Chapter 2
Eamon put me in the rear seat of a black SUV between two armed men.
No one fastened handcuffs on me. Nolan preferred punishments that looked like choices.
The vehicle left the lodge and turned north through the private woods. Snow crowded the headlights, erasing the road a few yards at a time.
I knew every bend.
Fourteen years earlier, I had driven this road in the opposite direction with Nolan bleeding across the back seat of my car.
He had been twenty-four, half-conscious, and unknown to me. His coat had been torn open from shoulder to ribs. Every breath made a wet sound.
Don't leave me here, he had said.
I had wrapped my coat around him and promised I would not.
The memory came so clearly that I reached toward the empty space beside me before I stopped myself.
One of the guards noticed.
He looked away.
Eamon drove with both hands on the wheel. At fifty-two, he had served Nolan longer than anyone at the table. I had stitched his side on my kitchen floor, treated his wife after a car wreck, and sat with his youngest daughter through an asthma attack.
Tonight, he would open the gate.
"Who carried Nolan out of Black Pine?" I asked.
Eamon's eyes lifted to the mirror.
The guard on my left shifted. "Don't start."
"I asked Eamon."
Snow hissed beneath the tires.
Eamon kept his attention on the road. "You did."
"Who stayed awake with him until the surgeon came?"
"Hollis." The guard beside me sounded almost angry. "Enough."
"Who made sure every man in this car got treated before the police could ask questions?"
Eamon's grip tightened on the wheel.
"You did," he said.
I nodded once.
"Then remember my name when Nolan tells you I was never loyal."
The guard beside me took his hand off his holster. He did not open a door or defy an order, but Eamon saw him do it in the mirror.
No one answered.
I had not escaped. I had not changed Eamon's orders. But the silence in the SUV no longer belonged entirely to Nolan.
The lower access gate appeared through the snow.
Beyond it, ten-foot fencing vanished into the trees. Security lights shone over churned ground and a narrow service lane. Dark shapes moved at the edge of the light.
The SUV stopped beside the control building.
Nolan's second vehicle pulled in behind us.
He stepped out first.
Camille came around the passenger side wearing a white wool coat I recognized from my own closet.
I had bought it after Nolan complained that I dressed like I was always heading to an emergency room. I had worn it once to his birthday dinner.
Camille buttoned it over her stomach.
The breath left me before I could hide it.
She saw.
"It was cold at the hospital," she said. "Nolan told me to take whatever I needed."
"You needed my coat?"
"I needed to stop shaking."
"You had his bed for that."
The nearest guard lowered his eyes.
Camille crossed the snow until we stood an arm's length apart.
"When I pulled him into my car, he kept asking for you," she said quietly. "I told him you were coming."
Her hand settled over the small life beneath the coat she had taken from me.
"After a while, he stopped asking."
The pain was physical. My chest seized around it, trying to keep the room I had built for Nolan from collapsing inside me.
I looked past her at my husband.
"You knew where I was."
"I knew where you chose to stay."
"You gave me the order."
"I expected my wife to know when an order no longer mattered."
There it was.
For fourteen years, I had solved whatever Nolan put in front of me. The one time I failed to abandon everyone else for him, he called it proof I had never loved him.
Eamon opened the control-room door.
Inside, camera feeds showed different sections of the preserve. Half the screens were white with storm interference. One showed the lower run, its gate buried beneath fresh snow.
Nolan came in behind us. His eyes went to the gun already in my hand.
"Still one round," he said. "You know what I meant for it."
"Kneel," he said. "Say the letter was a lie. You leave Ravenport tonight and live somewhere comfortable. Camille and the baby stay here."
"And I spend the rest of my life helping you pretend this was mercy."
"It is mercy."
"No. Mercy would require you to admit what you did."
Camille touched the casing at her throat.
"Take her down."
Eamon led me through the first gate.
The cold struck hard enough to steal my breath. Somewhere past the trees, metal clanged against metal.
Then a bell rang from the feeding shed.
Every dark shape in the preserve stopped moving.
One by one, the wolves turned toward me.