Page 11 of A Wolf's Revenge

I had kept doing it because I wanted her close. I had told myself that wanting her close was the same as protecting her, and it wasn’t. It was never that. My wolf had decided something about her — had named it the instant her scent reached me, the way our kind is built to — and I had spent every day since refusing to hear what it was saying, because I already knew, and knowing it would have made the work impossible.

The information I hadn’t given my father yet sat in my chest like a coal.

I knew what he would do when I gave it to him. I had always known.

I sat there until the city was fully dark, and I did not call him.

I told myself that meant something.

It didn’t.

6

By summer, I was keeping two ledgers.

One was the kind my father could see. Names, movements, the slow accretion of a family’s habits written in the flat operational shorthand he’d taught me before I could drive — Conti, A., departs 0815 daily, two-man detail; Conti compound, NW wall, single patrol 2200-0400; granddaughter, K., no detail, unguarded, source. That ledger I added to every week and delivered every Sunday, and my father read it the way he read everything, without comment, as if competence were simply the absence of failure and merited no further notice.

The other ledger, I kept nowhere. It was the one where I wrote down what Kerra’s hands did when she was working through a problem. The three different laughs she had and which one she gave when she’d forgotten to be careful. The fact that she took her coffee too sweet and was embarrassed about it. The way her wolf surfaced in her eyes when she was tired and she stopped bothering to hold it down. That ledger had no operational value. I added to it constantly. I told myself it was nothing — that a man could hold two ledgers, that one was the job and one was a weakness he’d master, and that the weakness wouldn’t bleed into the job because I wouldn’t let it.

I had been lying to myself with great discipline for months.

The thing I could not write in either ledger was the piece my father was waiting for.

He needed the inside of the house. Not the wall, not the patrols — those I’d given him in the spring, and he’d received them with the same flat nothing he gave everything. What he needed was the part only someone Kerra trusted could supply: where the Alpha slept, which room, which floor, the route a man would take through the building in the dark to reach Emeka Conti before the house woke. The hinge the whole thing turned on. The detail that turned reconnaissance into a plan.

Kerra had shown me. Not meaning to — she’d walked me through her grandfather’s house one warm evening when the family was out, her hand in mine, narrating the place the way you narrate the rooms you grew up in, that’s where Antonio broke his arm, that’s the window I used to climb out of, that’s Nonno’s study, he sleeps in the room behind it because he doesn’t trust the upstairs since the stroke. She’d given me the hinge in a single offhand sentence, laughing, because she had no reason on earth to think the man holding her hand was building a map.

I had that sentence. I had had it for two months.

I hadn’t filed it.

I told myself I was waiting — for the right moment, the right framing, some operational reason that would make the timing of the delivery my decision, instead of a thing I was simply failing to do. It was the most sustained lie I told that whole year, and I told it to myself in my father’s own voice, which was how I knew it was working.

He called me to the house at the end of July.

The Zorander place sat behind a wall in the kind of neighborhood where money bought silence, and walking up the drive, I felt the old thing happen to my body that had been happening since I was a boy — the wolf in me going small, folding itself down, because a son does not bring his wolf up to his full height in front of an Alpha like Aleksander Zorander, unless he’s prepared to lose. I wasn’t. I’d never been. That was the whole architecture of my life and I hadn’t yet understood it was a choice.

He received me in the study with the Beta standing at his shoulder — a thin gray man named Devlin, who’d argued against using me for the Conti job, and had been watching me for cracks ever since, the way a man watches for the fault he predicted so he can be right about it.

“The Conti layout,” my father said. No greeting. He never greeted. “Devlin tells me you’ve had access to the interior for two months and produced nothing from it.”

“The interior’s compartmentalized,” I said. The lie came smooth; I’d built it carefully. “The girl moves freely, but she doesn’t know the security arrangements — she’s kept out of pack business. I’m working a second angle through one of the house staff.”

Devlin made a small sound. My father didn’t look at him. He looked at me, and I held it, and the holding cost me something it had never cost me before. For the first time in my life, I was lying to Aleksander Zorander about something that mattered, and a part of me was certain he could smell it.

Maybe he could. He was an Alpha. He could read a room the way Kerra read the sky.

“You understand what this is,” he said. Not a question. “Six years, the Conti’s have held against me, and they’ve held because Emeka is careful and his house is closed. This is the only door. I’ve spent a great deal to put you behind it.” A pause that had weight in it. “I would be disappointed to learn the door was open and you simply hadn’t walked through.”

“It’s not open yet,” I said. “When it is, you’ll have it.”

He studied me a moment longer. Then he turned to the window, which was his way of ending things, and said, almost idly: “Your mother thought you were soft. I told her softness in a young wolf is just strength that hasn’t been required of itself yet.” He didn’t turn around. “Don’t make her right, Zimife. It’s the one argument I’ve never lost to her, and I’d hate to start now that she’s gone.”

I drove back into the city with my hands steady on the wheel, my wolf pressed flat against the floor of me, and the certain knowledge, for the first time, that the man would kill her. Not might. Would. The instant he had the hinge, he would take the house in the dark, and a granddaughter kept out of pack business — unguarded, unguarding, source — would not survive the kind of cleansing my father meant to do, because my father did not leave a house with anyone in it who might one day want a reckoning.

I had the hinge.

If I never filed it, he never got the door. If he never got the door, the attack never came. It was, I understood somewhere around the Triborough, the only thing standing between Kerra Conti and a fire — a sentence she’d given me laughing, that I was holding in my chest and not handing over, and that I could keep not handing over for exactly as long as my nerve and my father’s patience both held.