleep, whether it had permission or not.
She woke early as three years of running had trained her to do. Looked at the tin. Didn't reach for it.
Dawn was still an hour off.
She got up. Put her boots on. Went to the lodge.
Jace was already in the work room with Theo and Freya. Coffee on the table. Whiteboard covered. None of them looked surprised to see her.
“Today,” she said.
Jace looked at her. Read her face the way he read her face. Saw the thing he'd seen the night before sitting underneath the thing she was showing this morning.
“You slept four hours.”
“Maren—”
“Jace. Today.”
A beat.
“Okay.”
Theo didn't argue. Freya passed her a cup of coffee and went back to her laptop. Kira was called in. The plan went together in twenty minutes. One SUV. Kira driving. Jace shotgun. Maren and Declan in the back.
At dawn they rolled through the gate.
They made it eleven miles.
The sky was the gray of a day that hadn't picked a weather yet. The two-lane went south between winter pasture and scrub pine. Kira drove at five miles over the limit, eyes on the mirrors, one hand on the wheel, the other loose in her lap.
Five miles out, her eyes moved to the rearview and stayed there for a second longer than they'd been moving.
Three miles after that, Kira put her phone on the console face up, without looking down at it.
At the eleventh mile she said, “Alpha.”
“Yeah.”
“With respect, Luna—”
“It's Maren. And—”
“We have a tail.”
Maren closed her mouth.
“How long?”
“Since the main road. Car and SUV taking turns, too clean to be commuters. Half a mile. Holding, not closing. They're waiting on somebody.”
Jace watched the road for a breath.
“Storage is out.”
“Yeah,” Kira said.
“Declan.”
“I see them,” Declan said from beside Maren in the back. “Plates on the car don't run clean. Surveillance package on the SUV, antenna disguised as a ladder mount.”
“Turn around at the next fork, Kira.”
“Yes.”
Maren looked at the back of Kira's head. At Jace's shoulder in the shotgun seat.
“You win,” she said. Quiet.
“Not what I wanted,” Jace said.
She looked out the window at the pasture going back the way they'd come and didn't answer.
Back at the compound, Freya had something waiting that she'd pulled while the SUV was still on the road.
The storage facility kept digital records, and the file for unit 217 showed a biometric pad on the door, keyed to a single print.
Maren's. Her father had set it so the only finger that would ever open that unit was his daughter's.
The record didn't show what was inside. Only whose hand the inside had been left for.
She walked the compound after lunch. The mission came back empty and the pack was absorbing the weight of that.
Theo was coordinating the afternoon patrols in the yard near the lodge, his voice carrying the steady focus of someone managing a loss.
His shoulders were loose but his eyes were alert.
The wolves around him matched his pace. They weren't broken. They were reset.
Jace was near the cabin cluster. She could see him from the tree line, talking to one of the younger wolves about a twisted ankle.
His hand was on the younger wolf's shoulder.
Not heavy. Not light. The exact amount of weight a pack needed from an alpha when nothing had worked and nobody was asking him to make it work differently.
Roman was at the equipment shed. She caught sight of him kneeling beside a pile of harnesses, methodically working through buckles and attachment points. The kind of work that didn’t need planning. Just muscle memory and repetition.
He moved from one pack to the next without looking up. Without speaking to the wolves who came to collect them. He worked the strap like the next buckle was the only thing he was going to be allowed to do today.
She stood at the tree edge and watched him move through the afternoon work. Watched the older wolves around him work wide of him, the way they would for a wolf who was healing or hurting. Nothing in his stride said hurt. He looked like a man using the work to keep his thoughts quiet.
She had no destination. The snow between the buildings had the packed-flat quality of snow that had carried feet and paws for a long winter. Her own footprints went in a loop she didn't remember choosing.
She passed the equipment shed then stopped.
Roman was outside it on one knee, adjusting a shoulder strap on a patrol pack for a wolf who looked about twenty and was trying hard to look like he knew how to wear it.
Roman's fingers worked the buckle. His voice was low.
The younger wolf nodded at whatever he'd said, clipped the chest strap, stood up, thanked him, walked off.
Roman stayed on one knee a second. Put his palms on his thigh. Pushed up.
He saw her at the shed corner and didn't act surprised.
“Luna.”
“It’s Maren.”
He bowed his head briefly. Waited to see what she wanted.
She stood on the packed snow with her hands in her coat pockets and picked the sentence she wanted to pick before she said it.
“The other night. At the pack meal. When you stopped by Jace's chair.”
“Yeah?”
“Something went across your face.”
He held her eyes. The answer took him a second.
“You asked a question I don't know how to answer,” he said.
“I didn't ask one yet.”
His mouth moved close to a smile without reaching it.
“Ask it then.”
Maren shifted her weight. She'd spent three years learning how to keep away from other people's private things in exchange for them keeping away from hers.
“Do you have somebody?”
His face went still the way his face went still the other night. Not a flinch. Not a cover. Just the stilling of a man who had learned how to keep his face where he wanted it while his heart and mind raced.
