He looks up finally and huffs a sad little laugh. “Yeah.” He holds out a hand, which I take as I come to sit next to him on the mattress. “Everything seemed so simple when it was just us.” He kisses the back of my hand. “Now that we’re back, everything just seems so—fucked. And I miss you. I miss us. Why can’t it be like the desert all the time?”
I wrap my free hand around our interlaced fingers, making a little cocoon for his hand.
“Because that would be too simple,” I say. “And if I’ve learned anything in the last year it’s that being a werewolf in love is anything but simple.”
“What should I do?” he asks, and for a second he looks twelve, like a kid who needs some direction.
“We do what we can to help,” I say. “One wolf at a time.”
“Where do we start?”
I chew on my lip, bracing for Jasper’s reaction to what I have to say next.
“Omar,” I say. “We need to speak with him and find out why he did what he did.”
“Does it matter?” Jasper seems genuinely curious, like maybe it does.
“He’s a good wolf,” I say. “He deserves our help.”
Jasper looks skeptical.
“If he did a bad thing he must have had a reason,” I continue. “Maybe he can help us understand how the rogues were able to invade the packhouse so easily? It might help us with our situation now.”
“I don’t know if I can get him released,” Jasper says, preempting what he knows I’m going to ask for.
But relief washes over me because he’s not fighting me on this, instead he’s worried he won’t be able to do everything he can to help me.
“That’s okay. Let’s just talk to him and we’ll see what happens then.”
Jasper watches me for a second, and I can’t help wondering if I’m the one crossing some boundary, if asking him to help Omar is the thing that will finally pull us apart.
“Okay,” he says.
BENEATH THE PACKHOUSE
It’s dark out by the time Jasper has finished speaking with his father and we’re able to slip out of the apartment. Of course, it’s never actually dark in Manhattan—the streetlights, the gleam of office windows and storefronts, illuminate everything. There’s not a star to be seen overhead, just the moon, waning and low on the horizon. I glance at it as we make our way around the back of the packhouse to the prison’s separate entrance. Is Selene up there now? Is she watching me? Does she think we’re doing the right thing?
“Come on,” Jasper says, a few feet ahead of me, waving me on. “The entrance to the prison levels is this way.”
“Seems a little weird to me that we’d keep all our most dangerous criminals right under the hub of pack activity,” I say as we approach a rolling garage door.
“We don’t,” Jasper says. “Our major prison facility is upstate at a secret location. My father only told me where exactly last year. This is more like a holding facility, a halfway house, where we keep prisoners before they’re officially sentenced.”
When we reach the entrance to what looks like an underground parking garage, Jasper waves a fob over a spot on the wall and a door I hadn’t even noticed opens up, a piece of the metal wall sliding away to reveal a dimly lit, concrete box.
“So Omar hasn’t been sentenced yet?”
Before we step inside, Jasper turns and places a hand on my arm. “Not officially, but Max…”
“What? What is it?”
“Earlier today he confessed.”
“Why would he do that?”
“He was probably told the judge would be more lenient if he fessed up. It’s a tactic they use to avoid lengthy trials.”
“So they won’t be lenient? It was a trick?”
