CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

RILEY

They gave their ruling at nine in the morning.

Full Luna standing, contingent on bond completion within one year. Twins' heirs classification confirmed — first and second in line to Blackthorn Alpha authority. My half-blood parentage noted in the record and classified as a pending inquiry rather than a disqualification.

That last part was Elder Reyes. I found that out later from Grayson, who found out everything, always, through a network of contacts I had stopped trying to map. Reyes had argued for forty minutes in closed deliberation that unknown parentage was a procedural matter, not a disqualifying condition, and that the pack's tendency to treat unknown parentage in half-bloods as automatically suspect was a practice with a history that did not reflect well on anyone in that room.

Chen had been the last holdout. Reyes had said something to her, privately, in the last ten minutes of deliberation that Grayson didn't know the content of. Chen had changed her vote.

I thought about that on the drive home. The twins were with Grayson's cousin — I'd called twice, they were fine, Hunter had apparently reorganized the cousin's kitchen by size category while waiting, Luna had found a book about marine biology and was reading it in a corner with great focus and no acknowledgment of anyone around her. Normal.

"You're thinking loud," Knox said. He was driving. Grayson was asleep in the back seat.

"I do that."

"I know." He didn't push. That was the thing I was still adjusting to — he'd stopped pushing, somewhere in the last few weeks. He said things once and then left them there and trusted me to come back to them when I was ready. It was deeply inconvenient for a woman who had spent four years using resistance as a structural element of her personality.

"Pending inquiry," I said.

"On your parentage. Yes."

"That means they're going to look."

"Grayson is already looking," Knox said. "With your permission, he has been for about three weeks."

I looked at him.

"He told me he wanted your permission before he told you what he'd found," Knox said. "So I'm passing that on. Tell me when you want to know."

I looked out the window. The highway unspooled east to west, the city getting closer. I thought about the years of not knowing. The question that had been there my whole life — not urgent, not something I'd let myself make urgent, but there. The blank space in my mother's answers when I asked about my father. The ways certain things about me didn't fit the pattern of her side of the family. The twins' eyes, which I'd always thought came from Knox until I looked at photographs of myself at four and saw the same quality there, the same particular quality of attention.

"Tell Grayson I want to know," I said.

Knox nodded. That was all. No elaboration, no we'll-figure-this-out, no warm speech. Just the nod, and the road, and the city coming up on the horizon.

In the back seat, Grayson snored once, briefly, and resettled.

"He sleeps anywhere," I said.

"He could sleep on a fire escape," Knox said. "I have seen this."

I looked at my hands in my lap. "The bond completion. One year."

"I know."

"I'm not — the timeline is. I know there's a timeline now."

"The timeline is the council's. Not mine."

"But you're aware of it."

"I've been aware of the time since I got to Seattle." He changed lanes. Easy, unhurried, the particular confidence of someone who'd been riding motorcycles since he was fifteen and had translated that relationship with motion into everything else. "I'm not going to pretend the council's deadline doesn't exist. I'm also not going to use it. When you're ready, you tell me. The year is a ceiling, not a target."

I filed that under the growing category of things Knox Blackthorn said that I had not expected him to say. The category had been getting crowded lately.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay," he said.

We drove the rest of the way home in that particular silence that had stopped feeling like avoidance and had started feeling like something else entirely, which was its own kind of problem and also, quietly, its own kind of beginning.