My wolf has been folded away so long I’d half-convinced myself she was just quiet by nature. She’s not folded now. She’s aimed at the door he walked through, steady and certain. I press the heel of my hand flat to my breastbone. The pull doesn’t move.
“Breathe. Just breathe,” I tell myself.
He’s big and scary. That’s all.
I finish the count. I write the numbers in the right column, correct this time, and I don’t let myself think about the look on his face when he’d fixed it on me.
He’s the first person in years the glamour hasn’t touched.
That should be the thing I’m afraid of.
It is. It’s just not the only thing.
Chapter 7
Decker
The supply room door swings shut behind me, and whatever just happened in there doesn’t stay behind it.
I make it as far as the equipment desk before I catch myself standing there with the airway kit in my hand, no memory of the walk. I sign it back out properly. The clerk doesn’t look up. I go find something else to do with my hands.
The afternoon runs long in the ops corridor. I pull the depot manifests Zoe flagged in her report and cross-check them against the gate logs, twice, and both passes tell me nothing the first didn’t. My attention keeps sliding off the page, circling back to a woman at a shelf with a clipboard.
Get it together.
I’m on my way to return the manifests when Riven falls into step beside me.
I didn’t hear him coming. Nobody hears Riven coming; that’s the whole design of the man. Lean, dark hair kept short, a scarthrough one eyebrow that reads like punctuation. He walks with an unnerving stealth even when he has no reason to.
“You’ve worked with Crowe.” He doesn’t ask when a statement does the same job.
“Twice.” I keep walking. “Both times he delivered.”
“Both times he was paid,” he says. “The Guild doesn’t let its people freelance for nothing. If Crowe’s answering to Faine now, someone above him signed off on it.”
“Or he’s not answering to anyone. Just working the angle himself.”
“The Nightshade Guild doesn’t have operatives who work an angle themselves.” Flat, like a thing he’s tired of correcting people on. “I was one of them. There’s no such thing as freelance inside that place. There’s only who’s watching, and how closely.”
I should have a response for that. The jobs I worked with Crowe were the kind that don’t get written down, and I’ve got opinions about how carefully he plays a room. I open my mouth to say as much, and what comes out is nothing, because for about two seconds the corridor isn’t the corridor. It’s a supply shelf and a woman not stepping back.
“Decker.”
I blink. Riven’s stopped walking. He’s looking at me the way he looks at everything—assessing, patient, giving nothing away about what the assessment turns up.
“Crowe plays it close,” I say, picking the thread back up a beat too late for it to look natural. “Doesn’t mean he’s not straight with the information. Means he decides what you get, and when.”
Riven holds my eyes a second longer than the sentence needed.
“Noted,” he says.
We walk the rest of the corridor without talking. At the junction he peels off toward the map room without anotherword, and I stand there working out that I don’t actually know whether I answered his real question or just the one I remembered him asking.
He noticed it.
Of course he did. Men like Riven notice when people they’re working with drop the ball.
And I don’t drop the ball. Not ever.
