By the time my brothers got there a week later, I’d managed to hide that part away.
Yet here it is again, that same heavy feeling of loss no matter how much I’m also looking forward to the future.
Except this time around it comes with a heavy, sick sense of violation.
Because maybe this wasn’t mine the way I thought it was. Maybe someone has been using my patterns and predictions to hurt the pack I’ve been so sure I was helping. Maybe this has been going on for years, this desecration of the thing I’ve made so much a part of me.
I pull out all my old notes and start flipping through them, trying to see what I missed.
Trying to see a deliberate, traitorous saboteur looking back at me from all the careful notations I made. About what the packs in what was left of Seattle wanted in their area. About the black markets down south and how different it was in the wastelands of Eastern Oregon, and even more different out where there never was much but desert.
But if there are treacherous paw prints all over my notes, showing me how someone got into our business like this, I can’t find them.
And the thought of confessing this to Ty—that I’m not at all what I’ve been pretending to be, what hebelievedme to be all thistime—makes me want to curl into a ball like the wolf I’ve never been and fade away into the concrete floor.
I don’t, much as I wish I could.
Besides, Ty would come find me anyway.
“I have to train other people to track our business,” I tell him when I find him in the map room back at the den, because I decided on the drive back to Jacksonville that more eyes on my work can only be a good thing. Maybe someone else can find the traitor’s trail in my notes—or figure, like I do, that said traitor was certainly using all my work to their advantage.
I join Ty at the big table, staring down at the map. It’s beginning to take shape. As each lieutenant comes back having tracked the territory he was given, it will fill in more. Until, when we’re done, we will know every last inch of North America, fully scented and fully ours. More systems in place. More ways to expand and maintain the things that make us who we are.
Assuming someone doesn’t sabotage that, too. “It should never be dependent on one person,” I say. “Me or anyone else.”
“I’m all about diversifying,” Ty agrees, frowning down at the map. “It’s not accidental that I made sure I have a man in each of the three packs I trust least. If this is nothing but a cult of personality, it will die when I do. That’s no good for wolves.”
I want to melt into him. I want to climb him. I want to lose myself in him when I know what Ishoulddo is tell him that I’m a fraud.
I can’t bring myself to do anything but stand there.
“You can appoint the people you want,” he tells me, becausehedoesn’t know that I must have missed something.Hedoesn’t know that he essentially lied to the whole of wolfkind about me the other night. “Make them fight for it. Or at least, interview.” He laughs at that. “Whatever you do, I want to make it clear that these are positions that command the same level of respect as any other upper rank in the pack. Running a business is the way we run our territory. The end.”
I know it’s more than that. Letting me pick high-rank positions is an explicit indication of that partnership we already displayed to everyone at the solstice. He’s not telling them I’m an equal. He’s showing them—and we’re still not official.
And I know I don’t deserve it.
“Think about it,” he tells me, studying my face too intently as he looks down at me. “But not now. We have to go play grab ass around a Christmas table. Whatever the fuck that is.”
Maybe I’m more of a coward than I ever imagined, because I smile at him. I take the out.
“Come on,” I say. “It will be fun.”
And I’m determined it will be. Even if it kills us.
Because I’m more than a little worried that this might be the end of us, too.
19.
Winter is in the kitchen when we get there, slamming pots and pans around. I leave Ty with the rest of our awkward and wildly dangerous party, spread out through the dining room and the starkly furnished living room.
“I’m here to help,” I tell her.
“Oh, don’t be deceived,” Winter says to me beneath her breath. “I’m hiding in here. Savi waved her hands around and said that a feast would appearupon requirement.”
“Is that like ... dystopian DoorDash?”
Winter shrugs, but her indigo eyes are dancing. “I guess? Except more vegan? Also, I don’t think we have to tip.”
