Page 134 of Bought for Blood

“The moment Viktor realized you and Crowe were gone, he tore up the plan he’d been building and remade the whole thing overnight,” Grace says. “The operation got as far as vehicles running in the yard. Then Faine answered her telephone, told him the quarry was already finished, and refused to say one word about where you were.” She shakes her head. “I’ve never in my life seen a man that angry while sitting completely still.”

“What about the others?” I ask. “The ones they didn’t get.”

“Jericho is working the trucks that got out,” she says. “Three junctions, two hundred miles of road. It’s a big job. He’s been at it since the morning it happened.”

“And the woman I told them about? Kalli?” I say.

“They haven’t found her.”

“She was alive in that truck. I saw her.”

“Then they’ll find her.” Grace stops at the fourth window.

“There were men on those stairs,” I say. “Between me and that room. None of them walked away.”

Grace keeps her eyes on the road below. “I know. Viktor had the report.”

“My wolf isn’t sorry. Not for one of them.” I splay my hand on the cold stone. “I keep waiting to be. It hasn’t come.”

“It might not,” she says. “You get to live anyway.”

We stand there a while after that. The truck coming up the mountain road below us has chains on its tires, and I can hear them from here.

“Stay,” Grace says.

I don’t answer.

“I’m not fighting with you. I want to say it once, properly, so you’ve actually heard it. Then you can do whatever you’re going to do.”

“All right.”

“Neither of us has ever had an ordinary life. Not one day of it.” She keeps her eyes on the road. “We were on the run from the week Mama died. Before that we were being taught to be invisible by a woman who was frightened every hour she was awake. Then that place.”

“I know.”

“There’s a room here with your name on it. Viktor’s already asked me what you’re good at, which is how he offers people work without saying so.” She turns around and leans back against the ledge. Her hand comes to rest on her own stomach. She doesn’t seem to notice she’s done it.

My wolf heard it the moment we came up out of the room they gave me. A tiny life inside her. She was three feet from me in that room full of strangers, and I was so focused on finding Bastien that I didn’t read her. Now I have this, and I don’t know how to say any of it out loud. I keep waiting for her to tell me. She doesn’t. I have to respect that.

“There’s a town at the bottom of this road. I’ve been down twice. There’s a bakery and a library and a woman in the post office who talked to me about her knee for eleven minutes.”

“Eleven?”

“I counted. It was wonderful.” She half smiles. “You could learn to drive.”

“Grace.”

“You could have one safe year. One. Where no one could hurt you.” Her voice drops. “And you’d have me in it. Every day. Not a photograph. Not one line in an envelope.”

I look out at the road.

Everything I thought about for a year in that ward is inside this mountain. My sister with her hand on her belly. A door I opened myself this morning. A hall full of people eating breakfast because somebody came for them. Family, in one building, alive.

I don’t owe Bastien anything. I got him out of that room. He signed that piece of paper with my name on it.

I slip my hand into my pocket, and my fingers find the fold of it.

There’s a hollow space in my chest that my wolf normally fills. Her whole attention is on the pull that won’t let up.