Chapter 5 - Keira

The faces of the missing girls in the files bring me back to the office in New York, where I’ve spent the better part of three years. This shouldn’t surprise me, but it does.

I spent an hour looking through the files Ado and Aris supplied me with, sitting in the uncomfortable straight-backed seat I was assigned for the briefing and trying not to listen in on the other conversations around me, on the couches and at the table. Most of the pack is still here. I think Ado must be, too. I can smell him nearby. I keep my head down and pretend I can’t feel people staring.

It was like a shock of lightning to see Bigby, Byron, and Percy again, and likewise to meet their mates and friends, these new members of a pack I used to know. Everyone has been nothing less than kind to me. Still, I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The other shoe is lingering by the door behind me, I know, silent and waiting. What he’s waiting for, I don’t yet know.

A heavy hand claps down on my shoulder. I jump about a mile.

“Whoa!” Bigby laughs. “Easy there. It’s good to see you, Hart.”

“Please—just Keira,” I tell him. I stand, too, coming up to his level, suddenly full of nervous energy. “It’s good to see you again, too. And did someone tell me you have a daughter?”

“I know I don’t look the part,” Bigby laughs.

I find myself laughing too. “Everyone got so grown-up somehow,” I joke.

“You did, too,” says Percy, approaching us. He pulls me into a quick hug. I see a kind of tiredness in his face that wasn’t there before. I wonder what I missed. “Big office job in New York. Climbing the corporate ladder.”

“It’s not all that,” I promise, bashful now.

The air thickens with awkwardness. I’m not sure what to ask or say. The history I’ve missed feels insurmountable. Do I ask about everyone’s kids? Something about the mission, maybe—it’s why I’m here. But the meeting’s over, and suddenly, it occurs to me that I should leave and that this isn’t my place.

Bigby opens his mouth to say something, but I speak first, cutting over him.

“I need to carry on with these files. I might head to my room and knuckle down with them,” I say.

Percy looks sad. “You should stay and catch up with us.”

“No, really, I need to get caught up to speed on the details.” I force a smile onto my face. “Another time, though. Promise.”

Making clear that we have to get drinks and socialize properly soon, the boys disperse. I catch a quick, curious look exchanged between them. I find myself thinking again about Ado. Did he ever speak about me, in all these years?

I gather my papers and make for the door. I can’t see Ado, but I know he’s close. A woman whose name I think I remember is Rosa waves at me from one of the leather couches, and I wave back as I leave.

Preoccupied, I stumble over the ridge along the bottom of the doorframe and stagger forward, fumbling with the papers in my hands.

Someone catches my arm to steady me. I pull away on instinct and look over my shoulder to see Ado standing in the shadows against the wall on the outer side of the door.

We lock eyes for a single heartbeat again. A thousand truths pass between us in the darkness, none of them conclusive. They are the truths of all that happened, all the things we haven’t talked about.

I step away, straighten my papers, and stride off down the hallway. I mean to say something to him as I go—perhaps in thanks—but nothing rises to my mouth. I’ve never been like this before. Working in intelligence as I have for all these years, I have come to always know what to say. But not now.

***

I wake up in a dark room. There’s something wrong with my hands—I can’t feel them.

Perhaps the room is dark, or perhaps I’m blindfolded. I squint and make out nothing, then rub the side of my face against my shoulder until a sliver of light appears in the bottom of my vision, a shaft of artificial white, distant, as if glowing from down a hallway. Even as I stare into it, I see it flicker.

LEDs. Indoors. Stagnant air, no airflow. The blindfold isn’t covering my nose. I smell medical alcohol, ammonia, and the distant reek of sewage.

There is a rope around my wrists, I realize. They’re tied behind me, and I am on the ground, on my side, legs drawn up near my chest.

I know better than to shout out. There’s no use in it. I need to figure out how to get the blindfold off and assess my options.

Don’t panic. Don’t panic, Hart. Panic, and it’s already over.

I scrape my face against the rough ground under me until the blindfold is half-dislodged, sitting crooked on my head, and one eye is free. The fabric digs hard into the other. The room in front of me spins, and it occurs to me for the first time that I am in blinding pain. It feels as if someone has brought a hammer to my temples symmetrically on either side of my head, and the pain reverberates back through my skull, a constant echo.

