At two in the morning I was kneeling in the dark of Jude Thackery's study with a bent hairpin in my teeth, picking the lock of the man I was paid to protect.
One hand. The left arm hung in its sling like a bag of wet sand, and the silver wound under the bandage throbbed in time with the mantel clock. One scarf. One fist. One dead man in the reeds, and a mother who never once said Edric Thackery's name in my hearing.
The brown folder had held a verdict, three witness statements, a map and that picture. But it lived in the bottom drawer, and above it sat a smaller drawer with a better lock, and Jude's eyes had slid off it twice while he talked.
I wanted what he was still holding back. I wanted it more than sleep, or being a person who didn't do this.
The lock gave on the ninth try. Inside lay yellowed pages in a doctor's cramped hand, clipped under a county stamp. The coroner's original notes.
I read by my phone, cupped in my palm. Wolfsbane in the blood, enough to slow a heart. The throat wound made after death, the edges dry. Someone had poisoned Edric Thackery, waited, and then torn him open so the reeds would tell a different story. At the bottom, in an aside about the family, the coroner had written that the pack's regency was to be settled by council vote.
Coldbrook wolves don't use poison. My father used to say a wolf who needed a cup to win had already lost.
I would have staked my life on that yesterday. Tonight I couldn't have staked a button.
"You could have asked," Jude said from the doorway.
I didn't jump. I had the pages squared before the light came on, and I still felt like I'd been caught with my hand in a coat. He stood in a T-shirt and bare feet. He'd heard the drawer. Of course he had.
"You'd have said no," I said.
"I'd have said wait."
"I don't wait. I've got five nights. You lied to me."
"I left things out."
"That's lying with better manners."
"And you broke into my desk." His voice stayed pleasant, and the charm was off like a switch. "Which of us is the bodyguard, Katherine?"
"Which of us hired the daughter of the man you put in the cold?"
That landed. I watched it land. He crossed the room and took the pages out of my hand, gently, which was worse.
"I found those in April," he said. "In my father's desk. He'd kept them nine years and never said a word. When I told my mother I meant to reopen it, she asked me to let it lie. Said it nearly broke my father once already." He set them down. "I stopped asking."
I took that for grief, because that is what it looked like.
"You're bleeding," he said.
A red bloom had come through the sling, the edges already going dark. He pushed me into the chair, found a first aid tin, and unwound the sling with hands that had never done this and were careful anyway. The bandage stuck. He swore and soaked it from the carafe. The room smelled of woodsmoke and iodine, which he was dabbing, badly, at the black rim of the burn.
"Hold still."
"I am still."
"You're counting," he said. "I can hear you."
I was. Eleven pins in the cabinet lock. Four seconds between his breaths. His thumb rested on my collarbone a moment longer than the bandage needed.
"My mother drifted," I said, to the ceiling. "People think it ends. It doesn't. She went on being a wolf, somewhere. Lore says a drifted wolf can come home if her own pack calls her." I swallowed. "Coldbrook has no pack left to call."
He tied the knot. He didn't say sorry, and I was grateful. I did not tell him I had been counting the days since my last full change, and that the numbers had stopped coming out right.
On Tuesday I found Evander in the boathouse at ten past three, sitting on an upturned dinghy with a bottle of mead and a hand that wouldn't hold still.
"The rogue," he said. "Come to arrest me?"
"Your father. The night he died."
"Who was with him?"
"Nobody, apparently. That was rather the problem." He eyed my sling. "Cousin's dressing your wounds, I hear. Sweet. Does he know your mother's scarf was in my father's fist? I do. I've stared at that photograph more than anyone alive."
I kept my face still.
"And your father was a poisoner, wasn't he? Silver for the sons, a nice cup for the uncles."
"Coldbrook doesn't use poison."
"Coldbrook doesn't exist." He heard himself, and the sneer slid off. He looked at the bottle. "Sorry. I've had a morning."
I waited. The water slapped the pilings. I waited out eleven.
"He went out because someone asked him to," Evander said at last, quietly. "He put his coat on at midnight and said he'd be an hour. I asked who. He said it would keep." The tremor ran up his wrist. "I was twenty-one. I thought it would keep."
"Who asked?"
"I never knew." He laughed, a dry bark. "Go on. Say it's something. Everyone wants it to be something."
I said nothing. I climbed the slope to the house with my shoulder burning, his father's clenched fist in my head the whole way.
At dusk I went to the cloakroom for my coat and found paper in the pocket.
One sheet, folded in four, torn from a grocery pad. The handwriting was young and looping, the letters tilting like a child running.
I know who sweetened it. Ferry landing, eleven tonight. Come alone or I won't be there. Torvald.
Torvald. The girl with the red hair and the shaking hands, who had vanished from a hall of wolves.
Someone had walked past Silvan's watchers and put it in my coat.
I knew what it might be: a good place to kill a rogue. The landing was twelve minutes by truck and black as a well after nine. Five nights from the Claiming, someone here had already tried twice to stop Jude's heart, and I was the one wolf they couldn't fold.
If I went, the house had him for hours. If I stayed, Torvald would be gone again, and so would whoever she knew.
I told Silvan I had a headache. I told Marten Rhee to keep his chair against the door and his phone in his hand. Then I put the note in my boot and walked out to the truck alone.