Page 8 of A Wolf's Revenge

I was twenty-two years old and I thought that was wisdom.

By six, I was dressed and downstairs, past my chef’s surprised look, out the door before anyone could ask me a question I’d have to lie about. I drove myself to St. Jude’s in the gray January sleet, parked in the lot an hour before the first bell, and sat there with the engine running, watching the entrance.

My father had been specific. The Conti pack had held against him for three years — longer than any rival had managed, longer than he’d thought possible, which meant they were either smarter than the others, more careful, or both. A pack defending its own territory was a hard thing to break by design; it was the whole architecture of what we were. He needed the layout of the estate. The patrol rotations, the blind spots, the rooms that mattered, where the Alpha slept. Information that couldn’t be bought, or beaten out of anyone who knew the family only from the outside.

It had to come from someone who had been inside. Someone trusted.

His Beta had argued for a different approach — an older man, someone with an existing reason to move in Conti circles. My father had looked at him the way he looked at everyone who gave him advice he hadn’t asked for, and then he’d turned to me.

“You’ll do it,” he’d said. Not a question.

The girl’s name was Kerra. She was Antonio Conti’s cousin, the Alpha’s granddaughter. Nineteen, quiet, kept out of pack business — which made her both accessible, invisible, and useful. Unbonded, my father’s people had confirmed, and that mattered more than anything else on the page: a bonded she-wolf had a mate who would scent a stranger circling her inside a week. Kerra had no one. She had a scholarship application pending, which gave me a mechanism, and three months at St. Jude’s without a single close friend, which gave me an opening.

These were the facts I had reviewed the night before instead of sleeping.

I told myself I was ready. I told myself this was the job, the job was what mattered, and the job would make my father look at me the way he had never looked at me in twenty-two years of trying.

I lit a cigarette, watched the entrance, and waited.

The Conti limousine pulled up at eight-fifteen.

Three of them got out — Antonio first, already scanning the lot with the instincts of a young man raised to be paranoid, then two others I didn’t recognize. They peeled off immediately, heading for the entrance in a loose group, talking among themselves. Standard Conti — they moved like they owned whatever they were standing in, easy and unhurried, the particular confidence of a family that had never needed to prove itself to anyone.

Then Kerra stepped out.

I had a photograph on my phone. I had studied it enough times that I thought I knew what she looked like. I was wrong. The photograph had been taken at a distance, half her face turned away, the light poor. It had given me a shape, a general impression, and nothing more.

What it had not prepared me for was the way she stood in the sleet for a moment after her cousins disappeared, completely still, her face turned up slightly toward the gray sky as if she was thinking about something that had nothing to do with school, the cold, or where she was supposed to be. She was somewhere else entirely. Some internal country that had no use for the parking lot or the people in it.

Then she looked down, adjusted the strap of her bag, and walked toward the entrance.

I got out of the car, flicked the cigarette away, and followed.

I caught up with her in the east corridor before the first set of lockers, where the traffic was thin. I had timed it. I had planned to say her name as if I knew her, count on the disorientation of being addressed personally by someone she didn’t recognize, use the half-second of off-balance to take control of the exchange.

That was the plan.

“Kerra.”

She stopped. She turned.

And her scent reached me, and my wolf came to its feet.

It was a thing my father had spent twenty-two years training to heel — to wait, to stay down, to be an instrument I picked up when the work required it, and set aside when it didn’t. It had never once moved without my permission. It moved now, all at once, with no instruction from me, and then it went absolutely still in a way I had no memory of it, the way an animal goes still when it has found the one thing in a landscape worth holding completely motionless for.

I didn’t understand it. I had no framework for it, so I did what I’d been trained to do with anything I couldn’t name: I cataloged it and set it aside.

She was looking at me with eyes the color of moss, clear and entirely unimpressed, and I could see her running her own version of the same arithmetic — her nostrils telling her what mine had told me, a young male she didn’t know, a wolf, not pack, not from any quarter she could place. She had been kept too far from pack business to know a Zorander by scent. I was counting on exactly that.

“Nobody calls me that,” she said.

It wasn’t what I’d prepared for. I’d prepared for surprise, for a blush, for the standard reaction most girls gave me. What I got instead was someone who was watching me with the calm attention of a person who had been approached by people with agendas before and had learned how to read the approach before the agenda revealed itself.

I recalibrated.

“I know,” I said. “That’s why I used it. I wanted to see what you’d do.”

Something moved in her expression — not quite a smile, but adjacent to one. “And?”