CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

RILEY

I thought about it for two weeks.

Not in the way where you lose track of things — I kept working, took the twins to school, handled a full bay of work including a restoration that Mara had already invoiced ahead of actual completion, which was Mara's way of creating accountability through aggressive paperwork. I thought while I worked, which was when I did my best thinking, the physical task and the mental task running parallel on separate tracks.

What I landed on was this: I was angry. Not devastated, not grieving in the way I might have expected — I'd never known this man, couldn't miss someone I didn't have. But I was angry in a specific, clear-eyed way, the anger of someone who has just understood that a thing was taken and they didn't know it was being taken at the time.

My father had been killed — probably, with high probability, given what Grayson had found and what Reyes's silence implied — because he'd tried to change something. Because he'd looked at the way the pack treated half-bloods and decided it was wrong and said so. And then he'd been erased from the record, and I'd grown up half-knowing there was a blank space where that part of my history should be, and the twins carried his bloodline and his Alpha lineage and didn't know his name.

Reyes came on a Tuesday. Not to the shop — I'd decided against that after all, because I needed a neutral space for this conversation, somewhere that wasn't my professional territory or her institutional one. We met at a coffee shop in Capitol Hill, small, loud enough to give us privacy in the ambient noise, which was either ironic or appropriate.

She arrived before me and was sitting at the back table with a black coffee and no particular expression. I sat down across from her.

"You know why I asked to meet," I said.

"Yes."

"Tell me what you know."

She told me.

Thomas Harper-Wren had been twenty-seven years old when the Wren Alpha had made a formal complaint to the council about his advocacy work. He'd been organizing half-blood wolves across three packs — not aggressively, not politically, just connecting them to each other and to legal resources and to sympathetic full-bloods who believed in the same things he believed in. He had, according to Reyes, been the most genuinely decent Alpha-lineage wolf she'd encountered in thirty years on the council.

The Wren Alpha had seen his influence as a threat. Had argued to the council that a wolf who challenged pack hierarchy was a destabilizing element. The council had agreed. The rogue classification had followed, and three months after that he was dead, and the official report said natural causes, and Reyes had voted against the rogue classification and lost and had been unable to prevent the rest.

"You kept the file," I said.

"I've kept four files like it in thirty years," she said. "Wolves who were classified as rogues for reasons that were political rather than behavioral. I keep the files because the day always comes when someone needs to know what actually happened."

"The day always comes," I repeated. "You knew about me."

She looked at me steadily. "I knew Thomas had a human contact in Seattle in 1987 and 1988. I didn't know about a child. I found out about you when Knox's pack began the formal inquiry process three years ago, and your name came up in the initial background work." She paused. "That's why I came to Seattle. Not only to assess your standing. To see if you were what I thought you were."

"And am I."

She looked at me with those level eyes. "You're exactly what he would have wanted to happen."

The coffee shop was loud around us. Someone near the window was laughing. A barista called a name. The ordinary world, going about its business, not particularly aware that someone across from me had just described my father in two sentences and what he'd wanted to happen.

I put both hands flat on the table. "The three other half-bloods you mentioned. The ones with the same bloodline."

She went very still.

"Grayson told Knox," I said. "Knox told me. You mentioned there were others — are they safe."

A long pause. "Currently, yes. They're not aware of the full picture."

"They should be."

"I agree with you."

"And the person who's been protecting them. Is still alive."

She didn't answer that directly. She looked at her coffee and then at me and said: "There are things I need to manage the timing of."

"I understand managing timing." I looked at her. "But I'm going to want to meet them. When the time is right. That's not negotiable."

Reyes looked at me for a long moment. There was something in her face I hadn't seen there before — not warmth, exactly, but a kind of relief. The relief of someone who has been carrying something for a long time and has finally found the person it belongs to.

"No," she said. "I don't suppose it is."