CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

KNOX

The Cascade facility was three hours east of Seattle in a valley that the highway maps didn't bother naming. Pack-owned since 1987, maintained by a rotating crew of six, large enough to host forty wolves comfortably and the better part of a hundred if everyone was willing to renegotiate their personal space.

I'd been here twelve times. Every time I walked in I had the same reaction — the old-wood smell of the main hall, the quality of the light through the high windows, and the specific stillness that comes from a space that has held serious decisions for decades and absorbed some of their weight.

Grayson drove. Riley sat in the passenger seat and didn't look at the facility when we arrived, which meant she was building herself up to looking at it and I gave her the time.

She got out of the car and looked.

It was impressive and it was meant to be. High timber frame. Old-growth Douglas fir. The Blackthorn crest above the main doors, carved in stone, worn by weather to a shape that was now part of the architecture rather than a decoration. Two wolves on the steps I didn't recognize, young ones, probably third- or fourth-tier, stationed there as formality.

"It's a lot," Riley said quietly.

"Yes."

"For people who claim to believe in hierarchy as a natural order, they really do love a statement building."

I put my hand briefly at the small of her back — barely, barely, the way I'd learned was the version she'd tolerate without comment — and felt the mark flare warm through my palm and hers. She didn't flinch. "Come on," I said.

We were met inside by Elder Vasquez, who was seventy, sharp-eyed, and had the conversational warmth of a tax audit. He shook my hand. He looked at Riley the way people look at things that don't fit their category system — not hostile, just recalibrating.

"Ms. Harper," he said.

"Elder Vasquez." No title offered, no concession made, and her tone was the tone she used with vendors who quoted her above market rate — entirely civil and entirely unyielding.

Vasquez looked at me. I looked back. He nodded, slightly, and led us inside.

The session wasn't until morning. We had the evening to settle in, which in practice meant Grayson working his network of contacts in the facility and Riley and me sitting in a room that the council had assigned us — one room, one bed, a decision that I was certain was deliberate — with four feet of space between us and the particular charged quality of silence that comes when two people are both aware of a thing they're not discussing.

I slept on the floor. I'd brought a bedroll without saying anything about it. Riley didn't comment. She turned off the lamp at ten and I lay in the dark and listened to her breathing even out and I thought about what the morning would bring.

At two in the morning she said, in the complete dark, "Knox."

"Yeah."

"What's the worst thing that could happen tomorrow."

I thought about lying. The kind lie, the useful lie, the I've-handled-worse-and-we'll-be-fine lie. I was good at that lie. I'd been using it on myself for weeks.

"They could try to reclassify you as a ward of the pack instead of a mate. Which would put your housing and the kids' status under council review instead of Alpha authority."

Quiet.

"And you'd fight that," she said.

"With everything I have."

"But you don't know if you'd win."

"Not for certain. No."

Another quiet. Different from the first one — less frightened, which surprised me. Like she'd needed the true answer more than the comforting one. I'd noticed that about her. She could handle bad odds. What she couldn't handle was not knowing what the odds were.

"Okay," she said.

"Okay?"

"Okay. I needed to know that." A pause. "Go to sleep, Knox."

I didn't sleep for another hour. But I lay still in the dark and listened to the old building settle around us and thought that she was maybe — maybe — the most particular kind of extraordinary, and that I had spent five years being someone who didn't deserve her, and that tomorrow I was going to try to be someone who did.