Wade looks at the window, then at the folder, his scent going sour.
“Fine,” he says, exhaling through his nose. “I’ll do it.”
Bram lays two clean sheets on the desk with a piece of carbon paper between them, squares the stack, and taps it once. “Start at the beginning, and press hard.”
So Wade writes it longhand. The date he was hired. The rate. Every instruction, every delivery, every payment. When he goes vague, Bram taps the page, and the vague goes away. Then the phone gets unlocked and Wade scrolls the thread from the top,slow, slower, Bram says, while I photograph every screen twice. The hire date. The letter. The bag. The bins. And then the newer ones, where the asks get uglier.
I hand Ash the phone and go stand by the window for a minute. The creek’s still there, the dog’s still hollering. In through the nose... Save the burn.
By the end there are three pages in Wade’s own crabbed handwriting, with a carbon twin of every one underneath. Signed, dated, sworn, witnessed by a deputy and one civilian. “Two civilians,” I say, and sign my name under Ash’s.
Bram reads it through twice, peels the carbon copies free, slides one set into the folder, leaves one with Wade, and lays out the rest in the dullest voice he owns. “Monday, nine a.m., the county building, Detective Marsh. You walk in on your own two feet and you give her all of it, same as you gave it to us. And Wade. You’re paid through Sunday. Stay paid through Sunday. If that car of yours points north early, I’ll hear about it before the engine’s warm.”
Easy to know that when we’ve got a Pearl on our side.
We’re already at the door when Wade speaks up.
“He won’t stop without me.” He’s still in the chair, elbows on his knees, staring down at the carpet with his jaw working. “The guy’s obsessed. If I were you, I’d stop risking my neck for some simple omega who—”
Crack.
“Thanks for the cooperation,” I say, already standing over him. “Andthe comment.”
He looked up just in time for the meat of my open hand to catch him square across the cheek. Now he just blinks at me, stunned, a hand floating up to press against the blooming red print on his face.
“For helping a psycho find her.”
Burn, out.
36
Luna
I sleep like the dead and wake up in a house that smells like bacon.
It takes me a second to place where I am. For a long time, waking up meant feeling wrong with the wrong person. Every morning started with the same frantic, internal checklist.Where am I? Who’s breathing next to me? How many steps to the door, and what’s standing in my way?
But now, the inventory comes back wrong, which is to say right. Warm. A square of orchard light laid across the floorboards. Reed’s shirt, which I stole yesterday after the shower, soft and three sizes too big. And underneath the house: a pan, three low voices, and the very specific percussion of somebody losing a fight with the toaster.
Safe,my omega mumbles, and burrows back down.
Indeed.
I get us both upright, drag a brush through the disaster on my head, and follow the bacon downstairs on bare feet.
I’m three steps from the bottom when I see a folder squared up dead center on the kitchen island. A folder like this is rarely good news.
“Morning.”
I look toward the voice and see the three alphas in the kitchen, all looking at me with a smile. Ash at the stove. Reed against the counter with a mug. Bram halfway across the room, the toaster’s entire situation abandoned behind him.
“Hi,” I smile.
Bram follows my eyes to the folder. Something moves through his jaw for a second before it’s gone.
“That’s quite an ominous folder for eight in the morning,” I say.
“Coffee,” Reed announces, and steers me by the shoulders into a chair. A mug lands in front of me, doctored exactly the way I take it. “Drink, Inspector. Eggs in thirty seconds. Ash did the bacon.”
