Chapter 4 - Ado

Keira has let her hair grow out.

Fuck, I think, and splash my face with water, hunched over the sink.

It was shorter when I last knew her, half an inch below her shoulders, and it hung straight. She took care of it meticulously. Once, she told me that straightening it every day was the only time she had to herself.

Now it’s long and thick, honey-blonde curls cascading loosely down her back, the front pieces pinned artfully back out of her face. It’s proof she changed, proof the time really did pass. I think of her loose linen pants and that little black halter neck and have to splash water in my face again.

It took me a moment to recognize her when we first saw each other in the meeting room, though I could tell by the look on her face that she knew me instantly. She went pale—or maybe she’s just paler now. As a contractor, she probably spends less time out in the field, if any, and I don’t know why, but that thought makes me feel set alight, as if she has divided off from me and I can no longer reach her.

We could be strangers now. It’s been years. I flex my hand around the rim of the sink and try to convince myself it’s true.

“Ado.”

I don’t startle. I heard him coming, moving to stand in the doorway to the lower floor’s stalled bathroom.

Aris repeats himself when I don’t answer. “Ado. On this planet with us?”

I grunt my acknowledgment, then straighten, trying to pull myself together. The face in the mirror staring back at me doesn’t look like my own.

“It’s fine,” I say, before Aris can keep asking questions. I don’t want questions. I just want to keep working and act as if this isn’t happening. “Did you know?”

“Of course I didn’t.” Aris folds his arms. He meets my eyes in the mirror. “Is this going to be a problem?”

I know he isn’t judging me. He’s asking because he knows I’ll be straight with him about it and because he needs to know.

The only problem is that I don’t know. I have no idea what to say.

“I’ll work it out,” I tell him.

“Not an answer to my question.”

I turn to face him head-on. “It won’t be a problem. She’s a professional—so am I. It was years ago.”

Aris studies my face. Behind him, sunlight filters from a skylight in the hallway. I could navigate the pack center with my eyes closed, but now it feels like I’m at risk of forgetting where I am. Keira has unseated me from my own sense of familiarity.

After a second, my alpha sighs. He breaks the quiet.

“I would tell you that you can always talk to me about it, but you won’t listen,” he says. “So, I’ll take your word for it. But I hope you know how important this mission is.”

Of course, I know. It’s been my project since the beginning, since the fiasco with Olivia, Byron, Veronica, and Percy’s last mission left them all needing a break—not to mention the pregnancies. I’m more invested in this than anyone else. I know what’s at stake. And with two of the pack’s couples dealing with newborns and another expecting later this year, I know I can’t drop the ball on this.

I try to convey my commitment to Aris, though I don’t have the words for it. I look him in the eyes. “Yes.”

He nods, satisfied with my answer, or perhaps just with the expression on my face. “Briefing starts in ten.”

He turns and leaves me alone, standing in the middle of the bathroom, hands and face still wet, questioning myself and everything else.

***

Halfmoon Lake is down at the Rosecreek Bottoms, a flat, green stretch of three or four miles of wetland nestled on our side of the highway, downhill about half a mile from the edge of town. The west side of the water is our territory—our people live down there, play down there, and bring their kids there to swim and relax. Nobody has contested it before, and most likely, nobody ever will.

On the other side of the lake is a dense, forested mound once known as Attlefolk. It used to be an unincorporated community of only half a dozen families, but nobody has lived out in Attlefolk for decades now.

Older locals of Rosecreek tell us, that it became unlivable a long time ago thanks to the ebbing and flowing of the water off the swampland surrounding the Mississippi River miles to the east of us, which causes Halfmoon Lake to rise unpredictably in the wetter months.

Those few houses which comprised Attlefolk were too close to the water, and they have long since crumbled into the lake, which swells high in the summer and saturates the hardier soil to the west, and erodes the land too soft to withstand it; as an ironic result, the half-moon of Halfmoon lake has been waxing for decades now, ever so slowly widening. Just like the real thing.

Attlefolk is the closest speck of civilization to Rosecreek by far, but as far as any of us are concerned, it’s been empty for years.

Now, we know that’s no longer true.

We call the traffickers the Attlefolkers for brevity, though we know it must not be where they operate from. Byron and I’s running theory is that they bring their captives—all of them women, almost entirely shifters, mostly wolves—up the Mississippi and through waterways from down the river, probably from a connected source in Fountain City or Winona, which lie southeast of us.

They dock across the lake in Attlefolk to refuel and hide their boats by daylight, and then, as far as we can tell, they set off again northwest toward Minneapolis to some secondary location, where we’re sure they’re selling the girls as brides; it could even be another paranormal town up the river, like ours.

We’ve received numerous tips—we even managed to contact an escapee last month—but we don’t yet know where the auctions take place. We’re getting closer to it, though. I can feel it.

As Aris explains all of this to the room at large, I watch Keira take notes as if I’m watching her for signs of life. I take in every scratch of her pen. I know she can tell I’m staring. I wish I could stop, but even as I try, I cannot rip my eyes away.

