11. Chapter 11 #2
The screens continued their mute surveillance. The stage remained empty. The parcel and the boy shorts sat side by side beneath the lamplight I had forgotten to turn on, illuminated instead by monitor glow and city bleed through the glass, looking like evidence in a case against my self-command.
I stood, snatched neither object, and moved toward the door.
By the time my hand hit the latch, my mind had ceased circling emotion and returned to the only discipline that had ever reliably saved me from drowning in it: inquiry.
Ironwood had taken a membership two months ago. Sloan had interviewed for staff. Maddie had been drawn into their orbit with suspicious ease. Whether this was coincidence, opportunism, or something more deliberate, I intended to know.
Bohdan’s administrative suite still bled light into the corridor, a narrow golden seam under a half-closed door, and I knew before I touched it that I was not interrupting leisure but work—the real kind, the kind my brother hid beneath charm the way other men hid weapons.
I knocked once against the frame and pushed the door wider.
His jacket hung over the back of a nearby chair. His shirtsleeves were rolled to the forearms. Without the tailored armor and social smile, he looked younger and more dangerous both, leaner somehow, as if charm had flesh on it and work removed the extra layer.
He glanced up, took one look at me in the doorway, and lifted both brows.
“Let me guess,” he said. “Questions about a big bad wolf?”
I closed the door behind me. “Do try not to exhaust yourself with originality.”
“Impossible. It is my principal virtue.”
I crossed the room and dropped into the chair opposite his desk. The leather was cool; the posture too low to be entirely comfortable. Deliberate, no doubt. Bohdan liked slight advantages built into furniture and conversation alike.
He leaned back an inch and studied my face. “That bad?”
I could have answered with dignity. Instead, because I was tired, and he was my brother, I said, “Worse.”
A short sound escaped him through his nose—not quite laughter, but close. Then he turned one monitor toward himself, fingers already moving over the keys.
“Very well. Let us see how civilized our wolf friends truly are. Start at the beginning.”
“The beginning,” I said, “is that the Ironwood pack does not need Obsidian.”
“No,” he agreed. “They do not.”
“They have money enough to build private indulgences anywhere they like. Their politics make them disinclined toward mixed company. Yet Sage took a membership two months ago, and tonight he returned with pack members specifically to Maddie’s section.”
Bohdan’s expression altered little, but his hands kept moving with quicker precision now. “Requested seating?”
“I would stake a considerable sum on it.”
“I can check the note trail.”
“You may also check why his younger sister suddenly wished to become an employee in a supernatural den her pack’s philosophy should find morally and culturally distasteful.”
That earned me a glance over the screen. “Sloan.”
“Yes.”
He opened the staff database, entered a code, and brought up her file. Her photograph appeared first: dark hair, alert eyes, a face that managed frankness without friendliness. Beneath it, intake documents, interview notes, background verification.
Bohdan skimmed once, then settled in.
“All right,” he said. “Officially stated reason for employment change: she wanted autonomy from pack oversight, expanded exposure to species beyond wolves, and experience operating in a neutral-ground environment with a broad supernatural client base.” His mouth twitched faintly.
“Which, translated from interview language, means she was bored in the compound and wanted to see the world without technically rebelling.”
I said, “Did you believe her?”
“I believed she meant it.” He scrolled. “Whether it was the whole truth is a separate matter, but that is true of most applicants.”
He turned the monitor slightly so I could see the typed notes.
The details were clinical. Age, pack affiliation, previous education, prior work experience within Lynch internal operations, no criminal flags, no known Council violations.
Interview responses, concise and intelligent.
She had wanted freedom. She had wanted to work somewhere that did not replicate pack life in another costume.
She had specifically cited Obsidian as a place where species boundaries meant less than function, contract, and consent.
It sounded plausible.
That irritated me.
“She passed vetting?”
“With room to spare.” Bohdan tapped another section. “Background clean. References from internal pack administration irritatingly polished. No evidence of covert assignment, no hidden debt, no inconsistencies significant enough to warrant refusal.” He paused. “And.”
He clicked open the supplemental note.
I felt my attention sharpen before he spoke.
“And she passed Devon’s assessment without hesitation.”
That mattered.
