Page 17 of A Wolf's Revenge

The words went through me worse than the fire.

The fire found the far end of the corridor. Ten feet. Eight.

I pressed my forehead to hers. Her hand was still on my face.

“I had a ring,” I said. It was a stupid thing to say. It was the only thing I had.

She made a sound that was almost a laugh. “I know you did. I could smell it on you for weeks. Onyx and your nerves.” Her eyes were going unfocused. “I would have said yes. I want you to know that.”

The fire reached us.

I pulled her against me, wrapped the drapes tighter, put my body between her and the wall of heat, and held on. I could feel her breathing — shallow, ragged, slowing — and I kept talking to her, her name, over and over, because as long as I was saying it, she was still there.

And then, in the last of it, my wolf stopped letting me lie.

It had recognized her in a school corridor four months ago, and I had spent every day since calling it something else — strategy, weakness, want. It chose that moment, the worst and only moment, to give me the truth with no room left to refuse it: mate. The word arrived whole and undeniable, the way it should have arrived the first time I caught her scent, and it arrived exactly as the thing it named went out.

The bond severed. I felt it go — a thread I had refused to acknowledge existed, burning through and snapping, leaving a wound where my wolf had been. Something in me went quiet that night and did not come back for a very long time.

Then, there were hands on me. Strong ones, dragging me backward, and a voice I half-recognized, yelling something I couldn’t process.

I fought it.

I was still fighting it when the darkness came.

10

September 3, 2023

They brought me to my family at nine o’clock that night, which I understood, even as Francis unlocked the door, was not a kindness. It was a tool. A man who has only been told a threat can talk himself into doubting it. A man who has been allowed to stand in the room with the threat, to put his hands on it, to smell the fear coming off the two people he loves most in the world — that man does not doubt. He does exactly what he is told. Edoardo Conti had been running packs for fifty years, and he understood the mechanics of leverage the way I understood the mechanics of a lock, and letting me see them was the most efficient turn of the key he had. It worked.

The room was a converted apartment on the fourth floor — somebody’s idea of comfortable, once, with a sofa, a kitchenette, and a window painted shut. A second wolf standing in the corner with his hands folded who did not leave the entire time I was there. Noah was on the sofa. Amy was beside him with her arm around him, and she came up off the cushions the instant the door opened.The sound she made when she saw me was not a word, and I crossed the room and had both of them against me before the guard finished telling me I had ten minutes.

I held my son’s head against my chest and I felt him shaking, the fine continuous tremor of a six-year-old who has been brave for too many hour. Overr the top of his head, I looked at my wife, my wife looked at me, and in the half-second before either of us could arrange our faces for Noah’s sake, I saw the whole truth of where we were written plainly in hers. She is a doctor. She has a doctor’s face for catastrophe, the calm that is built specifically to keep the frightened person from reading the chart. She put it on for Noah a hundred times that week. She did not have it on yet when the door opened, and so I saw, for one half-second, exactly how frightened she was, and exactly how completely she had decided not to let it touch our son. I have loved her across eleven years and a great deal of difficulty, and I do not think I ever loved her as violently as I did in that unguarded half-second.

Then the calm came down over her face like a shutter, and she said, “Hi,” in an ordinary voice, for Noah. The performance of normal began, and the two of us held it up between us for the rest of the ten minutes the way you hold up a tarp in the rain, each gripping our own corners, not looking at how thin it was.

“Dad,” Noah said into my shirt. “Dad, the man said we have to wear the vests or the bad thing happens.”

I felt the room go very far away.

I made myself look down. I made myself look at the thing my son was wearing under the unzipped hoodie they’d let him keep — the flat gray panels, the strapping sized down clumsily for a small body, the small hard shape of the receiver over his sternum where a six-year-old’s heart was beating much too fast. Amy was wearing one too. I’d felt it when I held her and made my arms not understand what they were feeling. They had put an explosive vest on my wife and a smaller one on my son. They had told a six-year-old it was a vest, the way you’d tell him it was a seatbelt, the way you make a monstrous thing sayable to a child by giving it an ordinary word.

“That’s right, buddy,” I heard myself say, and my voice came out steady, which I will never understand and have stopped trying to. “You wear the vest. It’s like — it’s like a really serious seatbelt. Dad’s going to fix it so you can take it off really soon. Okay? That’s my whole job right now. That’s the only job I have.”

“Okay,” he said, in the trusting way that took the bottom out of me, because he believed me completely. I had given him my word, and I did not yet know how I was going to keep it, only that I was going to keep it or not survive the failing.

Amy got him settled with a glass of water and the second-hand promise of sleep, talking to him in the low even music she used at the end of his bad nights. While she did it, she steered the two of us a step toward the kitchenette, putting her back to the guard, and under the cover of refilling the glass, she finally let me see her face do something other than perform.

That was when I smelled it.

It was on her breath, faint, and on the water, fainter — a flat, green, medicinal bitterness with a chemical edge sanded onto it, and I knew it the way you know a voice through a wall, before you can name it, in the part of you that remembers older than thought. My wolf knew it first. My wolf, which had been pacing the inside of me all night, went absolutely still.

Wolfsbane. Refined.

“Amy,” I said. Very low. “How long have they been dosing you.”

Her doctor’s calm flickered. “Since the first hour,” she said, just as low, not looking at me, smiling slightly for Noah’s benefit across the room. “It’s in everything. I can’t —“ The smallest break. “Zimife, I can’t shift. I’ve been trying since they put us in here. There’s nothing there. It’s like reaching for a hand that’s been cut off. I’m a wolf and I can’t find it.” She steadied. “They don’t want me able to run, or fight, or get him out as anything other than a woman on foot in a building full of their people. So they took it. They just — took it out of me.”