19. Chapter 19
Jace had been meeting other alphas at the southern marker for fifteen years. He never expected to bring his mate to one.
He brought her today because it was her fight as much as his, and because the man they were meeting came three years for her.
Leaving her at the compound behind a hundred wolves wouldn't have made her safer.
It would have made her smaller. Smaller wasn't what his mate was going to be through this.
And the treaty's wolf-only line had no hold on her now.
A mated Luna counted as pack; no one across the stone could call her a human on the meet ground without naming her his, and saying that out loud cost Thornwood more than it bought them.
The marker was the stone pillar at the creek bend, the one he had stood beside twenty-four times in fifteen years. He had never stood beside it with a quiet armed contingent behind him and a hundred wolves scented but not visible in the trees at his back.
Maren was at his right. Coat collar up. The tire iron nowhere in sight because he'd asked her to leave it and she'd understood why.
She stood alpha-mate position without anyone having coached her.
She had learned it in the days since she'd come through Blackridge's gate the way she had learned the step of his feet on her porch.
Theo at his left. Declan, Rhys and Freya in a loose half-ring at his flanks. Brennan and Kira were in the trees with the rest.
Garrett's contingent came up the path from the south at noon sharp.
Twenty wolves in human form. Well-spaced. Boots on packed earth at the unhurried pace of a pack that walked this ground before. Garrett at the front, the way Garrett came to a marker. A man behind Garrett walking a second man between them with his hands zip-tied in front of him.
The second man was Cliff.
Jace hadn't expected Cliff.
Cliff still showed the bruise at his temple where Maren had put a pipe on him in the warehouse. Dark and mottled the way a shifter's bruise went before the shift cleared it. But he was alive, and he was walking, and his uncle had walked him here.
Jace's wolf catalogued the meaning of that without making a sound. Garrett didn't usually bring a liability to a parley. He was the type to focus three moves ahead so if Cliff was there, Garrett had a reason for it.
Cliff's eyes moved once to his uncle's profile. Not pleading. The kind of glance that asked a question to which the answer was already in the air between them. Garrett didn't return it.
Behind Thornwood, two black SUVs on the service road, pulled up as close as vehicles could get. Brock Bastian stepped out of the rear of one. Six men with him. Long coats. Rifle profiles under the coats a wolf could read before a human would have spotted them.
Brock crossed the last thirty feet on foot on his own, having been briefed on parley protocol.
He stood on marker ground as Garrett's named client, under Thornwood's escort and Thornwood's word, the only frame the old rules allowed a human at the stone.
His six were Garrett's liability to answer for, not Blackridge's, and every wolf in the trees knew it.
Jace's wolf wanted to take Brock's throat on approach. The man running the wolf held the line.
Garrett stopped ten feet short of the pillar.
“Vanier.”
“You asked for a sit-down. I brought the man.”
“You brought him and twenty. I brought mine and counted yours.”
Garrett's mouth did the thing it did. Not a smile. The acknowledgment between two alphas that the count on both sides had been correct.
Then Garrett did something Jace hadn't expected.
He stepped sideways out of the line between Jace and Brock.
“I just said I'd bring him here. Nothing was said about me staying.”
He motioned to his wolves.
Jace felt the shape of what Garrett was doing and let it land. Garrett wasn't going to die for Brock's contract. Garrett had said as much at the last marker meeting. He'd held the line long enough to finish the retainer, and he was done.
Garrett's wolves started for the trees.
“Garrett.”
Garrett paused.
Jace's eyes were hard. His voice was pitched low, for Garrett only.
“I won't forget.”
“Oh,” Garrett said. “Before I forget.”
He turned to Cliff.
Cliff had half a second to understand what was happening and no option that would do anything about it.
His hands came up zip-tied. His mouth opened.
Garrett took his nephew's head between his palms the way a man took a pot off a stove, snapped it sharply to the side clean and fast, and without the expression of a man who was doing it for the first time.
Cliff dropped.
Garrett wiped his hands on the hip of his coat.
“Weakness gets culled. In my pack and eventually in yours.”
He turned.
His wolves went into the trees behind him.
Thornwood was gone from the clearing in sixty seconds.
Brock's face through all of it hadn't moved. He had watched his own asset drop on the grass ten feet from him without blinking. The six men behind Brock had blinked. All of them. Brock hadn't.
Jace's chest registered that and filed it.
Maren had the cold edge of the boundary stone against her right glove because she had laid her palm there when Garrett's hands closed on Cliff's head, and she'd needed something solid to press against, and the stone was the closest solid thing.
Cliff on the grass she wouldn't look at. Enough men's bodies these last days already.
She made herself feel it instead of filing it away.
A man had been alive ten seconds ago and now he wasn't, and the hands that did it belonged to his own uncle, and not one wolf in the clearing had made a sound to stop it.
This was the law here. Not a thing that had gone wrong in this world.
A thing that was correct in it. She was standing in that world on purpose, at the right hand of the man whose pack ran on its own hard rules, and she was going to keep standing in it.
The stone was cold through her glove. She pressed her palm flat to it and let the weight of the choice land in her chest, and she did not pretend to herself that it was light.
She looked at Brock instead. Because Brock was walking toward her.
Brock Bastian in the flesh. Three feet closer than she had ever in her life wanted him to be.
His face was the face she'd studied on Freya's screen.
Charity-gala face. Federal-surveillance-photo face.
The face she had lain in a studio apartment above a diner for three years knowing was out there somewhere.
