6. Rhys
RHYS
How a pack of wolves knows her father's first name. Why I say it like we've met.
There are three or four answers to that, and every one of them ends with her trying to put Carl through my eye, so I take my time choosing.
She's watching me do it. That's the thing about her I keep running into.
She doesn't fill a silence, she uses it.
Most people, you let a pause run long enough they'll talk just to make it stop and hand you something for free.
Not her. She lies there with a fever building behind her eyes and a knife she can barely lift, and she waits me out like she's got all night and I'm the one bleeding it.
"A man in my line of work hears names," I say. "Marlowe's a big one. You don't have to have met the family to know who runs it."
"That's not an answer. That's a man not answering."
"It's both."
Her mouth does something that isn't a smile. "Try again."
I could lie to her. I'm good at it; the job ran on it for twenty years.
But she'd know, because she was raised by the man who taught me half of what I know about lying, and the other half I learned cleaning up after men like him.
A lie is a door she'll spend the rest of the night testing.
The truth, carefully cut, is heavier and harder to pick up and throw.
So I give her the truth the way you give a starving animal food. A little, at arm's length, where it can't take the hand with it.
"I've crossed paths with Marlowe interests," I say. "Years back. Different life. I'm not in that business anymore, and I haven't been for a long time, and that's as much of it as you get tonight."
"Crossed paths."
"Crossed paths."
"With my father."
"With Marlowe interests." I hold her eyes. "I'm not going to say it cleaner than that, so stop reaching for the seam. There isn't one tonight."
She studies me a while longer. The fever's coming up under her skin. I can see it in the flush starting along her cheekbones, hear it in the half-second her focus drifts before she drags it back. She's running out of road and she knows it, and she hates that I can see her knowing it.
"Names," she says finally. Not a question. A trade she's deciding whether to make. "You want one. The one I gave the world."
"I want whatever you'll give me."
"Valerie Cole." She says it flat, watching for what I do with it. "That's the name on the suppressant bottles. That's the name the pharmacist in Forks has. That's the name you should use if anyone ever asks whether you've seen a woman out here."
"Valerie Cole," I repeat, like it's new.
It isn't. I knew her real name before she knew mine, knew it off a contract six years old, knew it the second I saw her father's mouth set in a stranger's face in the rain.
Ember. But she's handed me a shield to hold in front of her, and a man doesn't refuse a frightened thing the one defense it's offering, even when he already knows what's behind it.
"Valerie," I say again, and let her watch me file it where she wants it filed.
Something in her eases by a single degree. Not trust. Trust is years off, if it ever comes. Just the small relief of a creature that put up a wall and found it held.
"Sleep," I tell her. "The fever's going to get worse before it breaks. I'll be in the chair."
"You don't have to sit there."
"I know."
I sit there.
The fever comes up hard around two in the morning.
I know the hour by the house settling, the way you know anything when you've decided not to leave a chair. She's been quiet for a stretch, that false quiet of a body working under the surface. Then the blanket starts to move. A shift. A kick. The sound of someone losing an argument with sleep.
I'm up before I decide to be.
Her skin's gone hot, and not the clean heat of healing.
The other kind. I can smell it before my hand finds her forehead.
The suppressant-wall thinner by another degree, the omega underneath rising up sweet and insistent through the iron and the sweat.
The wound's fighting her. So is her own body, in its own way. Between the two of them she's caught.
"Easy," I say, low, the way I said it in the ravine. "You're at the cabin. It's Rhys."
Her eyes open glassed-over, pupils blown wide, and she looks at me without the lock on her face for the first time since I met her.
That's the fever. It's taken the guard down, and what's underneath is younger and more tired than she'd ever show on purpose, and I make myself look away from it.
A woman's unguarded face isn't a thing you get to keep just because the fever handed it over.
"You're warm," she says. Accusing. Like I did it.
"You're the warm one. I'm going to change the packing and get water into you. That's all."
"Mm." Her hand finds my wrist. Doesn't push it off. Holds it. "You smell like the woods before rain."
"Pine. I've been told."
"It's not fair." Her thumb moves on the inside of my wrist, once, and she isn't doing it on purpose.
The fever's doing it. But my whole body goes still the way you go still when something's standing right behind you.
"You're not supposed to smell like something I want to stand closer to. Everything good is a trap."
"This isn't a trap." I ease my wrist free, gentle, and the loss of her hand registers somewhere I don't have a name for. "Let me see the leg."
I fold the blanket back. The gauze needs changing, the wound seeping but clean, no red threading out from the stitches.
Gideon's work holding. I work the old packing loose and she hisses, her hips shifting on the mattress, and the movement sends another wave of her up into the air between us.
I breathe through my mouth and don't think about it.
I think about it.
That's the trouble with an omega in early heat in a closed room.
The body doesn't ask permission. Mine's formed opinions about the warmth coming off her, about the sound she just made, about the way she's looking at me through the fever like the wall she keeps between herself and the world has a door in it and I'm standing in the frame.
None of it's mine to take. All of it's loud as hell.
"You've got a good face," she says, dreamy, ruined by fever and meaning none of it the way she'd mean it sober. "Stupid thing to notice. I'm noticing it."
"You're noticing because you're burning up." I press the cool cloth to the back of her neck and she makes a low, grateful sound that goes straight through me, and I hold the cloth there and recite trip-line distances in my head like a man saying a rosary.
"Rhys."
"Mm."
"If I asked you to stay closer."
"You're not going to ask me that." Steady.
A fact, the way I told her in the ravine she wasn't going to die.
"Because tomorrow you'll have your face back, and you'd hate that I listened to you tonight.
So I'm not going to listen to you tonight.
" I seat the fresh gauze, tie it off, draw the blanket up. "Water. Then sleep."
She drinks when I lift the cup. Most of it goes down. Her eyes are already losing the thread, the fever dragging her back under, and her hand finds mine again as she goes. This time I let her keep it.
"Not a trap," she mumbles, half a question, the last of her surfacing before the dark takes her.
"Not from me," I say.
She doesn't hear it. She's already under, breathing deep and even. I sit back down with her hand loose in mine and do the math on how many days until the thing coming for her body arrives in full, and how four alphas keep their heads when it does.
Not from me, I told her.
I'm going to have to make that true four times over, and I'm the only one who heard me promise it.
That's when I hear it downstairs. The gun cabinet, the particular complaint its hinge makes that no oil has ever fixed. Then the front door. Then Cass's boots on the gravel, slow and even, starting the long circuit of the property line in the dark.
Cass doesn't walk the line at three in the morning for nothing. Cass walks the line when he's turning something over too big to turn over sitting down.
He knows. He doesn't know yet who. Doesn't know the contract, doesn't know my name was once on Marlowe's payroll, doesn't know I'm the goddamn reason her father thinks she's dead.
But he knows there's a shape in the dark out past the treeline of what I've brought home.
And Cass has never once stopped walking until he's seen a thing all the way to its edges.