Page 31 of A Wolf's Revenge

Something moved across her face — not surprise. Recognition. As if she’d been waiting eleven years for exactly this sentence, and had decided, long ago, not to ask for it, because a thing like that only means anything when it’s offered.

“I know there’s a road you’ve never taken me down,” she said. Quietly. “I drove up it with you once, three years ago. Hudson Valley. You sat at the bottom of it for ten minutes and then said you’d taken the wrong exit.We went and got lunch in Cold Spring, and I held your hand across the table and didn’t ask, because I could see it was costing you something just to sit at the bottom of it.” She looked at me steadily. “I’ve always known the road was there. I decided to wait until you were ready to drive up it.” A pause. “I didn’t think it would take a kidnapping.”

“Neither did I.”

“Show me the far side, Zimife. When we’re safe.” She went back to Noah’s hair, and her voice dropped to almost nothing. “But know that whatever’s up that road — there’s no version of it that sends me down off this mattress. I chose you with my eyes open at Beck’s dinner table eleven years ago. I’m not the kind of wolf who unchooses.”

I’m not the kind of wolf who unchooses. Kerra, on a roof, nineteen years old: I already chose it. Months ago.

Two women, thirty-four years apart, telling me the same thing in almost the same words, and me, both times, too much of a coward to give them the truth in return while it could still have mattered.

I wasn’t going to be that man a third time. Whatever else happened on the road ahead, I’d decided that much.

I just didn’t know yet how little time I had to prove it, or that the man who’d cost me the first chance was about to spend his life buying me the second.

21

There’s a sound Amy makes when she’s frightened and refusing to let it win. Low, flat, scraped clean of everything but function. I’ve heard it three times in eleven years. The third was on a phone in a Conti building, telling me Noah was asleep. The first was six years ago, in a hospital corridor at four in the morning, and it was the night I came closest, before all of this, to understanding what she was to me.

Noah’s birth went wrong.

I won’t put down the details. They’re hers, they were bad. There was a stretch of about forty minutes where the careful surface I’d spent fifteen years building came completely off and I stood in a corridor that smelled of antiseptic and fear and could do absolutely nothing — no plan, no leverage, no contact to call, no version of the threat assessment that helped, because the threat was inside the woman I loved and it answered to nobody I could reach.

She was conscious for part of it. They let me in for part of it. She looked at me from a bed with her face gone gray and her body fighting something it might lose, and she used that flat scraped-clean voice — I’m okay, Zimife, stop looking at me like that, you’re scaring the residen. She made a joke, an actual joke, with her life half out the door, because that was Amy, because she would rather steady the people around her than be steadied. I stood there and felt my hollow burned-out wolf come up off the floor of me for the first time in two decades and howl.

Not out loud. Inside. A pressure behind the ribs, the wolf I’d thought was dead lunging toward her the way a thing lunges when it understands it’s about to lose the one it was made for. I didn’t have the word for it then. I told myself it was terror, ordinary husband-terror, the fear of any man who might be about to lose his wife and child in the same night. I filed it under that and didn’t look closer, because looking closer meant a corridor, a fire, and a girl I’d let myself believe I’d buried.

They both lived. Amy and Noah both lived. Noah came out furious and stayed that way, six pounds of outrage with his mother’s jaw, and Amy was sitting up making the resident laugh within a day. I took my son home and watched my wife rebuild herself with the bone-deep endurance that was the truest thing about her, and I told myself the howl had been fear, just fear, the kind any man feels.

It wasn’t fear. I know that now. It was the bond, burned down to almost nothing thirty years before, trying to wake because it had caught the scent of losing her — and going quiet again when she lived, sinking back below the surface where I’d kept it, because I wouldn’t let it up, because up was a place with Kerra in it.

For six years after that, I’d get up in the night, go stand in Noah’s doorway, and watch him breathe. Amy thought they were nightmares. She told me so, eventually, in a hotel room with everything finally on the table — I thought you were having nightmares, I thought it was the past catching up with you. She was closer than she knew. It wasn’t nightmares. It was a man checking, over and over, in the dark, that the thing his wolf had nearly howled itself awake over six years ago was still breathing in the next room. Making sure the universe hadn’t reconsidered. Making sure I hadn’t, this time, been the reason a person I loved stopped breathing in a building I couldn’t save them from.

I never told her any of it.

Eleven years, and the closest I came to giving Amy the truth about what she was to me was a flat-voiced joke in a hospital corridor, a man standing in a doorway at three in the morning, and her lying awake on the other side of a wall deciding, again and again, to trust the silence and wait.

I was done making the women I loved wait.

I just had to live long enough, and get them through this, to prove it.

22

Jeff found me before I found him.

I’d been gone forty minutes, working a payphone three neighborhoods away, when the burner buzzed with a text from a number I didn’t know.

Sal’s. Back room. Come alone and I’ll give you Voss. You know it’s me, Z. You’ve known since Jones.

Nobody had called me Z in thirty-four years, except a dead girl and the man who’d just texted me.

Sal’s had been a social club on Fourth Avenue when we were boys — a front for a numbers operation, a place where men who ran the neighborhood drank coffee and decided things.Where Jeff and I had swept floors, run envelopes, and learned the shape of the world we were going to spend our lives inside. It had been closed for two decades. The fact that Jeff knew it was still standing, knew I’d know what he meant, knew that naming it would land somewhere under my ribs that an address couldn’t — that was Jeff. He had always understood exactly which door in a man to knock on.

I went. Of course, I went. The wolf in me had been pacing since Jones said his name, and there’s no holding a thing like that off forever; you only choose the ground.

The front was boarded, but the side door gave to a shoulder, the way it always had. Inside, it smelled of damp, pigeon, and thirty years of nothing.Under all of it, faint and unmistakable, Jeff. Older. Sick, maybe — there was something in his scent that hadn’t been there when we were young, a thinness, the smell a body gets when it’s been at war with itself for a long time.

He was in the back room, sitting at a card table with a bottle of water in front of him and both hands flat on the surface where I could see them, which told me he’d thought about how this would have to go and had decided not to make it worse.