Hunted by the Shadow Division

Chapter 17

Ryan POV

Morning came in grey and quiet. Cass had fallen asleep in the chair again with her head on my shoulder and I had not moved for three hours so as not to wake her. My shoulder had strongly registered its objection but I had overruled it.

Nat had not slept.

She had the particular focused brightness of someone who has been running on strong coffee and the specific energy that comes from being very close to an answer. I recognised it from living with her. She got this way when a thing started to make sense. She got quieter and faster and the space between her and the screen got smaller until she was practically typing with her nose.

She had been at it all night. I knew because I had woken twice in the small hours — once at two, once at four — and each time Nat was exactly where she had been the evening before, surrounded by a different arrangement of open windows on her screen, her coffee replaced by a fresher cup, the darkness outside the lab windows still total.

At some point she had pulled up a map of the Atlanta metropolitan area and the surrounding counties and begun marking it with small precise points, each one connected to a document in another window. I had watched her do this in silence for a few minutes before going back to trying to sleep. Nat working was a thing you did not interrupt. Not because she was rude about it. Because interrupting Nat mid-investigation was like pulling a thread mid-weave — you might unravel something she would not be able to find again.

She had given everything to this problem. Not just the skill and the databases and the twelve years of academic contacts she had quietly accumulated. She had given it something more personal than that. The thing she had been carrying since we were children under a tree stump in the cold, since we were teenagers in the Rogers' house learning what we were and what had been done to our family.

She had given it her anger.

And Nat's anger, turned toward a problem, was the most effective research tool I had ever encountered.

At six forty-three she leaned back in her chair and said, "Found it."

Cass woke up.

"Where?" I asked.

"Forty minutes from your home town, Ryan. The same area. They have been there for at least eight years, built into a former agricultural research complex. The land is held by a shell company registered in Delaware, which is registered to a second company in the Cayman Islands, which is registered to a trust administered by a law firm in Washington DC that has represented three separate Department of Defence contractors in the last decade."

She turned around. Her eyes were bright and hard and steady.

"They built it where your pack used to be," she said. "Or very close to it. I do not think that is a coincidence."

I sat with that for a moment.

Close to home. Close to the land that had been ours. Close to the grass that used to be green.

"They went back," I said.

"Or they never entirely left."

Cass put her hand on my arm.

I put my hand over hers.

We were still like that when someone knocked on the lab door.

…

It was not a tentative knock. It was the knock of someone who has already assessed the building's entry points and exit routes and is knocking as a professional courtesy rather than a genuine question of whether they may enter.

Nat and I were both on our feet before the second knock.

I moved Cass behind me. Nat moved to the lab's secondary exit and stood beside it with the particular posture of Lee very close to the surface.

"Who is it?" I called.

A pause. Then a voice. Male, deep, with the measured cadence of someone used to authority but not performed authority. The real kind. The kind you don't have to announce.

"My name is Seth Okafor. I am the representative of the Northern Wolf Council. I am not here to cause a problem. I am here because we have been following the same organisation you have been researching for the past seven hours, and I think it is time we talked."

Nat and I looked at each other across the room.

Rhy was calm. That was relevant. Rhy's stillness in the presence of unknown wolves usually meant one of two things: either the wolf outside was no threat, or they were so far above us in the hierarchy that Rhy's instincts had already made a calculation and filed us under not worth fighting.

Given what the voice had said about the Northern Wolf Council, I suspected the second.

"How many are with you?" I asked.

"Four. They are staying with the vehicles. I came to the door alone."

Nat gave me a short nod.

I opened the door.