“Yes.”
“What’s her name?”
A long beat.
“Sera.” His body seemed to loosen just by hearing the name. “Her name is Sera.” He said it almost reverently.
He looked over his shoulder. Looked past her at the path she'd come up as if debating something in his mind. His mind settled, he pulled his phone out of his thigh pocket, thumbed a screen open, turned it to her as if sharing the most precious thing he had ever known.
The joy in the face of the woman on the screen was obvious and Maren felt herself smiling as she looked at the woman.
“She's beautiful,” Maren said.
“Yeah.” He smiled at the photo.
“You're not together.”
Roman shook his head. “We can’t be. Not yet. I’m trying to fix that.”
He left the how unsaid. He left who or what was keeping them apart unsaid.
What he did say instead, more to himself than to Maren, as he cast a last wistful glance at his phone before putting it back in his pocket, was “Two years on a leash is enough.”
As soon as the words left his mouth, he looked startled that he had said them out loud.
Maren thought she saw a flash of what looked like fear cross his face before his expression shuttered.
She wanted to make him feel at ease. “You will. You’d do anything for her.
I can tell.” She gave him an encouraging smile which, judging by his expression, seemed to make him more worried than encouraged.
He started to turn back to the harnesses he was working on then glanced back at Maren over his shoulder. “You’re learning fast. It matters. That Alpha Jace is teaching you how to take control, not just how to take a hit. You remember that. If things ever go wrong, you remember what he taught you.”
He gave a short nod then picked up the next buckle on the next strap of the next patrol pack on the rack.
Maren wasn’t sure what to make of Roman’s words as she walked back the way she’d come.
She filed the word Sera in the place she'd filed the flicker.
She'd gone four steps before something made her look back.
Roman was not on the next buckle. His palm was resting on the shape of the phone through his thigh pocket. His eyes looked up as he sighed the sigh of a man faced with what seemed like an impossible situation.
She watched him as his hand came away from his phone and he bent for the next harness.
She turned and kept walking. Filed the gesture with the rest of the filings.
Maren opened her cabin door that evening when she heard his feet on the porch. She knew his step by now.
Jace had one boot up on the bottom step like always.
“Come inside,” she said.
“To the bed. As a man. Not for sex. For sleep.”
Then he took his boot off the step.
Then he came up onto the porch.
“Okay,” he said.
Inside she bolted the door after him. Didn't turn around yet. Her hand stayed on the bolt. She listened to him shrug out of his coat. Hang it. Sit on the chair to take his boots off. Stand again.
She turned around.
He was in his jeans and a gray Henley. He hadn't looked at the bed yet. He was looking at her.
“On top of the covers,” she said. “I'll be under. No touching.”
“On top of the covers,” he repeated, like terms he intended to honor.
“If either of us changes our mind, we say so.”
“Deal. Fair warning, I sleep corpse-still. It unnerves people.”
“If you snore I'm going to kick you out.”
His mouth did a small thing that wasn't a smile.
“Fair.”
She went to the far side of the bed. Took off her boots. Took off her coat. Kept her jeans and her sweater on. Got under the blanket and the duvet on top of it and pulled both up to her collar.
He stretched out on the other side on top of the covers. Long. Weight pressing the mattress more than she'd expected. Head on the extra pillow, face to the ceiling. Arms at his sides. Didn't reach across. Didn't roll toward her.
He lay on his back like a man lying at attention in a room that belonged to someone else.
She turned the lamp off.
The dark came in.
For a stretch the only things in the cabin were his breathing and hers.
She lay still. Listened.
His breathing was the four-count, as he slept. Or he was holding still on purpose so she could hear the shape of him without having to look.
Her shoulders came down one inch.
Then another.
She didn't count how long it took. At some point she noticed she wasn't listening for him anymore. She was hearing him the way she heard the kettle ticking or the woodstove making its small sound. His breathing folded into the cabin’s other sounds. She knew it now.
She rolled onto her side. Put her face a few inches from his shoulder on top of the blanket and didn't touch him.
Don't go, she thought.
She didn't need to.
Somewhere in the dark between them his breath did something quiet that might have been an answer and might have been her imagining an answer. Either way, it held.
She closed her eyes and slept the first deep sleep of her adult life.
In the morning he was gone.
The side of the bed he'd been on was cold. The pillow had the shape of his head still pressed into it. His coat was off the hook. His boots were gone from beside the chair.
She put her palm on the sheet where he'd been.
Warm.
Not cold.
Warm where she'd thought cold.
She lay there a long minute with her palm open on the warm sheet and watched the gray of the morning come up through the window.
The tin was on the nightstand where she'd left it the night before last. Inside the tin was an envelope.
Inside the envelope was a facility and a unit and a three-word instruction in her father's writing.
She was going to read it again today and then she was going to find a way to get to it.
Today was Day 10.
Jace had left before dawn.
She sat up. Put her feet on the rug. Went to the kettle.
The pillow held its shape in the corner of her eye before it let go.