Celeste called Holt on a Friday morning.
Not from the pack house. From the village, which had become her habit for calls that mattered, the specific practical instinct of a woman who had grown up in a house where walls were thin and information was currency, who understood that the difference between a private conversation and a monitored one was sometimes only a matter of location.
She drove to the village at eight in the morning in the pack house truck that Damon's contract had given her the right to use, which was one of the many small practical consequences of the inter-pack employment agreement that Conrad had not fully mapped when he agreed to it. She bought coffee at the store where I mailed letters. She sat in the truck in the car park with the engine off and the October cold pre
