SHIFT

WHAT THE PACK KNOWS

Mara answered on the first ring, which told me everything about how bad the last twelve hours had been before she even said a word.

"You're alive," she said, and the relief in her voice cracked halfway through into something sharper. "Do you have any idea — I have had eyes on three different crime scenes since midnight, Kade. *Three.* And you go dark for twelve hours?"

"I got hurt. Silver, in the shoulder. I'm okay now." I glanced at Sam, who was pulling on shoes by the door, moving with the brisk efficiency of someone who'd apparently decided *what do you need me to do* wasn't a rhetorical question. "Someone helped me."

A pause on the line, weighted. "Someone who?"

"A human. Nurse. She found me in the alley and didn't run."

"Kade." Mara's voice dropped, careful now, the way she talked when she was trying not to spook me into doing something rash. "You know what that means if Vasquez's people find out. You know what it means if *Ellis* finds out."

I did know. That was the problem — I'd known it since the moment Sam pressed her jacket against my shoulder and I let her, some animal part of me too exhausted and too grateful to do the smart thing and disappear the second I could stand.

"Where are you," Mara said. Not a question anymore.

I gave her the cross streets. Fifteen minutes later there was a knock at Sam's door, three short raps and a pause, the signal Mara had used since we were both new to the pack and paranoid about everything. Sam looked at me, silent question in her face, and I nodded. She opened it.

Mara came in like weather — five foot nothing and built like she could take apart a car engine or a person with equal efficiency, laptop bag slung across her body, dark eyes doing a fast sweep of the apartment, the plants, the woman standing there in scrubs with her arms crossed, and finally landing on me.

"You look like hell," she said.

"Feels about right."

Her gaze cut to Sam. "And you are?"

"Sam. I live here. I'm the one who didn't let your friend bleed out on the sidewalk, so maybe start with *thank you* instead of interrogation."

Something flickered across Mara's face — not quite approval, but close to it. She had a soft spot for people who didn't back down, I'd learned that about her a long time ago. "Fair," she said, and dropped her bag onto Sam's coffee table like she'd been invited to. "Mara. I run comms and intel for the pack, which is currently on fire, so — no offense, but I need five minutes alone with him."

"No," I said, before Sam could answer for herself. "Whatever you've got, she hears it too. She's already in this."

Mara studied me for a second too long, the kind of look that read more than I wanted her to. Then she exhaled and pulled out her laptop.

"Fine. Then buckle up, because it's worse than the alley."

She turned the screen toward us. Security footage, grainy, timestamped from the night before — not our alley, a different location entirely, a warehouse district near the water I recognized vaguely from pack territory maps. Figures moving in the dark, too many to be a routine patrol.

"Vasquez pulled in wolves from two other packs last night," Mara said. "Not allies. *Recruits.* He's been making promises — territory, protection, a cut of whatever he's building toward — and it's working. He's not just after us anymore. He's consolidating. Fast."

"Consolidating for what?"

"That's the part I don't have yet. But here's what I do have." She pulled up another file — a photo this time, a man in a tailored coat standing at the edge of the warehouse, face mostly in shadow but unmistakably in charge, the way everyone around him angled their bodies toward his like plants toward light. "That's him. Vasquez. And this—" she tapped the screen, zooming into a second figure at his side, "—is the part you need to hear sitting down."

The image sharpened. A young man, controlled stance, dark hair, a face I'd last seen eight feet away on a rooftop with a crossbow aimed at my chest.

Ellis.

"That's not possible," I said. "He's hunting me *for* Vasquez's people. He thinks I killed his brother."

"He thought that," Mara said. "Past tense, maybe, if he's standing three feet from the man who actually ordered the hit. I pulled this off a contact who owes me a favor — this was taken six hours ago. Either Ellis knows exactly who he's working for and doesn't care, or—"

"Or he doesn't know," Sam said quietly, and both of us looked at her. She shrugged, arms still crossed, but her voice was steady, the same clinical calm she'd used on me in the alley. "You said he thinks Kade killed his brother. If Vasquez is the one who actually gave that order, and he's playing Ellis for information or muscle without telling him the truth — that's not an ally photo. That could be a target photo."

The room went quiet. Mara looked at Sam like she was recalculating something, and I felt a cold drop in my stomach that had nothing to do with silver.

"She's right," Mara said slowly. "Vasquez doesn't do anything without a reason. If he's got the brother of the man he used as bait standing right next to him, it's not because they're friends. It's because Ellis is useful to him right now — and people who are useful to Vasquez have a shelf life."

I thought about the rooftop. About Ellis lowering the crossbow, about the sixty seconds he'd given me to talk instead of putting a bolt through my chest. Whatever else he was, he wasn't stupid, and he wasn't cruel for the sake of it. He was a man chasing the wrong grief toward the wrong target, and if what Mara was showing us was true, he was standing right next to the person who'd actually killed his brother in every way that mattered, with no idea how close he was.

"I have to find him," I said. "Before Vasquez decides he's outlived his usefulness."

"Kade." Mara's voice was flat, warning. "He put a crossbow in your face two nights ago."

"And then he didn't shoot. He gave me sixty seconds, Mara. That's not nothing." I stood, testing my shoulder — stiff, aching, but holding. "If Vasquez is playing him, and Ellis figures that out too late, he's dead. And if I don't get to him first, the next person Vasquez uses him against might not walk away."

Sam grabbed her jacket off the hook by the door, the same one still faintly stained from the night before, and I opened my mouth to tell her to stay, that this was pack business now, hunter business, not something a nurse from the L train needed anywhere near her.

She beat me to it.

"Don't," she said, reading it off my face before I said a word. "You're still healing. You're better with backup, and unless your pack's comms expert doubles as a field medic, I'm the closest thing you've got. I'm coming."

Mara looked between the two of us, something unreadable passing behind her eyes, and then closed her laptop with a decisive snap.

"Great," she said, slinging her bag back over her shoulder. "A wolf, a nurse, and me. Vasquez doesn't stand a chance."

Nobody laughed. But for just a second, standing in that too-plant-filled apartment with the morning light finally breaking gray and gold through the windows, it almost felt like enough.