It worked, too.
For a while.
The first month was the worst. My body didn't know what to do without orders. I'd wake at four and lie in the dark waiting for a phone that wasn't there to ring with a name and an addressand an unspoken understanding of what I was meant to do with those bits of information.
It was like kicking an addiction. My hands twitched, my jaw ached from clenching, and I sweated through my sheets as I tossed and turned night after night. I walked the perimeter of the property a hundred times a day, checking sight lines, adjusting my trail cameras, securing the structure against threats that existed only in the muscle memory of a life I was trying to shed.
But things got better. Slowly.
By the second month, I could sit in the armchair for half an hour at a time minutes without standing up to patrol. By the third, I could read a book from beginning to end. I found Wolf in the fourth month—or he found me, half-starved and trembling in a ditch off the logging road, seventy pounds of wet black fur and trust so blind it made me angry.
You can't just trust a stranger like that, you idiot,I snarled at him more than once.You can't just love so easily. Don't you know that? Don't you know what happens when you do?
He'd just wag his tail and lick me.
So I fed him. He stayed. We agreed not to talk about our feelings.
By the fifth month, I'd found something approaching contentment. I wouldn't go so far as to call it happiness. I gave up on "happy" a long time ago—twenty years, give or take—right around the same time I gave up on the idea that the things I've done could be undone or forgiven or even properly understood.
Content was enough.
Frankly, it was more than I deserved.
So I shouldn't be surprised that now, as month six came to a close, Caroline Oglethorpe fell face-first into my yard, and the whole fragile architecture of my nothing life cracked right down the middle.
I told her I'd talk. I meant it. But standing here now, watching the snow pile higher against the windowsill, I'm not sure I have the faintest fucking idea of how to begin.
It's not because I don't remember the events she wants to know more about. It's the exact opposite problem: I remembereverything. Down to the finest details of every lie Bill ever told his daughter to keep her safe.
Your father was a good man, Caroline.
He was. One of the best I've known, and I've known very few of those.
But good men keep secrets.
Yeah. They do. Him more than most.
I rub the band on my left ring finger with my thumb. It's a habit, no better than a former smoker who still reaches for the pack that isn't there. Twenty years of wearing this thing and the groove it's carved into my skin is as permanent as any tattoo. Yelena's been dead longer than she was part of my life, and still this ring sits where she put it.
Behind me, I hear Caroline murmuring to Wolf in a baby voice. Something about his ears being "little velvet triangles." Wolf, the traitor with a heart made of cake frosting, is eating it up.
I can't believe I yielded to her demands so easily. When I found her face-down and bleeding in my yard, I knew right away whatshe'd come for, and I had no intention of giving her that. But push came to shove, and I folded like a fucking lawn chair.
I'm still reluctant to do it, but I gave her my word, and that's one thing I won't go back on. So I'll do it, goddammit.
I'll bring her this food and start at the beginning.
But the beginning is not where I trulywantto start. The beginning took place in 1994, in a warehouse in Brighton Beach, with a handshake between Bill Oglethorpe and Gervasii Satyrin that set everything in motion. Fuck, I can still picture my brother's face. Young. Reckless. So goddamn sure of himself. If only we'd known then how wrong it would all go…
Sighing, I turn to put the eggs on a plate and bring them to her.
And then Wolf barks.
Instantly, all thoughts of past and future evaporate. There is only the dangerousnow,a moment in which anything can happen. I whirl around to see him on his feet, ears pinned forward, body rigid, facing the front door. The bone lies forgotten on the rug. His teeth are bared.
Caroline sits up on the couch. "What's?—"
I hold up a hand.
