Not everything. Not the sex, not the spanking, not the knotting, not the physical details of my relationship with Silas. But the rest of it. The Sandias. The feeling of being watched. Robot Mark in his doorway. The hike, the wolf, the creature in the ravine. The hospital. Yazzie. The motel. The safe house. The interrogation room where a thing wearing Yazzie’s face had shot a guard and injected me with a tranquilizer.
I even told her I had shifted into a wolf.
I said it all plainly, without hedging, because I was done constructing careful versions of the truth for people who would choose not to believe me. If this woman was going to dismiss me the way everyone else but Yazzie had, she could do it with the full picture in front of her.
She didn’t dismiss me, though.
She didn’t react at all, actually. She just listened with the same even attention throughout, occasionally asking a clarifying question that was never skeptical, never leading, never lined with the subtle condescension that every other official I’d spoken to had deployed like a default setting.
When I finished, the office was quiet for a moment.
“The creature you’re describing,” she said. “You said it has a specific name.”
“Skinwalker. It’s called a skinwalker.”
She nodded, clearly not unfamiliar with the term.
“And the man who’s been protecting you. He also has a specific nature.”
“He’s a shifter. A wolf.”
She nodded again.
I leaned forward slightly. “You already know all of this.”
“I know some of it.” She picked up her coffee again, cradled it in both hands, and looked at me over the rim. “Enough to recognize what you’re describing. Enough to know that the agents who interrogated you previously were operating with an incomplete understanding of the situation.”
“An incomplete understanding. That’s diplomatic.”
“Diplomacy is part of my job.” She set the coffee down. “Katie, I’m going to ask you something, and I want you to think carefully before you answer.”
I waited.
“What would it take for you to walk out of this building today and go home? Not home to your apartment on Canyon Road. Home to wherever you’re building your life now.” Her eyes held mine with a directness that was not unkind. “What would it take for you to go live your life with your… mate, and leave the events of the past two weeks in this room?”
I felt my hands clam up. She knew about Silas. Not just that he existed, not just that he’d been at the hospital or carried me through Albuquerque. She knew what he was, and what I was. And all she seemed to want from me, and by extension from Silas, was for us to keep our secrets.
I sat with that for a moment.
“Three things,” I said.
“I’m listening.”
“First, my name gets cleared. Completely. Not quietly shelved, not ‘no longer a person of interest,’ not buried in a filing cabinet somewhere. Cleared publicly. Every record that connects me to Mark’s death gets expunged. I have a legal career ahead of me, and I won’t build it on a foundation that has ‘suspected of involvement in a homicide’ hiding underneath it.”
She nodded once. “What else?”
“Mark gets cleared too. He was my friend, and whatever narrative the media has been running about him needs to be corrected. His death was not the result of anything he did. He was a victim, not someone who got in too deep with the wrong people. I want that publicly clarified.”
“And the third?”
“Ranger Yazzie.” I held her gaze. “The skinwalker killed her, used her form. If there’s any suspicion attached to her name because of what happened, that gets cleaned up. She believed me when no one else did. She helped me. I won’t let her reputation become collateral damage.”
Mercer was quiet for a moment. She looked at the legal pad on her desk. It was blank.
“Ranger Yazzie,” she said, “is alive.”
My hands, which had been resting in my lap with what I thought was reasonable composure, gripped each other hard enough that my knuckles went pale.