He stopped inside the rules of the marker. Eight feet.
He looked at Maren. Not at Jace.
“I want what your father took.”
“Like hell. My dad died for that information.”
“Like father, like daughter?”
His growl came out of Jace's chest at a pitch the human rib didn't make.
The six men behind Brock half-raised their rifles.
Jace's eyes flicked once to the line of guns. Went back to Brock. His voice was the same pitch it had been with Garrett, but the register dropped another quarter.
“Don't you know you don't bring guns to a wolf fight?”
A hundred wolves stepped out of the trees.
Not running. Stepping. The careful spaced way of a pack called forward to show what lay on the other side of the arithmetic.
Maren felt them come out of the tree line more than she saw them. A shift in the air. Birds she now realized had gone quiet ten minutes ago. The press at the edge of her vision that the pack always pressed at the edge of her vision when they were there but not visible.
She walked past some of those wolves at the compound this week.
One of them had handed her a thermos at the gate on her first night here.
Another had nudged her hand with his nose two days ago when she'd come through the gate with Jace.
Tyler was somewhere in the line too, back on his feet now, the Argentex finally cleared from his blood, one of the gray and brown coats that had stepped into the light without making a sound.
They were a pack. They were her pack.
The arithmetic in the clearing tipped inside a breath. Six men with rifles, against a hundred wolves led by a mated alpha whose wolf was half out of his face.
The six men with the rifles understood what faced them.
“You may get some of us,” Jace said. “You aren't going to get all. He paying you enough to die?”
The men hesitated.
One by one, the rifles came down.
Not at the same time. Not in any performance of it. Each man made a calculation for himself and came down. One of them glanced at Brock. Brock didn't give a signal in return. Brock was watching Maren.
Brock's mouth moved on a small disgusted shape. He had brought muscle. He had spent the three-year retainer money on Thornwood. Both of those things had failed inside of ninety seconds.
He wasn't deterred.
That was the thing Maren understood, looking at his face across eight feet of grass. He had lost a move and he hadn't registered it as a loss. He had more moves. He had been playing at this longer than she had been alive.
He took one more step.
“Here's how this goes.”
She stayed where she was.
“You hand over what your father took by tomorrow morning. You don't, my attorneys send the feds a tip on a trafficking compound in the woods. Thirty agents and dogs come up that fire road with a warrant. Your dog here gets to explain his little camp. We both know how that ends.”
Maren's hand tightened on the stone.
“And in case you're thinking of handing those books to somebody you shouldn't. Those books land with the feds, the press, or anybody else, this pack still pays. Pups can disappear. Fires can start where they shouldn't. People die every day. I've been doing this shit since grade school.”
He smiled. Small. Real. The smile of a man who had said sentences like these in a lot of rooms and had gotten his outcome in most of them.
“You will give me my books, Ms. Palmer.”
He used her father's name.
It was the first time she had heard her father's surname said to her face by a man who wasn't her father or Jace in three years and seven months.
Brock's mouth said it the way it would have said a file number.
Not to rattle her. The rattling was a thing he expected to happen because he had said the name and she had been Elias's only daughter and he had watched her three years for the reaction he was now waiting for.
Maren didn't give it to him.
She had spent three years practicing not giving men like him the reaction they were waiting for.
Jace's growl hadn't stopped. It went lower.
Brock turned without waiting for a response. His men turned with him. They walked back to the SUVs. Engines started. Two vehicles turning in the gravel, pulling onto the service road in a slow line that was meant to look like unhurried departure and was exactly that.
Taillights around the curve, gone.
Blackridge wolves vanished back into the trees. Jace's core group stood where they stood.
Jace was looking at her already. His eyes hadn't gone back to amber.
They were still the amber-to-gold they'd been during the growl.
His jaw was the jaw of a man whose wolf wanted to leave the clearing going south through the trees after a set of taillights and whose man was holding the wolf in place by the shoulder.
“Home,” he said.
“Yeah.”
Theo's voice was quiet beside them.
“The body.”
“Leave it,” Jace said. “His uncle can come back for it.”
Theo gave one nod. Quiet: “Cold even for Garrett.” Maren heard him.
The Blackridge contingent turned north together.
Maren walked at Jace's right. The wolf right behind his eyes was still up. The alpha in his face was still there. She hadn't seen both of them together quite this close to the surface before.
Halfway across the boundary ground her hand found his without either of them reaching for it. His fingers closed on hers.
They went under the cover of the trees and up the north track to the SUV. Theo took the wheel. Declan rode shotgun. Maren and Jace in the back.
The forest moved past the windows and her hand was still in his on the seat between them, and the road had his eyes for the better part of an hour. She didn't make him.
When he did, his eyes came back from gold the rest of the way.
“My pack has been careful for over a thousand years,” he said.
The growl was gone out of his voice. What was left was the quieter thing under it.
“We'll stay careful through this. The feds come up that fire road, we know how to put a face on for thirty agents and a warrant.
We've done it before. We'll do it again.”
She watched the trees.
“Our problem to manage, Maren. Not yours to carry.”
She moved her head until it was on his shoulder.
He didn't shift to make room for her. He let her settle against the line of him exactly where she'd put herself.
“Okay,” she said, low.
“Home, then. We'll take the rest as it comes.”
Her mind raced the rest of the way back. The deadline. The box. The voice she had not yet called. The pack on the other side of his ribs, breathing under her cheek. She didn't try to slow any of it down.