CHAPTER FOURTEEN

KNOX

I was writing at midnight for no particular reason. Just — sitting at the kitchen table after the twins were asleep with a notebook open, working through my thoughts the way I do, long-hand, the way my fourth-grade teacher taught me when she figured out I processed things better with a pen in my hand than out loud.

I wrote about the lake. About the way it had felt to have my chin on his shoulder on the ride back and not move it. About Hunter's face when he learned the pull-back trick, that specific pride of a kid who's just discovered something his body can do. About Luna naming Grayson's stuffed wolf Brick and appointing it as a getaway driver.

I stopped and looked at the page.

The handwriting was doing something I didn't like. Getting looser the further down the page I got, more slanted, more — his. Like the muscle memory of writing things you feel was the same muscle memory I'd built reading fourteen letters, and the influence was still there somewhere in my hand.

I closed the notebook.

I had a clipboard with a schedule on it. The weekly schedule — who had the twins when, school days, shop hours, Grayson's agreed pickup times. I'd made it because structure was the only thing standing between me and complete emotional disorientation and I knew it. I took the clipboard and went upstairs.

I told myself it was about the schedule.

He opened the door before I knocked. He'd been awake — grey sweatpants, hair loose, reading something on his phone, the penthouse still completely bare of furniture except for the kitchen stools and what appeared to be a bedroll on the floor near the window. I looked at the bedroll.

"You don't have furniture," I said.

"I have stools."

"You've been sleeping on the floor."

"I sleep on the floor at the compound when the pack's unsettled. Easier to hear." He stepped back to let me in. "Show me the schedule."

We sat at the kitchen counter — the only place to sit — and went through it. Hunter's doctor appointment next Thursday, could he take that. Luna's parent-teacher conference on the fourteenth, could we both go. The shop's big commission starting next week, which meant later hours for me some evenings. Did that work with his schedule.

It worked.

We talked for two hours and none of it was about us. It was about pick-up times and Luna's developing preference for a specific brand of juice box and Hunter's nightmares — he'd been having them twice a week, always some version of being lost, and Knox said quietly that he'd been sleeping in the hallway outside their room on the worst nights because his scent helped and Riley hadn't asked him to stop because it did.

It was so ordinary.

That was the thing about it. Two hours of completely ordinary co-parenting logistics in a bare kitchen at midnight, and it was the most like myself I'd felt in weeks.

He picked up his phone to show me something. "From the lake."

Both twins, asleep on the tank of the red bike. Luna curled with her chin on her chest, Hunter's head tipped back, the helmets still on, both of them completely gone. The shot was perfect — late afternoon light, mountain lake in the background, two small people dead asleep in the most contented way imaginable.

"Can I keep this?" I asked.

"I set it as your lock screen when you fell asleep on the way back."

I looked at my phone. He had.

I turned it over on the counter. Started toward the door.

Stopped.

"Who is Selene Voss to you." I said it to the door, then turned around. "All of it. I'm not asking about the photos. I'm asking about what she was supposed to be."

He didn't hesitate.

He told me about the arrangement — his father, her family, years of expectation built into the pack's political architecture like load-bearing walls. He told me she'd been patient about it, strategically patient, in a way that should've been a warning sign about her character and wasn't until later. He told me he'd refused, quietly and then loudly and then categorically, and that she'd accepted it with a grace that he'd been grateful for at the time.

"And then," he said, "Grayson told me she'd been in Seattle before I arrived."

I looked at him.

"She fed my wolf your scent," he said. "I think she's been manipulating the bond for months, routing it through rogue-pack channels to make the tracking signal stronger. I don't know all of it yet. I'm still getting the full picture."

I let that land.

She'd engineered this. Not for us. For whatever she planned to do with the wreckage of Knox's political standing once he took a half-blood mate back in front of the whole pack. That was why she was here. Not because she loved him. Because removing him from the board required getting him on it in the compromised position first.

I walked back downstairs.

I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark and I thought about that for a long time. About being a piece in someone else's game. About what it meant to know that and what you do with that knowledge.

What you do, I decided, is stop being a piece.

You start being a player.