She raises her head when Aris is finished speaking, tapping her fingers rhythmically on the face of her notepad.

“These ‘Attlefolkers,’” she says, nodding. “We need to start with identifying them. If we can get even just one or two names on the books, we can narrow down their base of operations. How often are they docking across the lake?”

I answer before I can stop myself. “Once every ten days.”

Half a dozen people around the table look at me like I’ve just grown a second head. I never speak voluntarily at these meetings.

Keira nods. She doesn’t look at me, not once, just glances between Aris and her notepad with trained precision.

“Unless there’s a raid already planned for their base across the water, I’d suggest we start with identification efforts, then,” she says.

Aris nods thoughtfully. “It’s a good plan. Does that line up with where you were at, Ado?”

“Yes.” It comes out raspy. I clear my throat. “Yes. We’ve got a lot on file already to go through.”

“We can hack local security and police files for larger downs south of here, search for likely suspects who might match what you’ve got,” Byron offers easily, seeming not to have picked up on the tension in the least. I’ve never seen him so happy as he’s been for the last few months. Great for him, but it does make him just a bit insufferable.

“Might be worth running another recon on their next visit to Attlefolk, too,” Bigby puts in. “Set up camp before they arrive; get some of their faces on camera. Makes your job easier, doesn’t it?”

I nod. I can’t stop looking at Keira. I watch her chew the end of her pen, eyes flicking around the table at everyone but me.

“They can’t know we’re on the case yet,” she warns. “Not until the last possible second. They’ll just find a new place to dock on the other side of the river, out of the waterways and on the main drag, if they suspect there’s eyes on them.”

“Not a peep,” Bigby promises.

Keira smiles at him, and a hot flash of irrational anger leaps inside me. I have to force it down. We’re all teammates here. What am I doing?

“We also know of two suspected collaborators based in a warehouse not far downriver,” Byron chips in. “We’ve been on standby to raid for a few weeks now, since we know they’d suspect any activity on our part to be that of a business rival or another gang from one of the cities. It would maintain our cover.”

Keira scribbles that down. “Let’s get it in the diary,” she says. “For the furthest point from an Attlefolk landing, if we can, so five days out from an upcoming date—so we can keep it clean and quiet.”

That’ll happen in the next few weeks. I’ll have to up the intensity of the training I’m running for those who currently need it. And maybe…

With everyone’s roles assigned, Aris closes the meeting. I watch him leave to return to Linnea and the baby. Others drift, too, back to their rooms and houses or sit on the couches across the room instead of here, chattering about the mission. I see Olivia facilitate Keira’s reunion with Byron. They smile at one another. Clearly, there’s no baggage there. Her problem is with me.

Zane leans across the now-empty seat between the two of us. I had forgotten he was here.

“New girl?” he asks.

I make a noncommittal motion with my head, somewhere between a nod and a shrug. I don’t want to talk to him about this, not when he’s still barely Pack.

“Be like that,” Zane mutters, not really seeming to care. I watch his eyes follow Maisie on the other side of the room.

Across from us, Byron is quizzing Keira on what she’s been up to all this time. Clearly, he has skirted past how things ended when she left.

“It’s nice,” I hear Keira say. “I mean, New York is expensive, but I like the work, and I get to help people. I never thought you would all leave the military. It’s like you’re basically old men now.”

Byron makes a face so affronted that both women laugh. I feel sick. I want to leave this room, this building.

But I think of that last mission, the chokehold, the red moonlight, and I know there’s something I need to do.

I catch Keira just as she’s detaching herself from the others, presumably heading back to her seat and looking through the files we passed onto her. I almost reach out for her arm but hold myself back.

“Keira.” After all this time, the feeling of her name on my lips is the same.

She flinches, though I’m sure she knew on some level that I was beside her. Her bright, intelligent eyes crisscross me as if not certain where to land.

“Ado,” she says. “Whatever it is, I don’t—"

“Your field experience.” I don’t know why I cut her off. It’s as if I couldn’t stop myself. “You haven’t been on the frontlines of an op for years, have you?”

She bristles. She meets my gaze wholly then, looking me dead in the eyes.

“If that’s supposed to mean something, I don’t—"

I interrupt again. Whatever Keira did to my mouth when she came here and turned the world upside down, I want her to undo it. “You need to redo basic training. You’ve been out of combat for too long.”

Keira studies me. I watch some of her defensiveness melt.

“I don’t plan on being in the field,” she says.

“Things happen.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

Of course, she does. We both do.

I tilt my head slightly. I’m the shortest guy in the team, but I tower over Keira. We used to laugh about it, once upon a time.

“An hour a day, until I’m satisfied,” I tell her. “Aris can do it if you want. I’m not taking arguments on this.”

Keira frowns. I see her clear her face of emotion by force.

“Fine,” she says, with the weight of someone who understands what can go wrong. “An hour a day with Aris.”