Chapter 2
Ezekiel
She walks out and takes the air with her.
That's how it feels. The door swings shut behind her and the room goes airless, and the seven years I've spent holding everything down — every feeling locked in a box, every reaction filed flat, every human thing in me sanded off so a hollow man could move through hell without leaving fingerprints — the box breaks.
All of it hits me at once. Standing in the middle of the clubhouse with my brothers looking at the floor, I feel seven years of buried grief surge up my spine like floodwater up a stairwell, and my wolf —
My wolf, who is barely anything anymore, who is a whisper where he used to be a roar, who has been chemically drowned for so long that most days I can't find him at all —
My wolf howls.
It's a thin and broken sound, deep in the place where he lives, more pain than voice.
But it's grief, real grief, sharp enough to cut clean through the chemical fog the suppressants have left in me, and my knees go.
The room tilts. Hands catch me — Priest, his grip iron on my arm, holding me up the way he held my shoulder seven years ago in that green-dark office.
"Easy," he says. The first word he's spoken since I walked into this compound. "Easy, brother. I've got you."
Brother. He still calls me that. After everything I let them all do — let them carry the box, let them mourn me, let them spend seven years thinking they'd failed to keep me alive — he still calls me brother.
I don't know what to do with it. I've been Ghost so long I've forgotten how to be a thing that's owed loyalty.
Conrad's voice cuts across the room. "Everybody out."
They go. They go quietly, the way men go when they don't have words, and a few of them touch my shoulder on the way past, and a few of them can't look at me at all, and Casket stops in the doorway and says, low, "Glad you're breathing, Ghost," and then he's gone too, and it's just me and Conrad and Priest and the table and the falling light.
Priest steers me onto a stool at the bar. I sit. I put my hands flat on the wood the way I've watched Conrad do, because I need something to hold onto and the wood is solid and the wood doesn't have feelings about me.
I look at my hands.
They're not my hands. I keep thinking that.
They're thinner than they were, the knuckles bigger, two fingers on the left that didn't set right after a man named Vault broke them in a basement in Tennessee to see if I'd flinch in the wrong language.
They're scarred in places they weren't. They're a stranger's hands and they're attached to me and I lived inside this stranger so long that the strangeness is the only home I have left.
"How is she," I say.
Conrad pours three glasses without asking and pushes one toward me.
"She's the best person in this compound," he says.
"And I don't say that to twist the knife.
I say it because it's true and you should know it.
She held this place together with her bare hands while you were gone.
The children love her like she made them.
She kept Della upright through the bad years.
She runs that school like a tight ship and she remembers every birthday and she shows up for every funeral and she—" He stops.
Drinks. "She visits your grave every Sunday.
Seven years. Rain, snow, the week we buried Tobias, the morning after the Greylock fire. Every Sunday."
"I know."
He sets the glass down hard. "You know."
"I watched. Once." The words come out of a part of me I've kept locked so long it's stiff to open.
"Two years ago. I was running an op on a Cerberus relay sixty miles from here, close enough that I could justify it in the after-action if anyone asked, and nobody asked, and I went to the cemetery in the dark before dawn and I waited in the tree line because it was a Sunday and I knew.
" I drink. It burns and I'm grateful for the burn.
"She came at nine. Same as always, Conrad said, and I didn't know that yet but I'd have bet on it. She came at nine with sunflowers."
The word does something to my throat. Sunflowers. I have to stop and breathe around it.
"She sat with the stone for an hour. She talked to it.
I couldn't hear the words but I could hear the shape of her voice and it was the voice she used to use with me in bed, low, just for the two of us, and she was using it on a rock with my name on it.
" I turn the glass on the wood. "I had a clear line to her the whole time.
Forty yards. I could have walked down that hill in two minutes and ended it, the lie, all of it, just walked down and said her name.
My wolf wanted to. What's left of him. He nearly took the choice away from me.
" I drink the rest of it. "Seeing her alive and grieving me was worse than dying would have been.
Dying you only do once. That I had to do every day. "
Priest puts a hand on my back. Conrad looks at me for a long moment with the stone in his face cracked clean through, and then he does something I don't expect.
He reaches across the bar and grips the back of my neck, hard, the old gesture, the one a father gives a son or a king gives a soldier, and he holds it and says, "You did the impossible thing.
