Chapter 10 The Interrogation She Turns

Kael came back an hour after Damon left.

He walked through the door, looked at her face, and stopped moving completely.

"He was here," he said. Not a question.

"An hour ago," she responded. "He let himself in."

Something moved through Kael's jaw. He set down what he was carrying and looked around the cabin like he could still feel his cousin in it. Maybe he could. She was starting to understand that wolves picked up things humans simply couldn't.

"What did he say?"

"He asked questions. I answered the ones I could."

"And the ones you couldn't?"

"I didn't answer those."

Kael looked at her for a long moment. She could see him working through it, what Damon had seen, what he'd concluded, what he was going to do with whatever he'd carried out of here.

"He'll come back," Kael said.

"I know," she replied.

He came back the next morning.

Kael was there this time, standing by the stove with his arms crossed and his jaw set hard. It accomplished nothing except showing Damon exactly how much this mattered to him. Aria watched Kael's face and thought, don't do that. Don't show him where the nerve is. But she couldn't say it out loud so she filed it away and focused.

Damon sat in the same chair as yesterday. Same position. Same stillness. Like he had simply paused overnight and was now resuming exactly where he left off.

He looked at Aria.

"Yesterday you told me you had nowhere else to go," he said.

"Yes," she answered.

"Where were you before here?"

"Settlement Seven. Eastern human territories."

"What happened to it?"

"It burned," she said. "Four months ago."

"How?"

"A raid."

"Which pack?"

She looked at him steadily. "I don't know."

True, she had the seal, she had the name Calder, but she was just not handing over everything she suspected to a man who would know exactly what to do with it.

Damon's eyes didn't move from her face.

"You crossed wolf territory alone," he said. "On foot. No escort. No papers. Middle of the night." A pause. "That's not what people do when they have nowhere to go. That's what people do when they have somewhere specific to be."

The cabin was very quiet.

"I was running," she said. "Direction didn't matter."

"Direction always matters," he said. "East would have taken you to the Harren settlements, three times closer, half the danger. You went north instead, into the most heavily patrolled wolf territory in the region." He tilted his head just slightly.

"Why north?"

She held his gaze and said nothing.

That was an answer too and they both understood it.

He moved on without pressing. New angle.

"You have no fear response," he said. "I watched you yesterday. I'm watching you now. Most humans in your position, alone, no protection, kill order over their head, they give something away. Shaking hands. Eyes going to the exits. Something." He looked at her hands resting in her lap.

"Nothing from you."

"Fear takes energy," she said. "I need mine."

"For what?"

"Surviving."

"Surviving what specifically?"

She almost smiled at that. He was good. She had known it from yesterday but sitting across from it properly now she could feel the full weight of it, the way each question opened into another question, the way he used silence to do the work she wouldn't do for him, the way he assembled things from her answers even when her answers gave him almost nothing to work with.

Most people interrogated looking for a confession.

Damon interrogated like he was building a picture piece by piece and would finish it eventually whether she helped him or not.

"You're not afraid of me," he said. The questions had stopped. He was just looking at her now. "Why?"

She met his eyes directly.

"Should I be?" she said.

One second of silence. Two.

"Yes," he said. "Deeply."

No heat in it. No performance. Just a plain fact handed over the same way he handed over everything, like the truth was always the most efficient option and he had never found a reason to use anything else.

She believed him completely.

That was the thing about Damon Vayne she was going to have to stay careful about. Everything Kael had told her, the patterns, the details, the never failing, she had taken it seriously. But hearing it secondhand and sitting three feet from it were entirely different things.

He was the most dangerous person she had met in this territory.

And he still didn't know she had crossed on purpose.

She could see the shape of what he didn't know in the questions he was asking. He was working from the assumption that she was a refugee. Desperate. Running without a real direction. He was looking for the hidden thing inside a story he believed was mostly true.

He was in the right room and the wrong corner.

She needed to keep him exactly there.

"I've already survived things that should have killed me," she said. "A raid. Four months alone. A border crossing on foot with broken ribs." She held his gaze and didn't blink. "You're dangerous. I understand that. But danger stopped scaring me the night I buried my brother."

Something moved in his expression. Brief, just a second. Something that wasn't calculation, something more human than that, there and gone before she could put a name to it.

He stood.

"How old was he?" Damon asked.

She hadn't prepared for that question. Of everything he could have said that was the last thing she'd expected from him.

"Twenty-two," she said.

He nodded once, then looked across at Kael. Something passed between the two cousins, quick and silent, built from a lifetime of knowing each other. She couldn't read it.

Then he walked to the door.

"I'll be back," he said.

The door closed.

Aria let out a slow breath and looked at her hands in her lap. Completely still. She was proud of that.

"He believed you," Kael said quietly from across the room.

She looked up.

"For now," she said. "He believed m

e for now."

That was the only thing that mattered.

For now was enough.

She just had to make sure it lasted long enough.