Chapter 1 - Keira

"Half-shot, just the way you like it," greets one of the new interns as I step into the office complex. She pushes a hot coffee into my hands.

She's a sweet girl, a wolf, like most of us in the agency. I thank her. I wonder, as I do with many of the girls I meet through my work now, whether her family is wealthy enough that if she were to become one of the faces in our files, they would be able to fund her rescue. I wonder whether she ever reads those case files.

"You don't have to keep getting my coffee," I remind her as I pick my way through the cubicles to my desk.

She grins toothily at me. "You always forget!"

I guess she's not wrong. I have a nasty habit of getting lost in my work. Even Director Jenkins has started complaining when I stay late night after night, sternly ordering me to go home and sleep.

It's not as if I have a lot to go home to. In the military, I slept in barracks with five or six others every night. Now, the silence and emptiness of my apartment downtown unsettles me.

Jenkins herself is waiting at my desk when I reach it. She's an older woman, with steel-gray hair and even steelier eyes. She's a good boss. I get the sense that perhaps, beneath the authority she wields, she's also a good person. I can't be sure.

"I was just looking at your photos," she greets unconvincingly as I approach. She gestures to the single framed picture on the corner of my desk.

In the frame, me and my old unit beam out toward the viewer. I catch sight of myself and Ado toward the back, his thick arm around my shoulders, pulling me against his side. I look happy.

Despite my best efforts, it's a photo I often look at.

"From my time in the military," I say needlessly. We're all in uniform.

Jenkins nods. She glances me up and down. "Did you go home last night?"

"Of course." She doesn't need to know it was only for three hours.

"Well, that's good. Because I wanted to speak with you." Jenkins nods toward her office. "Come sit with me. It shouldn't take too long."

Anxiety spikes through me, a hard, cold sword. Irrationally, I am suddenly terrified she'll fire me. I can't lose this job. I'm not sure what else I have left.

Jenkins' office is cold, minimalist, and hard-edged. Not a spot on her broad, mahogany desk is smudged by even a single fingerprint. Through the huge glass pane that comprises the back wall, I can see over the whole city, shimmering with yellow heat. Cars screech in the street below.

After everything happened, I leaped at the chance to apply when I saw this job. I was under-qualified, with only a few years of intelligence work under my belt, and she must have known it, but Jenkins saw something in me when I came to interview her and told her stiffly that I had been honorably discharged following my captivity with a group of violent outlaws. Maybe she knew there was little in our cases that would make me squeamish anymore.

She gestures for me to sit across from her. "Please, sit down. I have an important assignment for you."

"Another data analysis project?" The last had been boring but easy. I'm between personal projects now, scrubbing in on the assignments of the people in my department, who deal with domestic shifter security. I try to avoid the missing-person cases, but they find me anyway.

"No, this is different. It’s a field assignment." She meets my eye. "The special ops team in Rosecreek needs an intelligence analyst, and I told them I'd send my best."

I wrack my mind. Rosecreek. I’ve heard of the black ops team in Rosecreek, Minnesota, though I’ve never been on any of their cases, for which they have occasionally extended offers for contractors like me. They’re not quite extrajudicial. But it’s clear their territory is theirs, and they manage themselves and their people privately. I haven’t heard anything bad about them, not even once; rare, for a pack so sizeable and isolated.

“I don’t take field missions anymore,” I tell Jenkins. “I haven’t for years. You know that.”

Jenkins eyes me over her spotless desk. I watch one of her perfectly manicured fingernails run along the edge.

“I thought you might say that,” she admits: “I just want you to hear me out before you say no outright, Hart. Can we agree on that?”

Jenkins is a formidable woman, but she’s at her most terrifying when she does this. I look into her eyes and know that she has seriously considered what her plan with me might be on this. She thinks she knows what’s going to happen next.

“Sure,” I say and lean back, crossing one leg over the other.

I stopped wearing skirts to work a long time ago. There’s nobody out here, perhaps nobody in the whole city, that I feel the need to dress to impress. It’s one of a thousand other things I used to do happily that I no longer think to.

“It’s a long-term mission, with multiple infiltrations. Their targets have several locations, some unconfirmed. It’ll be external work, directorial; you’ll be at the forefront of directing a team, they’ve assured me. Working from the outside, and from the bird’s-eye.”

“Who are the targets?”

Jenkins’ steely eyes flash, and I know I have asked what she wanted me to ask.

“Traffickers,” she says. “And as far as they can tell, traffickers running a state-wide operation, if not national. Expanding fast. They’re running auctions of shifter brides. Slaves. And they’re running those auctions right out of the Rosecreek pack’s backyard, so you can understand the urgency with which they approached me.”

A chill runs down my spine. I’ve been on a dozen trafficking operation cases in the last five years, and there is never one that doesn’t find its way down into your bones. Cases with so many victims, and so many that go unknown and unrecovered even when missions are completed, carve out their own space within me. I can still see the faces of the girls I didn’t get to safety in the back of my mind, their pictures filed away in the deepest recesses of my memory, as if there, I can keep them safe.

Jenkins must know what I’m thinking and the things I’m reliving. I watch her tilt her chin up, then go in for the kill.

“You’d make a hefty commission, work only when necessary from the field. Accommodations and resources provided, of course. Strictly non-combat, they tell me, though you know how these things go.”

She shuffles through a stack of papers on her otherwise empty desk, then hands me a pristinely rendered contract printed on expensive paper. I stare down at the small print. The dotted line across the bottom seems to point in the direction of my own uncertain future. In my mind, I watch as arrows threaten to extend out of the cold, quiet mundanity of my life. I haven’t spent much time in the Midwest. Absurdly, my mind conjures a picture of cornfields stretching out for hundreds of miles, a post-apocalyptic wasteland. I think of my lonely little apartment, and my heart seems to say something to me, though I don’t know what it is.

“I’ll think about it,” I try.

Jenkins shakes her head. “I can’t do that for you, Hart. You know it.”

I do. This contract isn’t just open to me. If I don’t take it, one of my colleagues will, and they deserve a fair shot as much as I do.

I stare at the contract in my hands. I don’t know why, but I find myself thinking of Ado. He had a peculiar way of making me feel as if I was good at what I did; back then, at that point in my life and career, I rarely felt confident in my own abilities. I was certain I had scammed my way into this work I loved so much somehow. But sometimes, after a long day or a hard mission, Ado would seek me out in the evenings and sit silently beside me in the barracks or on the rooftop. It was as if he could sense my doubt. He never asked, but I could always tell he was waiting for me to speak, and I did speak. I told him everything, from my doubts and insecurities to the minuscule and methodical details of my work. He never said much, but I could tell he cared about what I had to say.

I think about what it was like to quit my fieldwork after escaping from the Bloodtooth Pack. It felt like severing a limb from myself. I was traumatized, of course, and I would have been useless on the field with how much I still had to unpack from my time in captivity. But I think, looking back, that a part of me knew some part of my tether to the work had been lost when Ado left me behind. Continuing without him seemed impossible. Even now, I’m not entirely sure why it felt that way.

I slide the contract onto the desk in front of me. “I need a pen.”