I go through the numbers for the fourth time, and they end in the same place.
If Decker isn’t back by tomorrow night, I take the south route after dark. Find a signal point. Reach Kaylin’s emergency line and hand her the truth—all of it, the drops, my sister, what I’ve done. That’s the plan. It doesn’t improve with looking at it.
The long light crosses the stone floor, and I track it. His pack sits in the corner where he left it. The energy bars stand on the shelf in a line he made before he went—evenly spaced, labels out—and I’ve picked them up once to count them and put them back exactly the way they were.
My wolf paces.
Not threat-pacing. The other kind. Slow circuits, wall-to-wall, nowhere to put it. Her restlessness won’t let up. Every time I sit down, it gets louder. Every time I stand, I’m five steps to the shelf and five steps back. Neither of us is getting anywhere.
I know what she wants. I’m not going to say it.
He’s been gone since morning. I worked it out while the boulder was still settling: forty minutes down, the drive to Aurora, however long Viktor keeps him, the drive back, and forty minutes up. Every hour past twilight, I get more anxious.
Because I know where he went. He told me to my face, lacing his boots like it was nothing. To Viktor. The man who thinks I sold out his people. And I stood there wanting so badly to ask him not to go, but I couldn’t. Because I knew he had no option.
So now I run the scenarios instead. It’s what I do when there’s nothing left to close.
If Viktor holds him, I’ve got about three days of provisions. Then the gap beside the boulder that I made before. The south route is cold, no cover on the open stretch, but I can make it if I go at night.
If Viktor believes him, he comes back.
If Viktor believed nothing and put people on his track, then I’m sitting in a cave waiting for a boulder that opens on an extraction team.
I stop walking and put my back to the stone near the entrance.
He fought a dragon for me. Fire across his back, flesh laid open down his ribs, and he got up off that grass and crossed to where I was like it was the only thing on his mind. Then he carried me up a mountain and worked on my wounds all night while his own stayed open. And when I tried to say something about it, he told me I needed the sleep more, and he stayed with me.
I know that man. Months of learning to read people well enough to stay alive, and I knowthatman. I know I trust him.
I also know I gave him everything. Serenity’s name. The drops. Everything I did. It’s out of my hands now, and it has been since this morning, and there’s nothing to do with that except stand here and feel it.
My wolf stops mid-circuit.
She turns and faces the entrance.
I feel it a half-second behind her—the low scrape of stone on stone, smooth and even. The sound it makes when someone knows exactly where to press.
I’m moving before the gap finishes opening.
Decker comes through sideways, the way his shoulders make him. Jacket rumpled. Dust on his jaw. No blood. He scans the cave the way he always does—wall, shelf, pool passage—and lands on me.
“You’ve been pacing,” he says.
“You’re not locked up.”
He looks at me for a beat, then smiles. “No.”
The relief hits my knees. I get a palm flat against the wall to stay upright.
He seals the boulder and crosses to the shelf, setting his phone and keys down. His scent moves through the den with him, and my wolf goes quiet all at once, the pacing finished like it never happened.
“Tell me,” I say.
He turns and reads my face first. Then he gives it to me straight, the way he gives everything.
“Viktor heard me out. All of it—the calls, your sister, why you did it.” A pause. “He believes you were used.”
My breath leaves me in a gust. I make myself stay against the wall.
