THE HEIR HE NEVER CLAIMED

The Price of Safe

Mara — FMC POV



Seven months looks different than I imagined.

I imagined it would feel like anticipation. What it actually feels like is weight — not metaphorical, just physical, the specific redistribution of a body that has made a structural decision without consulting the person living inside it. I move differently now. I sleep differently. I stopped being able to pretend this wasn't real somewhere around month five, when he started moving in the middle of the night with the deliberate force of someone making a point.

He. I know it's a he. Jace's medical team confirmed it six weeks ago and I sat with that information for four days before I let myself look directly at it.

He has his father's timing. That's the thing I can't unknow. Dominic Voss-Krane moves through any room at the exact moment it will cost the most, and apparently this is genetic.

Jace's facility occupies the top two floors of a building in the Mercer Island district that is registered as a private security consulting firm and is, in fact, exactly that, plus whatever category of operation quietly houses a seven-months-pregnant former Omega in a room with good locks and wolves on the door who ask no questions. It is the cleanest safe house I have ever heard of. I have been here for six weeks and nobody has raised their voice and nobody has touched me without asking first and the medical care is better than anything available in KraneTech's pack clinic.

I keep waiting to find the price.

Jace is in the doorway when I look up. He does this — appears in doorframes without announcing himself, waiting to be noticed rather than demanding it. He is a tall man with a careful face and the specific stillness of someone who learned early that showing urgency is the same as showing weakness.

—You're still awake, he says.

—I'm always awake at this point. The baby's nocturnal. He takes after his father.

Jace moves to the chair across from me and sits. He doesn't comment on what I just said. He has this quality of absorbing information without reacting to it that I initially read as coldness and have come to understand is something more like discipline.

I look at him directly.

—I need you to tell me why you're doing this.

—I've told you.

—You've told me the logistical version. I want the real version.

He is quiet for a moment. Not hesitating — processing, the way he does everything, with a thoroughness that suggests he has already considered this conversation and is deciding how much of the prepared answer to use.

—Dominic Voss-Krane, he says, —recommended to the Elder Council fourteen months ago that the Merrow rogue territories be dissolved on the grounds of pack destabilization. The Council voted on Ashwood's guidance and Dominic's endorsement. My brother's pack lost its charter in seventy-two hours. Thirty-one wolves, no territory, no legal protection. He pauses. —My brother died four months later. Not dramatically. He just stopped functioning, the way wolves do when you take the pack from them. Like a tree without soil.

The room is very quiet.

—Dominic signed the recommendation, I say.

—He signed it. Whether he understood what he was endorsing or whether Ashwood handed him a document and he trusted the source — I don't know. I've been trying to determine that for over a year. He looks at me with the flat directness that is, I've learned, the closest he gets to warmth. —You are the most useful piece of information I have found in fourteen months of looking. That is the real version.

—So this is intelligence gathering.

—This is the enemy of my enemy. He doesn't apologize for it. —You needed somewhere safe. I needed proximity to someone who can tell me whether Dominic Voss-Krane is a man who was used, or a man who participated. Those are not the same problem and they don't have the same solution.

I think about the signing. My father's document. The six words on the Presentation Stone.

—I don't know the answer to that either, I say.

—I know. He settles back. —That's why I'm patient.

Something in his honesty makes the tension I've been carrying for six weeks shift — not disappear, but rearrange itself into something I can set down temporarily. I don't trust Jace Merrow. I don't think I'm supposed to. But I understand him, and understanding is a kind of traction when you've been moving across ice for months.

The wall screen on the far side of the room pulses.

Jace is on his feet before I register the sound. He crosses to the panel and I watch his shoulders change — a subtle tightening, the specific posture of someone absorbing bad information and choosing not to show it to the person behind them.

—Jace.

—KraneTech tracker signatures. His voice is level and careful in a way that means the opposite. —Moving along the outer perimeter. They've been circling for approximately—

He turns and looks at me with the expression I have never seen on him before tonight. Not calm. Not calculating.

—They've narrowed it to the city, he says.