Oxygen deprivation. The thought leaps into my mind before I can understand where it came from. Someone choked me out.

Memories of it come back to me like pictures in a flipbook, snatches of disjointed movement. I remember staring over a crowded street, dozens of shapes flashing in the dark. I was cold. Ado was in front of me. His arm stretched into the night, holding me back but reaching for me at the same time. I remember believing in him so fiercely in that moment that it almost bowled me over. It felt like it might kill me, how strong the relief was. I loved him—only for a second, but I did.

The arm around my throat was strong. I struggled. Ado’s face in the dark in front of me seemed to change. As the world blackened, I don’t remember where he was, but he was gone.

Now, I am tied up somewhere underground. I suspect this isn’t anywhere near the camp I have been undercover at. We’ve relocated. And I have been discovered.

In front of me is a barred door. As I stare, the iron rods seem to contort and bend strangely, along with everything else in my vision; I blink furiously, but it doesn’t help. Beyond the bars, a long, dark hallway stretches far out of my view. A single white fluorescent tube light flickers on the ceiling ten feet ahead of me in the gloom.

It blinks, emitting a soft noise like tapping. On-off. On-off. I rake my fingertips along the ground behind me—searching for what, I don’t know. I try to roll onto my front to sit up on my knees, but my whole body is leaden, like I’ve not used it in years. How long was I out?

On-off. On-off. Amidst the tapping, I hear a high, plastic-like sound. I glance up, and in a flicker of light, I see a figure slowly approaching down the hallway. His leather boots squeak faintly as he peels through the darkness.

I manage to push myself up onto my knees. I brace myself for whatever is coming.

Like a shock of electricity, I come back into my body.

I am not in the cell under the old power facility. I am sitting on my bed in the Rosecreek pack center.

I flop my torso back onto the mattress like a puppet with its strings cut. The ceiling seems to spin, and I stare it down until it slows and stops. Outside the high, bright window through which you can see the whole town, I hear the lofty call of a bird in the clear air.

It’s not like it’s uncommon for me to slip into memories of that time. It used to be worse—I used to have to leave work early sometimes, especially when we were tracking missing persons and keeping up with kidnapping cases, and it all felt too close to home. I would close my eyes at my desk, and it was as if the whole thing was playing out inside my eyelids. Nobody in the office knew how to ask, so they didn’t, and I didn’t volunteer. I never have.

I firmly ground myself, rubbing a thumb into the middle of my left palm, wringing my fingers into knots. In, out. In, out. I’m in about the safest place I can possibly be right now. Certainly, I am safer than I was in the tower block in the city.

Does Ado dream of what happened? Does he close his eyes and feel himself float away from the present and into the past? If I asked him, would he lie to me? A tendril of familiar old resentment curls up in my stomach.

I wish I had the strength not to hate him. Perhaps it would make being here bearable. If I had been able to let him go, I think, I wouldn’t feel this way now whenever I see him: as if I’m going to catch fire. Even now, thinking of him, my face and neck feel hot, and my hands tingle.

My wolf is unhappy. I feel her rattling with frustration inside me. She has never been content with the complications of my emotional life—they are too cerebral for her, and I feel the heat of her hate burn hot in my gut.

Perhaps Ado hates me, too, or some part of him does. I think of his face in the meeting room. I used to read him so well, and now, I don’t even know what it means when he sets his jaw like that…

My wolf arises to wine. My gut gets hotter.

No . I almost say it out loud. I am no longer a giggling, squealing teenager; I should be able to treat Ado like any other coworker. And I certainly shouldn’t feel… I can’t even finish the thought.

When I was a kid, my father built a tire swing over the creek at the bottom below our house for me. Once, when I was eight, I was standing on the tire and swinging high across the sharp, wintry air, back and forth over the river. The wind bit my face, and I was one with my wolf, and I was one with myself.

The rope snapped, and I plunged toward the river. The surface wasn’t frozen solid, but the water was sluggish, with cold ice crystals floating like half-melted slushie in summer. I saw the silver surface of the creek swinging up toward me out of the one place I had never bothered looking—below—and my mouth decided it would scream before I could even process what was happening around me.

I think of Ado’s mouth opening to speak to me, and it’s as if I’m falling toward the cold river again.