22. Rhys
RHYS
We lay the lines at dawn, the way Cass said, and Knox and I have done this enough times that it goes mostly without talking.
It's good work for a morning after a bad night.
Physical, exact, the kind of thing that uses the hands and quiets the head.
We start at the south draw, because the south draw is where the trouble's been coming from, and we work outward in a slow arc through the wet timber, setting the wire low across the game trails and the natural approaches, where a man moving careful would put his feet because a man moving careful always reads the ground the same way.
I do the setting. Knox does the reading.
For the first stretch he runs it on four legs, a dark shape moving ahead of me through the wet timber, nose down, covering twice the ground I could and reading it cleaner, and when he's satisfied a line of approach he comes back to skin long enough to tell me where the wire wants to go.
Here. A tilt of his head at a gap in the brush.
Here. The place where two trails braid together and anyone coming up the draw would have to cross.
He's good at this. Better than good. Five years alone in country like this teaches a man exactly how a thing moves when it doesn't want to be seen, and Knox learned it the hard way, the way I learned tracking the hard way, and between the two of us, one nose in fur and one set of hands in gloves, there isn't much that gets up this mountain we don't account for.
Neither of us says anything about last night.
It's there the whole time. It's in the marks on his neck he didn't bother to hide and the careful way he's holding the parts of himself that the heat-sharing knocked loose, and it's in the fact that we're out here at all, laying lines a day earlier than we'd have chosen, because while he was in that shed with her an Easton walked our ground and went home with a story.
He told it to Cass flat, no excuses, and Cass took it the way Cass takes everything, and now here we are at dawn making the mountain harder to climb.
Nobody's blaming him. The wanting of her was always going to cost the pack its edge for a stretch, and we all knew it going in, and the trade was made with open eyes.
Doesn't change that the bill came due last night specifically.
I run the wire across a deer trail and seat it, and I think about her on the porch telling me the alias, handing me a shield she didn't know I'd already seen through.
I think about the dark room and the rain on the glass.
I'm not built to be jealous about Knox, that's not the shape of how this pack works, never has been, but I'd be lying if I said the new arrangement of things doesn't sit strange in me yet.
Three of us now. Her choosing each of us in turn, in her own time, on her own terms, which is the only way a thing like her could ever be had and the only way worth having her.
"You're quiet," Knox says. First words in an hour.
"You're one to talk."
A breath that's almost a laugh out of him.
He crouches and reads a patch of churned ground, and his face goes flat again.
"He stood here. Last night. The scout." He touches the air above a print I can barely make out, the toe dug in, a man pausing.
"Looked at the cabin. You can see the kitchen window from here through that gap. "
I crouch beside him and follow his eyeline, and he's right, there's a clean sightline straight to the lit window where we sat last night not knowing we were watched.
The cold of it goes down my spine. A man stood here in the dark and looked at our lives through a gap in the trees and we none of us felt it, because the one of us whose whole job is feeling it was occupied.
"How long do you make it," I say. "Before they move. Real read."
Knox stands, scans the treeline, the way he does, the wolf doing the math the man can't. "Easton's careful.
They've scouted twice now, two different men.
They don't move until they're sure, and a careful pack confirms before it commits.
" He's quiet a moment. "But they're past needing to confirm she's here.
Two scouts both came up empty on her scent and both came back anyway, which means they're not checking if.
They're checking how many of us and how hard.
That's the last thing you scout before you come. "
"Days, then."
"Days. Maybe less." He looks at me. "And that's just Easton.
We've still got a dead man's phone on the kitchen table going unanswered, and Sutter on the other end of it counting the hours, and when Marlowe moves he won't scout at all.
Your father-in-law's people don't ask how hard. They just come heavy and soon."
"Not my father-in-law," I say.
"You know what I mean."
I do. I run the last of the wire on that trail and we move on, up the slope, setting the high lines now, the ones that catch a man who tries to come down from above thinking nobody guards the high ground.
We work in the quiet the rest of the morning, and the lines go in good, a whole web of them strung through the timber, every approach we can think of seeded with something that'll trip and sing and tell us a thing's coming before it arrives.
It's good work. It's the best we can do.
And both of us know, without saying it, that good work and a web of wire is a thin thing to stand between four men and an omega and the two families that want her, one of which makes its money on violence and the other of which had her promised in a contract signed in her own blood before she could vote.
We finish the last line as the sun finally burns through the cloud, thin and pale over the ridge. Knox stands back and looks at the whole of what we've built, the invisible net of it laid through the trees, and I watch him tally it the way I'm tallying it, and come up where I come up.
"It'll hold against a few," he says. "Coming up the obvious ways. It'll buy us warning, and warning's worth more than the wire."
"And if it's more than a few."
"Then we'll know they're coming a little sooner, and we'll die a little less surprised." He says it flat, the way Knox says the true ugly things, no drama in it. Then, after a beat: "Both packs?"
It's the question that's been sitting under the whole morning.
Whether we get them one at a time, Marlowe then Easton or the other way round, a fight we might survive twice.
Or whether the clocks run out together and both of them come up this mountain at once, and four men and a feral omega try to hold a cabin against a war on two fronts.
I look out at the wire we've strung, and the gap where a man stood last night and watched our window, and the pale sun coming up on what's left of the quiet.
"Probably not at once," I say.
Knox doesn't answer right away.
"Probably," he agrees.
And neither of us believes it.