Chapter 11
Cole's POV
Claude waited until the courtyard was nearly empty. Then he tipped his head toward the strip of gravel behind the pack house. I followed him around the corner.
"Talk," he said.
So I talked. I told him the girl was a wolfless stray my family fed out of pity three winters ago. I told him her head was never right. I said I never had a contract with her four separate times in one minute, because a man who repeats a thing is supposed to make it heavier.
Claude let me finish. Then he spoke. "None of that matters now."
He said it like a man reading off a form. Three complaints were already on the record. The Alpha King had put her in his own house in front of twenty wolves. Any deal I made in private would be read as interference in a case the seat had touched.
He took one step closer and dropped his voice. "Understand one more thing. Ayla Frey comes back in three days. When this reaches that house, Beta Frey will spend his name on his daughter. He will not spend it on you."
He reached up and straightened my collar with two fingers. It was the way you fix a boy's coat before you push him out into the snow.
"Clean it up yourself," he said.
Then he walked away with his hands behind his back. The dark took him before I had one word ready.
I stood there with the taste of my own blood going stale. The ground went out from under me, and it had not done that since I was ten.
Thirteen years I had gotten out of everything the same way. Find the smaller wolf in the room and make him feel my trouble was his trouble. There was no smaller wolf in that alley. The old road was closed.
If the girl stayed, then in three days I had a Beta's daughter asking me questions across my own table. There was only one honest answer, and I could never say it out loud. So the complaint had to die. A complaint dies when the one who filed it stops existing.
The thought had come before. It came the night my mother wrote that the girl was getting hard to handle. It came again when I left her standing at that gate. The slow way was what I ran instead. One spoon of the brown bottle in her morning tea, every day, for three years.
The slow way looks like nothing. It looks like a body giving up by itself. Three years it had, and it failed. The bottle was never the problem. I was. I had been soft, and soft had put my name in a Gamma's notebook.
My house was dark, and it stayed dark after I put the lights on. Ayla's calendar was still hanging by the kitchen door in her blue pen. It was the only thing in the room with anything to say to me.
I boiled water and dropped in a bundle of noodles. I ate standing at the counter with my back to the window.
The phone rang just before nine. My mother came down the line already cracked open.
"Cole. The deed is gone."
My mother was crying and shouting at once, and the shouting was winning. "The Ashwood deed. Out of the closet panel, behind the loose stone, where it has sat for three years. Gone. The tin too. Every coin in it. And my mother's ring out of the jewelry box, the one with the green stone."
I put my hand over the mouthpiece and looked at the door. "Stop. Say it slower and say it quieter."
So she said it quieter. Quiet made it worse.
The girl had walked out of that house after dinner and nobody heard a thing. Not my mother, not Cassie, who spent the whole night in the bathroom being sick and was still asleep on the floor.
"Three years we fed that thing," my mother said. Her voice had gone thin. "Now she sits in Nobleclaw Pack and tells wolves I am a poisoner." She breathed once, hard. "Cole. What are we going to do about her."
The word she used was soft. The thing under it was not. That is how my mother and I have always talked.
"She is in the Alpha King's own house," I said. "Second floor. Locked room. Key in her pocket, no spare anywhere. The inner gate shuts at dark, and the wolf on it would put a sliever blade in any Carter who walked up that path."
My mother said nothing, so I gave her the rest. Nobody we knew could get inside that building. Not a logger. Not a cousin. Not my aunt's husband. There was one road up that hill, and Horne's wolves sat on all of it.
She was quiet a moment. When she spoke again her voice had dropped.
"Then she has to come out," she said. "A complaint needs the one who filed it. She walks off that hill once, just once. The road out runs into the trees, and those trees belong to everybody."
I did not answer right away. I had already walked that road twice in my head since the gate.
Past the housing edge the road bends into old pine. A truck can sit in there with its lights off. It is a long dark walk for a fat, newly awakened she-wolf with no real fighting experience. She might be able to throw one clumsy punch before panic takes over. One wolf could do it. Maybe two. Just patience.
She really thinks I didn’t hit her back because I couldn’t? Please. I just didn’t want to look like a man who beats women in front of twenty wolves. That’s all.
My mother asked why I could not come home. I told her there was a complaint with my name on it, and a wolf who runs reads like a wolf who is guilty. She started crying again, but it had gone dry and angry.
I told her I would get money to her by the fifteenth. I told her to stay in the house and be seen doing nothing at all.
Then I hung up and stood there with my hand on the receiver.
Three years. That was the thing that kept coming back, and it came back with teeth. Three years of a spoon and a cup, run long because I did not want to look at it.
I wanted a fat quiet girl in a storage room and clean hands and the deeds in the cellar. I told myself the tea was enough. I told myself I would never have to be in the room when it finished.
I should have walked her into those woods the first winter. Then I would have stood at the pack line the next morning and told them, straight-faced, that my poor sister wandered off and never came back. Nobody in that town would have asked a second question.
I would have had my name. My mate. My rank.
I poured the noodles into the sink and stood at the counter in the dark. Ayla's calendar hung on the wall in her blue pen. Three days and she would be home. She would ask me about the gate, and I would have to tell her something.
Either the girl went quiet before that, or the girl was the smallest thing I was going to lose.
