Page 25 of Mane in Finance

She sees me, half-shifted, bleeding from shoulder and flank, more lion than man. She runs to me and puts both hands flat against my heart, and the change rolls back through me at her touch faster than it ever has.

"You came," she says. Her voice isn't steady. Neither am I.

"I found your trail. You terrified me and saved people in the same morning."

"I killed their decryption terminal. I bought us hours." She's shaking and grinning at once. "The captives…"

"Out. Kian's walking them away now." I catch her face in my hands, careful of the cut. "I was terrified, Sophie. I went into it with nothing to lose. Tonight I could've lost you, and I've never been so afraid in my life."

"I'm okay." She covers my hands with hers. "I'll always fight beside you. Not behind you. Beside you. Get used to it."

Then her eyes snap past my shoulder toward the dock, and the grin drops off her face.

"Lucian… the trucks."

I turn. The place where I left Helena is empty, a smear of blood on the concrete leading toward the dock.

One of the refrigerated haulers is pulling off the far side of it, running dark, already past the fence line and onto the dead road.

Kurtis roars after it. Through the windshield, under the security lights, I see gray hair and a good suit in the passenger seat, and Helena in the driver's seat.

"It's Clifford. Did you see him? He must've ran the second you came through the wall." Her voice cracks. "The database, Lucian. He's still got it."

I watch the taillights vanish down the dead road, and everything in me wants to run it down as the lion. I don't, because Sophie's hand is fisted in what's left of my shirt, and because I can't catch a truck that has a head start, and because chasing means leaving freed captives half-evacuated in darkness.

"We freed everyone in that building," I tell her, holding hard to the win we did get. "Every cage. Families who'd be sold by morning."

"But he walked out the back with the one file that can still get all killed." She rotates to me, filthy, bleeding, furious and unbroken. "It's still encrypted at least. He's back to zero percent." Her chin comes up to that impossible angle. "He got away with it. Fine. Now I know how he thinks, I know what he's carrying, and I know it's useless to him until he unlocks it. So we don't chase the truck."

"Then what do we chase?"

"Nothing." A hard, certain light comes into her eyes, the one I've learned means she's three moves ahead of everyone. "We stop chasing him entirely. We make him come to us."

21

SOPHIE

Acouple of days after the warehouse, the manor finally silences. The captives are placed. The freed families are threaded out through Kian's routes and Kurtis' houses, papers moving, the network absorbing people overnight like it was always built to. My cheek has closed to a thin scab I keep forgetting until I smile and it pulls. Lucian's shoulder and flank healed before we reached home, which I'm still not used to, catching myself checking him for wounds that aren't there anymore. The adrenaline that carried me through has finally drained out, and what's underneath it is shaking.

He finds me on the back terrace at dusk, wrapped in a blanket, staring out into darkness where the wolves walked forty people to safety.

"You've been out here an hour," he says, settling beside me without asking. "Talk to me."

"I keep doing the calculations. Forty-odd out. The Dakotas family still missing. The database still in a truck somewhere getting slowly cracked. Some nights the ledger balances and some nights it doesn't, and tonight it won't sit still."

"You saved everyone."

"I know. I do know that." I pull the blanket tighter. "It's not the losing I can't settle. It's that I care this much. Six months ago I'd have filed a case and slept fine and let the chips land wherever. You gave me a whole town, a network, and multiple faces, and now I lie awake counting them all. I wouldn't trade it, but it is exhausting."

"You said something to me once. That being strong from a distance was exhausting. This is the opposite of that. This is what it costs to be close. It's a worse ache, but a better life. I've had it for years. I'd have told you it wasn't worth it, right up until you showed me it was."

I gaze at him, the golden man that protected me from a window smashing on day one and has never once mentioned it since, and what I've been circling for weeks finally lands somewhere I can say it.

"I don't think of this place as a stop anymore." The words come slow, because they're true and true things are heavy. "I came here to get quiet. Somewhere, this became a place that I like that felt like… It feels like home, Lucian. Not just you, the town, the pride, the ridiculous cider donuts. I've not had a home I chose. I have one now."

His face adjusts, contentment I've never noticed before.

"Then I'm going to say what I've been holding since the overlook," he says. "I fell in love with you a long time ago" His hand finds mine under the blanket. "I want my future to have you in it. Beside me. Five years from now, fifty. I don't want to picture a single day of it without you."