CHAPTER 5
939 Words
CADEN
I made it back through the forest. I made it past the car and the scent that came through that cracked window like a fist. I made it all the way to the packhouse, into clothes, down the stairs, into the hallway.
And then she looked up at me with those amber eyes and every wall I have been building and reinforcing for four solid years cracked straight through at the base.
I get them into my office. I manage the formalities. I run the pack invitation, say the words, and they each accept. The Iron Ridge bond settles over them one by one. When it reaches Zara, Tor goes quiet in my head, a deep and satisfied quiet, the way he goes when a thing he has been holding out for arrives.
She is pack now. She is inside our protection. Every instinct I have responds to that with one word.
Good.
I make myself look at the papers on my desk. I talk to Declan about the situation, the house we have prepared, the warrior program, practical things that I can manage. Marcus stands near the window and says exactly the right things at exactly the right times because that is his job and he is very good at it.
I mostly succeed at not watching her.
Then Lena appears in the doorway.
She was supposed to be asleep two hours ago. She is wearing the pink nightgown with the wolf printed across the front, and she is carrying Theodore, her stuffed bear, held against her chest with both arms.
"Daddy." She surveys the strangers in the room with the total confidence of someone who has never been wrong about a room before. "You said you would come read to me."
"I know, baby. Ten more minutes."
She considers this as a negotiating position. Then she looks at Zara the way small children look at things that interest them, directly and without any of the social buffer that adults build up over the years.
"Are you new?" she asks.
"Very new," Zara says. Her voice changes. The careful steadiness in it drops away and something easier comes through.
"What is your name?"
"Zara."
Lena turns the word over. "That is a good name." She walks into the room, past me, past Marcus, and comes to stand directly in front of Zara. She lifts the stuffed bear. "This is Theodore."
"Theodore looks very distinguished," Zara says, seriously.
Lena's whole face opens up. She climbs into Zara's lap without asking.
Zara goes still for one second. Then her arms come up around Lena with the careful, unhurried gentleness of someone who has held children before, and she looks down at her.
I look at my desk. I look at Marcus. Marcus has found something on the ceiling to study with great attention.
Declan Quinn is watching his daughter hold my daughter from the corner of the room. His expression is one I cannot read entirely, but the relief in it is plain.
"Lena," I say. "Time for bed."
"Five minutes."
"Three."
She accepts three. She settles deeper into Zara's lap and starts explaining Theodore's entire biography, which is long and almost entirely invented, and Zara listens to every word of it with full seriousness.
Tor is useless to me right now. He is sitting in my head making a sound I can only describe as contented and when I tell him to stop, he does not stop.
She is ours, he says. The hundredth time.
She is seventeen, I tell him. The hundredth time. She just fled a man who decided she belonged to him without asking. We are going to be a pack home and a safe place and nothing else until she is of age and can feel this herself. You understand me.
He goes quiet. Then: I understand. But it does not change what she is.
No, I agree. It does not.
I would rather build a wall around myself with both hands than be the second man to decide what Zara Quinn's future looks like without her consent.
Marcus materializes at my shoulder and says, low enough for only me: "The scout I sent to watch Redwood Hollow's border comm line checked in. Vance has been trying to reach the Quinn family's phones for three hours."
I turn my head just far enough to look at him.
"He will figure out they came here," Marcus says.
"Yes."
"He may push on it."
"He is welcome to try."
Marcus studies my face. He does the thing he does when he is deciding how much to say. "Is there anything I should know? About why this particular family matters in this particular way?"
Across the room, Lena has fallen asleep in Zara's lap. Zara has gone completely still to avoid disturbing her. The lamp is catching the amber in her eyes and turning it gold.
"Double the eastern patrol tonight," I say. "Put the Quinn family in the house closest to the packhouse on the east side."
Marcus follows my gaze. He looks back at me. His expression does not change.
"Marcus."
"Not one word," he says. "You have my word on it." He picks up his phone. "Eastern patrol doubled. East house for the Quinn family." He pauses. "Anything else?"
I look at Zara one more time. She feels it. She looks up and finds my eyes across the room. We hold that for a long moment.
Then she looks away first and her jaw tightens and she goes back to watching Lena sleep in her lap.
"That will be all," I say. "For now."
- Writer
