CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

KNOX

They sent two.

Which was interesting, because the council usually sent three when they wanted to make an impression, which meant Reth had decided this was a message rather than an action. I watched them come up the building steps from the penthouse window at eight in the morning and thought about the difference between a warning and a declaration and which one this was intended to be.

They delivered the order at the door. Standard language — formal pack legal, the kind they print on paper that's meant to feel heavy — declaring the twins property of the Blackthorn Pack pending Alpha remand, requiring their transfer to pack territory within seventy-two hours.

I took the papers.

I read them.

Riley read them over my shoulder. I felt the moment she reached the key clause — the twins' names, the seventy-two hours, the consequence language that outlined what happened to the Alpha title if the order wasn't complied with — and I felt her become very still in the specific way that meant she was not panicking and was not waiting for someone to tell her what to do.

She went to the twins' room.

When she came back she had two overnight bags packed, both twins dressed, Hunter with his little fingerless gloves already on.

I stared at her.

"Where are we going?" she said.

"I know a route," I said.

"I'm not hiding." She adjusted Hunter's helmet strap. "I'm not hiding, I'm not running, and I'm not walking into a Council chamber with my kids. But I'm also not standing in this apartment for three days waiting for something to happen."

"Neither are we," I said. "We're going toward them."

She looked at me. "Good." Then she looked at the kids. "Helmets on, guys. We're going for a ride."

We left before dawn.

Grayson appeared in the parking lot with a truck he'd apparently rented or borrowed or acquired by other means, loaded with enough supplies for a week, looking like a very large man who had understood the assignment. The twins went into their bike seats — one per Harley, helmets on, the four of them arranged like a very small tactical convoy.

The black Harley leading. The red one beside it. Grayson's truck bringing up the rear.

We went south first, then turned east on the interstate. The city lights thinning out, then gone, then just road and dark and the smell of coast giving way to mountain. I kept checking my mirror. Not for the elders — for Riley's face in the dark, the headlight of the red bike steady in the lane beside me, just visible enough to know she was there.

The first night was a motel in southern Oregon. One queen for the twins. I took the floor. Riley took the armchair and held it for about two hours before giving up and sliding down to the floor beside me without a word, the way you stop fighting something that was going to happen anyway.

Hunter was asleep across my chest by midnight, one arm out, the other tucked under his chin. Luna had an arm across Riley's shoulder.

I lay on the floor of a motel in Oregon and stared at the ceiling and thought: this is the whole world. Right here. This is all of it.

Morning. Gas station just past the state line.

Hunter ate a gas station hotdog at seven in the morning with the conviction of a child who has never made a bad culinary decision and doesn't intend to start. Luna had appropriated the road atlas from the truck's glove compartment and was studying it spread across the hood with the intensity of a small navigator planning a circumnavigation.

Riley was leaning against the red bike with a coffee, watching the road.

I looked at her watching the road — the horizon, the long stretch of interstate going east into the morning — and I noticed that she wasn't calculating. She wasn't assessing the exits, wasn't doing the mental inventory of options that I'd watched her do every time the future came up for the last three weeks. She was just looking at it.

I filed that away and didn't say anything about it.

I filled both tanks.

We rode.