Chapter 17

Kade

The rumors kept coming, more specific each time, the way rumors did once a thing became interesting enough for people to bother getting the details right.

Nightshade had a name now, or near enough — an Alpha, young, who'd apparently come from nowhere five months back and rebuilt a dying pack from six starving survivors into something northern traders had started routing around out of simple caution. Female, according to two separate sources, which Kade noted and then spent an uncomfortable amount of time trying not to think about.

"They're calling her something now," Torren said, dropping into the chair across from Kade's desk with the particular energy of a man who'd been sitting on information he found more interesting than he was letting on. "Not a real name — nobody's gotten that far, she keeps it close — but a nickname. The Nightshade Ghost, on account of some trick she does in a fight. Rogues who go up against her patrol report losing track of her mid-attack. Just — gone, and then not, a second later, somewhere else entirely."

Something cold moved through Kade's chest at that, sharp enough that he had to set down the pen he'd been holding before his hand betrayed how hard it had started shaking.

"Gone how."

"Nobody's sure. Scent-masking, maybe, though nobody's ever heard of a wolf who could do it mid-fight, under pressure, reliably enough to win with it." Torren watched him carefully, and Kade got the distinct impression his second-in-command had chosen this particular phrasing on purpose, testing something. "Sound familiar to you at all? You've gone a strange color."

"No." The lie came out fast, too fast, and Kade heard it land wrong even as he said it. "I don't know why it would."

Torren didn't push, which was somehow worse than if he had — just watched him a moment longer, something knowing and patient in his expression, and let the silence make the point his words hadn't.

Alone again after Torren left, Kade sat with it a long time, the ache behind his ribs pulsing harder than it had in weeks, insistent, almost triumphant, like it knew something he was still refusing to let himself know.

Scent-masking, mid-fight, under pressure. He thought of an omega girl standing very still in a crowded clearing, refusing to be the one who looked away first, and understood, with a clarity that frightened him more than the ache itself did, that some part of him — some old, stubborn, traitorous part — had already decided the answer to a question he hadn't let himself fully ask yet.

He was married. He had a pack to hold together, a father who'd finally, quietly admitted he didn't have the answers either, and a wife who deserved better than a husband who spent his nights doing arithmetic on rumors from two territories north.

He told himself all of that, in order, like a man reciting a list he was afraid of forgetting.

He didn't believe a word of it as much as he needed to.

That night he found himself, again, walking the northern road without quite remembering deciding to. This time he didn't turn around right away. He stood at the edge of Blackthorn's furthest border marker, looking out at territory he'd never once set foot in, and let himself imagine, for exactly as long as he could stand it, what he'd find if he simply kept walking.

He turned around eventually. He always did. But it took longer this time than it ever had before, and that, more than anything Torren had told him, was the detail that followed him back to a house that no longer felt entirely like his, into a marriage that had never once managed to touch the one wound it was supposed to heal.