Page 12 of A Wolf's Revenge

Neither was going to hold forever. I knew that too.

She was at my apartment when I got back. She’d taken to coming on the evenings she could engineer free, navigating around her grandfather’s rules with small careful lies that she hated telling.

She was asleep on the couch when I came in, a textbook open on her chest, the city going amber in the windows behind her. I stood in the doorway and looked at her and the wolf in me — the one I kept folded flat in front of my father — came up to its full height and went absolutely still, the way it had in a school corridor in January, the way it had refused to do for anyone else in twenty-two years.

I knew what it was. I think I’d known since the corridor. I just hadn’t let the word up into the part of me that used words, because the word made the job impossible. The word made me a monster, and I wasn’t ready to be either of those things out loud.

She stirred, scented me, and surfaced — that slow swim up out of sleep, her eyes going to mine, her wolf flickering there for a second before she remembered to hold it down.

“You’re late,” she said. “And you smell like the Bronx and somebody else’s cigarettes.” A pause, her gaze sharpening the way it did when she caught a thing she couldn’t place. “And like a fight you didn’t have. You go still in a particular way when you’ve been somewhere that scared you. Did you know that?”

“No,” I said.

“You do.” She sat up, set the book aside, and looked at me with the open, unguarded attention that undid me every single time. “Where were you, Z?”

“Family thing,” I said. Which was true, and was the worst kind of lie, the kind built entirely out of true words.

She watched me a moment longer. She didn’t push. That was the thing about Kerra — she’d hand you the door and let you decide whether to walk through it, and she never once mistook your silence for an absence of something behind it. “Okay,” she said, and held out her hand. I crossed the room and took it, and she pulled me down beside her and put her head on my shoulder. We sat in the amber dark not talking while I held the hand of the girl whose family I’d spent the afternoon promising to deliver.

I had a sentence in my chest that would burn her house down.

I held her hand instead of saying it.

I told myself, again, that holding it back meant I was protecting her.

It didn’t. It just meant I hadn’t decided yet which of us I was going to betray.

7

The summer turned. I made a decision somewhere in the long warm middle of it without ever deciding it, the way you find yourself already walking before you’ve chosen the direction.

I was not going to file the hinge.

More than that — I was going to make sure my father never got it from anyone, which meant the only safe place in the world for Kerra Conti was somewhere her family wasn’t, and mine couldn’t reach. Which meant leaving, which meant a thing no son of Aleksander Zorander had ever done and survived. I started, quietly, to build the leaving. An account he knew nothing about, fed from the cut I skimmed running the eastern district, withdrawals small enough that nothing flagged. A second passport through a man in Queens who didn’t ask questions. I built it the way I built everything, in careful pieces, and I told no one. For the first time in my life, the careful work was for me — for us — instead of for him.

It should have felt like freedom. It felt like standing on a high ledge with my back to a long drop, building the thing that would either save us or be the proof, when they found it, of exactly how far I’d fallen.

Kerra knew something had shifted in me. Of course she did. She read me the way she read everything — directly, without protection.

“You’ve gotten quiet,” she said one night, the good kind of quiet to her, the kind she didn’t yet know to be afraid of. We were on the roof of my building, which had become a place we went when the planetarium was closed and she still needed the sky. She’d brought a blanket, a thermos, and her endless patient willingness to explain the universe to a man who only asked questions so he could keep her talking. “Not bad-quiet. Settled-quiet. Like you put something down.”

“Maybe I did,” I said.

“What.”

I almost told her then. The whole truth sat right at the back of my teeth — I’m a Zorander, my father is the man your grandfather has been at war with for six years. I was sent to use you and I did, and I’m building us a way out because the alternative is your family in the ground. I can’t, I can’t be the one who does that to you. It was all there. I could feel the shape of it, the relief of it, the way naming it would have set something down in me that had been crushing me since January.

But naming it would also have put the truth into her hands, and Kerra did not know how to hold a truth and not act on it. She’d have gone to her grandfather. She’d have tried to make peace, or warn him, or simply could not have looked at me the same way across a dinner table while pretending nothing was wrong — because she believed that naming a thing honestly was the first step to deciding how to live with it, and a woman like that cannot un-know that her lover is her family’s executioner-in-waiting and carry on. The truth would have moved through her family like a current, and my father had eyes in places I couldn’t see. The moment the Conti’s started behaving like people who knew, he’d have known they knew, and he’d have moved early, and the leaving I was building would have come to nothing.

That was the reasoning. It was even partly true.

The rest of it — the part I didn’t look at — was that I was a coward, and that telling her meant watching her face change. I would rather have died than watch Kerra Conti look at me and understand what I was.

“Z.” She’d gone still beside me, her wolf up in her eyes, reading me the way she read the sky — for the thing that moved when everything else held. “You were about to say something.”

“I was thinking about what you said. At the planetarium.” I heard myself reach for the exit and take it. “The far side of the moon. The whole side of yourself nobody sees.” I looked at her, and I let her see as much of it as I could afford, which was the wanting and not the reason. “I’ve got a side like that. I’m going to show it to you. Soon. I just need to get a few things in place first.”

Something crossed her face — not suspicion, exactly. The patient attention of a person who has been handed a door, told not yet, and has decided to trust the not yet against her own better instincts.