And I'm the one who asked you to. I'll carry that. "
I don't have anything to say to that. I never thought about Conrad carrying anything.
He always seemed made of granite to me, but his hand on my neck is warm and his grip is shaking very slightly and I realize he's been carrying this for seven years too, in his own way, the weight of the order he gave.
"The mission's done," I say, because I need to be useful, because being useful is the only language I have left.
"Cerberus is mapped. All of it. Leadership, locations, the financial spine, the trafficking corridors, the schedule of the suppressant production runs.
I have everything. We can take the whole thing apart in a single night and there won't be enough left of it to grow back. "
Conrad nods slowly. "Then we end it. We'll debrief tomorrow, you and me and Priest and the war council, and we'll plan it down to the minute." He releases my neck. "But tonight you rest, Ghost. You're no good to anyone falling off a stool."
He's right and I hate that he's right. I'm a wreck of a man held together by mission and habit, and now the mission's almost done, and habit isn't going to be enough.
I don't go to my old cabin. My old cabin is hers now.
They put me in a guest cabin at the edge of the compound, a small bare room with a bed and a chair and a window that looks at the trees, and I sit on the edge of the bed in the dark and I don't sleep, because I don't remember how to sleep in a bed that's safe.
Seven years I've slept light, slept armed, slept with one ear on the door.
The safety here is so foreign it's almost unbearable.
I look at my hands again. And then I try to do the thing I'm afraid to do.
I try to shift.
I reach down inside myself for the wolf, for the place where he lives, the warm den of him that used to be the surest thing about me.
When I was young the shift was easy as breathing — easier, joy itself, the bones rearranging like water finding its level and then the four-footed freedom and the world gone bright and loud and true, every scent a story, every sound a thread.
I used to shift for nothing. For the joy of it.
I used to carry Margo into the woods on my back, her hands buried in my ruff, her laughter raining down on me while I ran the ridgelines with her weight a glory across my spine.
I reach for him now.
There's a flicker. A faint gold heat behind my eyes, a tremor along the long bones of my arms, the ghost of a sensation that used to be a flood.
My breath catches with hope — and then it dies.
The gold gutters out. The tremor stills.
There's nothing. Just the suppressant fog and the silence where the animal should be, and a thin exhausted whine somewhere down deep, my wolf reaching back toward me from the bottom of a well with no strength to climb.
Jo examined me this afternoon, before Margo, before any of it.
She's the compound's healer and she's blunt as a hammer and she didn't soften a thing.
The bond's degraded, Ghost. Years of chemical suppression — you've got scarring on the connection itself, neural and otherwise, places where the man and the wolf used to talk to each other and now the line's mostly dead.
The wolf's alive. He's in there. But the road between you is washed out.
You might get some of it back. You might not get much.
I won't lie to you and tell you you'll run again. Most likely you won't.
Most likely I won't.
I sit in the dark in the borrowed cabin and I think about that.
The thing I pretended to be for seven years — a man without a wolf, a hollow human moving through a human world — I might just be that now.
The pretending might have made it true. I went into Cerberus a wolf wearing a man's empty story and I came out a man who can't reliably find his wolf, and maybe that's the last and cruelest thing the mission took: not my life, which I got to keep, but the animal in me that made the life worth keeping.
And under all of it, deeper than the wolf, deeper than the silence, there's the thing I can't stop seeing.
Margo in the doorway. Her face when she understood.
The flatness, then the white heat coming through the cracks.
You're dead. You're alive. You let me grieve you.
And then the step. The single step backward she took when I moved toward her, the step that landed in the center of my chest and is still landing, will keep landing, I think, for the rest of my life.
I've survived two assassination attempts.
I've been beaten in basements and interrogated in languages I had to pretend not to understand.
I sat across a table from the man who runs Cerberus and ate dinner with him and smiled while I memorized the lines of his face for the day we'd end him.
I have lived seven years one wrong word away from a bullet, and I learned to feel nothing, because feeling was a weakness that could get me killed.
Nothing in seven years has hurt like Margo stepping away from me.
I lie back on the strange bed and I stare at the ceiling I don't know and I let the hurt have me, because there's no mission left to hide it behind, and somewhere down in the washed-out dark my wolf lies down too, and the two of us — the man and what's left of the animal — grieve the same woman in the same silence, and that, at least, is something we still do together.