It mattered more than either of us was entirely comfortable admitting in formal settings, which likely explained why we only discussed it in rooms with locked doors.
Since my father had mated the fallen angel and the whole world had rearranged itself accordingly, Devon’s impressions had acquired a status no conventional vetting process could rival.
She saw wrongness in people the way some creatures smelled blood.
Not always with evidence one could put in a file.
But often enough, and accurately enough, that ignoring her had become indistinguishable from stupidity.
Bohdan met my gaze. “Devon’s note says, and I quote, ‘She is restless, not false. She wants out, not in.’”
I exhaled slowly.
“So Sloan may simply have wanted a larger world.”
“Many people do,” Bohdan said. “Contrary to family myth, not everyone finds pack life sufficient unto itself.”
“No. But her brother taking membership thereafter is untidy.”
“It is.”
We let that sit for a moment while the monitors cast shifting light across the office. Somewhere beneath us, a final bottle crate rolled across the back hall and thudded to rest. The club was shutting itself down bone by bone.
I said, “Maddie is going to their full moon run.”
Bohdan’s fingers stilled over the keyboard.
Only for a second. Yet I saw it.
He already knew.
Something cold and mean slipped neatly between my ribs.
“Yes,” he said.
I did not like how level my voice remained. “You were aware.”
“She requested the time off herself this afternoon.”
Of course she had. She worked for him. He managed scheduling. No betrayal existed there. No slight. No promise broken. She owed me no report of where she meant to take her own body under the moon.
It stung anyway.
I kept my face still and discovered, not for the first time, that composure did very little to alter the interior reality of being cut.
Bohdan watched me absorb it with altogether too much intelligence. He was kind enough not to smile.
“She did not mention it at breakfast?” he asked.
I gave him a look.
“That would be a no, then.”
“She told me she was going.”
“Ah,” he said quietly. “And you were fine with this?”
The office seemed smaller for a beat after that. Not physically. Emotionally. Or perhaps that was merely what honesty did when one was trapped in it.
I leaned back and scrubbed one hand over my mouth. “I encouraged her to go.”
That, apparently, was the line that broke him.
Bohdan laughed.
Not politely. Not with his social veneer intact. A short, startled, wholly genuine laugh that filled the office and made him look for one moment so much like the brother I had known in private for centuries that I almost resented him for it.
“What?” I said.
He only shook his head once, still smiling as if something delightful and impossible had finally confirmed itself.
“She needs to be around wolves,” I said, hearing defensiveness enter and despising it. “It would be selfish to keep her from that because I dislike the company.”
“You have become alarmingly reasonable.”
“I was always reasonable.”
“Not about this.” He leaned back in his chair, folding one arm across his middle while the other rested on the chair arm. His gaze moved over me with a species of wonder I found deeply insulting. “You love this wolf.”
The sentence landed cleanly. No ornament. No question.
I did not answer.
I suspect my silence was more eloquent than speech would have been, because Bohdan’s expression softened by a shade.
“Well,” he said. “There it is.”
I stood because remaining seated suddenly felt intolerable.
He went on, voice lighter again, though not frivolous. “I guess they say if you love something, let it go... if it comes back and all.”
I stared at him.
“Please do not quote human greeting cards at me in my hour of crisis.”
“Brother, I am trying to meet you where you live now, which appears to be somewhere between tragedy and sentimental nonsense.”
I should have had a reply. I did not. Or perhaps I did and was too tired to sharpen it.
I turned toward the door.
Behind me, his chair creaked softly as he leaned forward again, whatever brief indulgence in humor he had permitted himself slipping toward something darker.
“Of course,” he said, and his voice dropped just enough that the line traveled after me into the corridor like a knife slid over silk, “the human greeting card gets it wrong. If it doesn’t come back, you track down whatever is keeping it and slaughter the entire lot, eh, brother?”
I had already crossed the threshold.
I did not turn back.
Because the joke was monstrous, because it was Bohdan, because he knew exactly what family he belonged to, and because some ancient brutal region of me—one I preferred unconsulted—had understood the sentiment before the words even ended.
I kept walking.
Tilden arrived when summoned, immaculate as always, silver hair in perfect order, gloves spotless, expression arranged in that composure house staff everywhere cultivated as a defense against aristocratic nonsense.
He accepted the box with both hands.