36. Ember
EMBER
I'm on the west rise with the rifle, covering the east ridge where Gideon and Knox have gone, putting rounds into the timber wherever the threads of movement show.
Suppressing fire, the way my father taught it.
Half the time I can't see what I'm hitting, and I fire anyway, because somewhere up in that white timber Gideon is walking toward the boy from the next cot, and this rifle is the only way I can reach him.
Keeping Easton heads down is the whole job.
I'm working the bolt on the next one when a man walks out of the treeline below the cabin alone, and I know before I have him in the scope that it's him.
I know by the coat. Six years and I still know the cut of that coat, the expensive quiet of it.
Ardric Easton walks across my yard toward my porch like a man arriving at a property he holds the deed to, unhurried, unbothered by the war happening on the ridge above him, because men like Ardric don't go to the fighting.
The fighting comes to them, or it's done on their behalf, and they arrive after to inspect the result.
He's not going to the ridge. He's coming to the cabin. To the porch.
To me.
I should shoot him. I have him in the scope, center mass, an easy shot, the shot I've taken three times already this morning. My finger's on the trigger.
I don't take it.
Tactical, I tell myself. A rifle shot brings the other Eastons down on the cabin where Rhys and Cass and a wounded man are; a quiet kill is better than a loud one.
That's true. But it's not the whole truth and I know it even as I'm easing off the trigger and coming down off the rise.
The whole truth is that I have waited six years to look this man in the face, and a bullet from four hundred yards is not looking him in the face, and there are some things you have to collect in person.
The way down to the cabin runs along its blind side.
Through the kitchen window I catch Cass at the glass, rifle low, Rhys a shadow at his shoulder, both of them reading the man crossing the yard and the woman coming down off the rise to meet him.
Cass's eyes find mine and I shake my head once.
Hold. This one's mine too. And they hold, the way they held for Malek, because they've learned what it costs me when somebody else collects my debts.
I step up onto my own porch as he reaches the bottom of the steps, and we look at each other across the boards in the falling snow, and he smiles.
That's the thing about Ardric. He smiles.
He was always going to smile. He's a handsome man gone a little soft at the jaw with the years, well-kept, easy in his body, and he looks at me, at the woman in hunting clothes with blood on her sleeve and a knife on her belt, and his smile is warm and certain and almost, almost kind.
"Valerie Cole," he says. The alias, savored, like a clever thing a child said.
"Or should I drop the costume now that we're face to face.
Ember. You've gotten hard to look at, do you know that?
Not unlovely. Hard. Like something left out in the weather.
" He tilts his head. "Six years in the wilderness.
I confess I'm impressed. I didn't think you had it in you.
I thought we'd find you in a city somewhere inside a season, broke and ready to come home. "
"You came yourself," I say. I keep my voice even. I keep my hands still. I let him have the porch, the closeness, the illusion that I'm listening. "Down here, while your men die on the ridge. That's a lot of trouble for a runaway bride."
"You were never a runaway bride. Let's not be dramatic.
" He sets one polished boot on the bottom step.
"You were an acquisition. A good one. Your father and I made an arrangement that was advantageous to both houses, and you were the instrument of it, and instruments don't run away, they get misplaced, and a careful man recovers what he's misplaced.
" Another step. He's enjoying this. He's wanted to say it as long as I've wanted to hear it.
"Do you remember the terms? You were so young.
The arrangement was that your usefulness would be evaluated annually.
Your health, your temperament, your output, against the value of what your father received.
I'll be honest with you, Ember. The first few years, your absence put you badly in the red.
A liability. A line item bleeding money. "
"And now?"
"And now?" He's three steps up. Close. The narrow old-blood scent of him, iron and wet stone, the Easton smell Knox named at the line a lifetime ago.
He looks me over again, slow, appraising, the way you'd look at a horse you were thinking of buying back at a loss.
"Now I find you've appreciated. Look at you.
You killed how many of Marlowe's men this morning?
You put your own father in the ground, I'd wager, because he's not down there fighting and Malek Marlowe doesn't sit in the car.
You've become something genuinely valuable in the wild.
Trained. Lethal. Wasted out here on a pack of nobodies.
" He reaches the top step. He's on the porch with me now, close enough to touch, and his voice drops to something intimate and terrible.
"Come back and be evaluated properly. I think you'll find your worth has gone up considerably.
I think you'll find I'm prepared to be generous about the years you cost me, given what you've turned into.
That's a better offer than you'll get anywhere.
That's me, telling you, you can come home and be worth something again. "
I let him finish. I let him say all of it, every word, the annual evaluation and the line item and the appreciated asset, and I stand there and let him believe I'm the girl who used to stand there and take it, because the craft of this, the thing my father gave me, is that you let them think they have you right up until the instant you take them.
"You know what six years in the woods taught me," I say. Quiet. Almost soft. I let him lean in to hear it. "It taught me that the most dangerous thing in any room is the one everyone's already decided is property."
And he smiles, indulgent, not understanding yet, and he reaches for my wrist.
He reaches for my wrist the exact way he did when I was eighteen, in a study that smelled of his father's cigars, when he closed his hand around it to show me I couldn't pull away.
The same gesture. The same certainty. He's reaching for a thing he had measured years ago: a trained omega, scent-locked, wolf-caged, controllable, the asset his house paid for.
He has no idea the cage broke this morning.
He has no idea what's standing on this porch now wearing the girl he remembers.
So I show him.
The change takes me faster than thought, faster than his hand can close, the way it comes when the body wants it and the body has wanted nothing more in its life than this.
One instant I'm the woman he reached for and the next there's a wolf where she stood, grey as wet stone, all teeth and six years of survival and twenty-four of caged fury, and his certain warm smile finally, finally breaks.
His hand is still in the air, closing on nothing, on the memory of a wrist that isn't there anymore.
The knife?—
No. Not the knife. Not this time. This time my own teeth.