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He watched me warily.

"You don't get to hurt for a while and call it even. You have to tell him what you did, tell him why, and then let him decide what it means for your friendship."

River looked away for the first time.

I crawled on top of the bed next to him. "That's the only way you get to keep him as a friend."

Chapter Eighteen

We drove back to pack lands Friday morning, and I spent most of the trip working out how to tell all those people I was going to get one of them killed.

That sounds dramatic. I'm aware. But I'd done the math four times between the motel and the county line, and it kept giving me the same answer. By the second cup of gas station coffee, I'd stopped pretending there was some smart combo of magic, leverage, or spectacularly bad judgment that ended with everyone walking away unharmed.

Danika's contract came due in eight days. If she couldn't pay whatever price was needed, it went to auction, and whoever bought it owned considerably more than my grandmother's soul. They owned the High Priestess of the Gatekeeper's Coven, along with sixty years of knowledge, alliances, wards, secrets, and every other dangerous thing Danika had collected while the rest of us were busy trying not to piss her off.

At the same time, the Council had sanctioned the Greywood pack because of me.

Two catastrophes. One solution.

Me.

River drove. He'd taken the keys off the nightstand while I was in the bathroom and hadn't bothered asking, which ordinarily would have earned him a lecture about boundaries and possibly a threat involving his favorite body parts. That morning, I let him get away with it. My hands weren't entirely reliable yet, and he needed something to do for the next two hours besides sit still and think about what waited for him when we got there.

Unfortunately, sitting beside River for two hours had developed complications of its own.

I had become familiar with his hands last night. And other parts of him.

Extremely familiar.

So every time one of his limbs shifted or moved, my brain offered information I had not requested. When his fingers tightened around the leather, I remembered them against my waist. When he reached for his coffee, I remembered the cold slide of those same fingers over my skin, and when he pushed his sleeve up his forearms, I stared long enough to become annoyed with myself.

Apparently sleeping with River had done nothing useful for my attraction to him. If anything, it had made the situation considerably worse.

"You're quiet," he said.

I looked out the window before he could catch me staring. "I'm thinking."

"That usually involves more swearing."

"You're a comedian now?" The silence that followed had a distinctly amused quality despite River not saying a word. I risked looking over and found his attention on the road, his expression perfectly composed.

"You could practice on me," I said, because discussing his impending confrontation with Alex seemed considerably safer than thinking about what River had done with his mouth six hours ago.

"No."

"I'm an excellent audience. I've been told I'm very openminded and understanding."

"By whom? A porcupine? You have been told no such thing." His gaze remained on the road. "And if I practice on you, I'll find the version that works instead of the version that's true."

Well. That shut me up for nine miles. By the time we reached Greywood land, I had managed to stop thinking about last night long enough to start worrying about everything else again.

Then I saw the gate.

It was open.

Not the way it used to be, with weeds caught in the hinges and some wolf lifting two fingers from a porch because they'd smelled the truck coming half a mile away. This was deliberate. Two shifters stood at the posts, one on either side, and neither waved as we passed. They watched the truck all the way up the road, their attention following us until the gate disappeared behind the trees.

The stumps were still there from where the tree line had been cut, although somebody had started pulling them. A backhoe sat near the woods with dried mud packed into its tracks, and about thirty feet of fence had already been replaced. The new lumber stood pale against the weathered boards, raw enough that I probably could have smelled the sawdust if the windows had been down.