Chapter 5

Dominic

The best lies are the ones that are mostly true.

Jennifer deserves to see her daughter. That’s true. Eight years of waiting by a phone that never rang, of setting a place at Christmas and clearing it again, of pretending not to cry when someone mentions Silvercrest. If anyone has earned the right to look her daughter in the eye and ask why, it’s Jennifer.

That’s what I tell the others.

What I let them believe is that I want payback. That’s true too. Every one of them saw what her leaving did to us. They watched me ride for that border and come back with nothing. They won’t blame me for wanting her to face it.

What I don’t tell anyone is the rest.

That Ezekiel Lockhart’s daughter is alone and hiding, and Silvercrest hasn’t said a word about it. That a high elder doesn’t keep quiet about a runaway daughter unless he’s ashamed, or afraid, or hunting her himself. And that whatever Silvercrest wants this badly is something I can use.

Some truths are safer kept behind your teeth.

The motel off the highway has twelve rooms and a vacancy sign with half the letters burned out. We take three of them. Shane pays cash and tells the man at the desk we’re riding down from Canada. The man doesn’t care.

By seven, Kip has found us a truck. An old Ford with a cracked windshield, a heater that works, and a trailer big enough for my bike and Asher’s, bought from a rancher at the gas station for a price that made him very happy not to ask questions.

By eight, Dutch is parked across from her building, and Shane is covering the back.

By nine, Asher has stopped speaking to me.

He lasts until ten. Then he comes into my room without knocking and shuts the door behind him, and I know before he opens his mouth what he’s going to say.

“Let her go, Dom.”

I don’t look up from the map on my phone. “No.”

“She doesn’t want to come home. You saw her. She’s terrified of us.”

“Then she should’ve thought about that before she left.”

“She was sixteen.”

“She was twenty when she took a mate.” I put the phone down. “Jennifer deserves to see her. You want to tell Jennifer we found her and drove away?”

“Then call Jennifer.” He’s standing very still, the way he does when he’s angry enough to hit something and won’t let himself. “Let her drive up here and talk to her. Let Neve decide.”

“And when she runs again before Jennifer gets here?”

“Then she runs!” It comes out of him so hard the lamp rattles on the nightstand. “Moon above, Dom. Did you see her hands? Did you see how she looked at us? Whatever happened to her, she’s been through enough. Let her live. Leave her be.”

For a second, I almost do.

I think about the way she held the coffee pot with both hands. The way she kept her back to the wall. The way she flinched when I stepped toward her, and then didn’t step back.

Then I think about Warren on the river road, and my father’s word, and four years of telling myself she chose this.

“If she runs,” I say, “you track her.”

“No.”

I stand up.

I’ve never done this to him. Not once, not since we were kids wrestling in the dirt and I was the one who always ended up on top. There are things you don’t do to the people closest to you, even when you can. Especially when you can.

I do it anyway.

“You’ll track her.”

The word comes out of me with the full weight of the alpha behind it, and I watch it hit him. His knees buckle. He catches himself against the dresser, jaw locked, breathing hard through his nose, and fights it for three long seconds before his head bows.

“Yes, Alpha,” he says through his teeth.

When he looks up again, there’s something in his eyes I’ve never seen there before. Not anger. Something colder.

He leaves without another word. The door clicks shut behind him, very softly.

I stand in the middle of the room for a long time after that, and I tell myself I don’t feel anything at all.

At midnight, I give Dutch his instructions through the link.

At two, you and Shane get on your phones. Look bored. Look like you’re half asleep.

You want her to run?

She’s going to run either way. I want to know where.

She knows how to disappear. She’s been doing it for years. But she’s been doing it from humans, and from strangers, and from people who don’t know her.

We know her.

At 2:07, Dutch’s voice cuts through the dark. She’s out. Bathroom window, onto the laundromat roof. Heading for the alley.

Let her go. Don’t follow.

I’m already in the truck. Asher is in the passenger seat, staring out the windshield. He hasn’t said a word since the motel. When I start the engine, he rolls down his window and breathes in the cold, and I watch him close his eyes.

He was always the best tracker in the pack. Even through the smoke and the crushed leaves she hides behind, he can find her. He’s known her scent since he was nine years old.

“Back road,” he says flatly. “Behind the grain elevator. Toward the highway.”

There’s only one thing on the highway at this hour. The gas station two miles out of town, where the overnight bus to Spokane stops for ten minutes at 3:15 if anyone’s waiting.

I take the long way around and get there first.

The station is closed, its lights off except for the old bus sign over the bench, humming and flickering in the snow. I park behind the building, where the truck can’t be seen from the road, and I get out and wait in the shadow of the ice machine.

She comes out of the dark at 2:48.

She’s walking fast with her head down, a duffel bag over one shoulder, snow on her hat and her shoulders. She stops at the edge of the light and looks around for a long time. Up the road. Down the road. At the dark windows of the station.

She doesn’t see me. She doesn’t smell me, either; the wind is in my favor, and whatever’s left of her wolf is too buried to tell her anything.

The pull in my chest is back, so strong it almost hurts. I tell myself it’s the cold.

She sits down on the bench under the flickering sign and sets the bag between her feet. Then she does something I didn’t expect. She tips her head back against the wall, closes her eyes, and lets out a long, slow breath, like a woman putting down something she’s carried for a very long time.

She thinks she’s free.

For one second, I hate myself for what I’m about to do.

Then I step out of the shadows and into the light.

Her eyes fly open.

“Going somewhere?”

For a second, she doesn’t move at all.

Then every drop of color drains from her face. Her hand closes around the strap of the bag at her feet, knuckles white, and her eyes slide past me to the empty highway. The dark. The miles of nothing in every direction.

She’s measuring the distance.

So am I.