HOWL OF THE GODWOLF

The tailor pinned the last fold of my jacket sleeve and stepped back like he was appraising a car he planned to sell. “Your father wants the Kade crest on the cufflinks too,” he said, not looking at me. “For the board photo.” “Of course he does,” I said. I’d been standing on this platform in the east wing for forty minutes. Outside the window, the September light was doing that thing it does over the Hudson in the early morning, turning the water the color of a bruise healing. Somewhere below, I could hear the low hum of my father’s voice through two floors of stone and glass, already on a call, already running something. He was always running something. The company. The house. Me. “Julian.” My mother’s voice, from the doorway. Elena Kade didn’t knock, not in her own house, not for her own son. She looked at me in the half-finished suit and something in her face softened and tightened at the same time, the way it always did when she looked at me lately — like she was trying to memorize a version of me she suspected wouldn’t last. “You look like him,” she said. “That’s the idea.” “That wasn’t a compliment, sweetheart.” The tailor cleared his throat and excused himself, taking his pins and his opinions with him. My mother crossed the room and straightened my collar even though it didn’t need straightening. She was human, which in this house made her either the softest thing in it or the only honest one, depending on the day. “You don’t have to go,” she said. “Not to Wren Hall. Not for him.” “It’s one semester before he loses his mind, Mom. He wants me networked before I’m twenty-one. Non-negotiable, remember?” “Everything with your father is non-negotiable until it isn’t.” She tucked a loose thread back into my sleeve. “I just want you to have something that’s yours. Before all of this becomes yours.” I didn’t have an answer for that, so I kissed her forehead and went to find out what my father wanted, because he always wanted something, and because in this house that was as close to affection as it Marcus Kade’s office took up the entire top floor of the east wing, which told you everything about how he prioritized square footage relative to human need. He didn’t look up when I came in. He was reading something on his tablet with the particular stillness he got when he was deciding whether to be disappointed in someone. “You’re leaving Thursday,” he said. “Not Friday.” “The itinerary says Friday.” “The itinerary is wrong. Wren Hall has a mixer Thursday night for legacy families. The Voss family will be there.” He finally looked up. My father had a way of looking at you that made you feel simultaneously important and entirely replaceable, both at once, like you were a very good employee he hadn’t decided whether to promote or let go. “You’ll want to be seen before you’re spoken about.” “I thought I was going to college, not a hostile takeover.” “They’re the same thing if you do it right.” He set the tablet down. “Sit.” I sat. I always sat, when he used that voice. “You understand what this year is,” he said. It wasn’t a question, but he waited anyway, the way he did when he wanted you to say the thing back to him so he could hear it land correctly. “Networking. Positioning. Getting my name in front of the families that’ll matter when I take over.” “Getting your scent in front of them,” he corrected. “Names fade. A wolf remembers what they smelled the day they decided you were worth respecting.” He stood, came around the desk, and for one strange second put his hand on my shoulder in something that might have been affection if it hadn’t also been an inspection. “You’re the best version of me I’ve ever made. I need the packs to see that in the first week, before the Voss boy or anyone else tries to convince them otherwise.” “And if I’d rather just go to class.” “You won’t.” He said it without cruelty, which was somehow worse than if he had. “You’re a Kade. Class was never the point.”I left Thursday morning, because arguing with my father was a hobby I’d retired from years ago. Rowan drove me — he’d been our driver since before I could remember, a broad, quiet wolf who’d been with the family longer than my mother had. I caught his eyes in the rearview once, somewhere past the gate, and he looked away fast enough that I noticed. “Everything okay, Rowan?” “Fine, Mr. Kade.” A beat too long before he added it. He never called me Mr. Kade. He’d called me Julian since I was six and used to hide in his trunk to avoid piano lessons. I let it go. People got strange around my father’s business the closer we got to campus season — old debts, old favors, the machinery of the empire creaking louder than usual. I told myself that’s all it was. It wasn’t until we stopped for gas outside Poughkeepsie that I understood how wrong I was. I got out to stretch my legs. There was a kid at the next pump, maybe seventeen, wearing a community college hoodie, filling up an old Civic that had seen better decades. Nothing about him mattered to me. I hadn’t looked at him twice. He looked at me, though. And then he didn’t look away. His shoulders dropped. His chin tipped down, just slightly, just enough that I felt it before I understood what I was seeing — the particular stillness of a wolf choosing not to challenge something. I’d seen the gesture a thousand times directed at my father. I had never once, in twenty years, had it directed at me. “Sorry,” the kid muttered, eyes on the pavement now. “Didn’t mean to stare.” “You weren’t staring at anything,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say, and because some old animal part of me recognized that whatever had just happened needed to be smoothed over before it became a thing. He nodded like I’d given him an order, not a reassurance, and got back in his car so fast he forgot to put the gas cap back on. I stood there a long moment, the pump handle heavy in my hand, replaying it. Rowan didn’t ask what happened. When I got back in the car, he wouldn’t meet my eyes again, not once, for the rest of the drive. I told myself it was nothing. A stranger having a stranger day. I believed that for exactly six more days.