The Last Direwolf

Tell Me Why

The med bay had gone quiet by four, the way it always did before the shift-change rush — Tamsin off doing inventory two rooms over, the waiting area empty, nothing on Vesper's desk but a half-finished cup of tea and the particular stillness she'd learned to enjoy without ever quite trusting.

She heard him before she saw him. Not footsteps — something underneath footsteps, a change in the air of the hallway that her body had apparently decided, as of eleven forty-one that morning, belonged to exactly one person now. She had approximately four seconds to arrange her face before he was in the doorway.

He wasn't smiling. That was the first thing she catalogued, the professional part of her mind running its assessment before the rest of her caught up. Different energy than the exam room — that had been controlled but easy, a man doing a task he found mildly, privately interesting. This was something narrower. A folder in his hand instead of nothing.

"Do you have a minute," he said. Not really a question.

"I have several." She gestured at the empty waiting area. "Business is slow."

He came in and shut the door, which he hadn't done that morning, and something about the click of the latch sat in her chest like the first cold drop before rain. She kept her hands loose on the desk. She'd trained herself out of hiding them years ago — hidden hands read as guilty hands, and guilty hands were the kind of mistake that got people noticed.

"I need a physician's read on some data," he said. "Not a division head's. Yours specifically."

"That's what I'm here for."

He set the folder down between them and opened it, and she saw the case number on the first page half a second before she understood, with the particular clean horror of a diagnosis you'd been half-expecting for years, exactly which file it was.

Her own handwriting. Corrected, three years ago, at two in the morning, in a database she'd told herself no one outside Sentinel's own physicians would ever have real reason to cross-reference against raw lab output.

"Tell me why these numbers were changed," Rhys said.

He didn't say it like an accusation. That was almost worse — an accusation she could have deflected with outrage, with the easy, practiced offense of someone who'd never done anything wrong. This was quieter. A question from a man who genuinely, as far as she could tell, hadn't decided yet what the answer meant.

Vesper looked at the page for exactly as long as it took to breathe once, in, out, the four-count Mara had drilled into her before she was old enough to understand why counting mattered more than panicking. Grandma, why do I need to know this. She could still hear the answer some mornings, unbidden, in a voice she hadn't heard in real life in three years. Because one day, sweetheart, I may not be here to protect you.

She was here to protect herself now. That was the whole of the inheritance.

"Show me the raw output," she said, reaching for the folder instead of flinching from it, because the surest way to look guilty was to look like you needed time to think. "If there's a discrepancy, I want to see exactly where it diverges before I tell you anything."

Something shifted behind his eyes — not suspicion exactly. Recalibration. She understood, watching it happen, that she'd just done the one thing an innocent person and a guilty person would both plausibly do, and that he hadn't expected either version of her to ask for the data instead of an explanation.

He slid the second page across. She studied it with genuine, unfaked attention, because the fastest way to build a lie that held was to build it out of real material.

"Reagent drift," she said, after a moment, in the flat, unhurried voice she used for things that were actually true, borrowed now for something that wasn't. "This batch ran hot — I flagged it internally when we switched suppliers. The raw markers can read anomalous if the calibration's off by even a narrow margin. I corrected for known drift before filing. It's standard practice, not concealment."

It was, technically, a real practice. It was also not remotely what had happened to this file, and she watched him weigh that — watched him want, with a visible effort that told her more than she wanted to know about how much of him was already compromised where she was concerned, to simply believe her.

"Six files," he said instead. "All the same drift?"

"If they're from the same batch and window, that wouldn't surprise me." She held his gaze, because looking away now would cost her everything looking straight at him was currently costing her. "I can pull the supplier logs if you need them in writing."

He was quiet for a moment that went on a beat too long to be comfortable.

"Pull them," he said finally. "By tomorrow."

"Of course."

He didn't leave right away. He stood there instead, folder half-closed in his hand, looking at her with an expression she couldn't fully name and didn't trust herself to try — and for one unguarded second, she saw past the Wolfhunter entirely and into the man underneath, the one whose wolf had gone as quiet and as loud as hers had eleven hours ago, the one who had absolutely no idea he was standing four feet away from exactly what he'd been sent to find.

"Ms. Hale." He said it softer than he had that morning. "For what it's worth — I don't think this is nothing. But I also don't think it's you."

You have no idea how wrong you are, she thought, and smiled the small, careful, professional smile that had gotten her through six years of exactly this kind of moment. "I appreciate that."

He left. She counted to twenty before she let her hands shake, and by the time Tamsin wandered back in with a box of supplies and a question about lunch, Vesper had already decided the only safe place left to stand was directly inside his investigation — close enough to see everything he found, before he found it without her.

"I'm going to help him with the audit," she said, before Tamsin could ask what was wrong. "Officially. Starting tomorrow."

Tamsin blinked. "Since when do you volunteer for extra work?"

"Since I decided I'd rather know what he's looking at," Vesper said, "than wonder."

It wasn't a lie. It just wasn't the whole truth, either — and she had gotten very, very good, over six long careful years, at knowing exactly where that line was and never once stepping over it by accident.