Page 105 of Fate, Interrupted

I look at her in the low light of this house that is entirely hers—the shelves and the plants and the mismatched everything that she built out of stubbornness and a genuine belief that the life she wanted was worth building. She built it here. If she wanted to, she could build it somewhere else. The whole architecture of a life run on her own terms—none of that is attached to this city.

It’s attached to her.

Three hundred miles is nothing.

Chapter twenty-eight

Silas

Ifind them in forty minutes.

That’s what humans don’t fully understand about wolf tracking. It isn’t mystical or some ancient gift wrapped in folklore. It’s chemistry. Scent has a signature the way a fingerprint does, and if I’ve been where someone stood and they left enough of themselves behind, I can follow it. These two left plenty.

I catch their scent in the alley outside The Last Chapter, after I speak to her long enough to confirm she is indeed fine. After I let myself breathe again, I note it the way I note everything: file it away, not knowing then when I’ll use it.

I know now.

The truck is warm. The city moves past the windows at eleven on a weeknight: closed restaurants, the last bar crowd on the sidewalks, delivery trucks finding their windows. I’m not driving fast. I don’t need to. My wolf is quiet because it knows exactly what we’re doing.

My phone rings.

It’s Greer. I answer it on the second ring. “Yeah.”

“You left early,” he says.

“Had somewhere to be.”

A pause. Not the uncertain kind. The Greer kind, where he decides how much he wants to say. “Your father was looking for you.”

“He can look.”

Another pause. Longer. “The north corridor situation is resolved,” he says. “Logan handled the follow-up.”

“Good.”

“Nothing else requiring your attention tonight,” he says. “Operationally.”

He puts just enough weight on the last word that both of us know what he’s doing, and neither of us acknowledges it. Greer rarely states more than he has to. Thirty years in this family has made him fluent in what doesn’t get said.

“Quiet night,” I say.

“Is it,” he says.

It’s not a question. He knows I’m in the truck. He was in the kitchen when I got Norah’s call, and he knows I left without telling anyone where I was going. If he suspects why, he’s keeping it.

“How’s the Elmwood equipment?” I ask.

“Fine,” he says. “Rory has it handled.”

“Good.”

City blocks pass, and I take a turn I know, moving east now, into the neighborhood where the scent pointed me before I consciously decided to follow it.

“Silas,” Greer says.

“Yeah.”

A long pause. When he speaks again, his voice has dropped a register, the register he uses when he’s talking to me rather than to the operation. “Some things are better handled quietly.”